Darth Wiki / Desu Shi

"4t happens."

Desu Shi (デス死, lit. "Death Death") is an arcade Shoot 'Em Up shmup shooting game that does not exist. (Or it might someday, due to Tsunde Ray being a computer science major.).

Needs a better plot. But I will say this: it is the year 2015. Shit happens. The game focuses on two teams, both rivals of each other: Plus Team, the Neutral Good mercenary pilot squadron, and the Minus Team, the Lawful Evil posse.

The game offers an arcade mode, in which you must clear 7 stages to finish the game. The console ports also have a story mode, which plays more like Tyrian and offers a more thorough plotline, many stages spread out over muliple chapters, and upgradable ships.

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Desu Shi contains nonexistant examples of:

Tropes Pertaining to Gameplay

• Ascended Meme: The "sushi" meme got so popular that in a DLC Bonus Stage, one of the hidden One Ups is a roll of sushi. Collect it and you'll hear the "DESU SHI!" title screen shout.
• Big "NO!": The sound you get when you run out of continues or simply choose not to continue.
• Bonus Stage: Stage C++ is an optional stage with opportunities to rack up lots of points. Dying here once will end the stage, but it will not subtract a life.
• Bullet Hell
• Cap: Inverted; hitting 100% rank will permanently impose a lower cap of 60% for Easy, 75% for Normal, 90% for Hard, and 100% for Another.
• Awesome Music: The nonexistent leitmotifs and stage music for the Plus Team, composed by a potpurri of shooting game soundtrack composers: Tamayo Kawamoto, Hyakutaro Tsukumo, Manabu Namiki, and Shinji Hosoe. Quite possibly the best 2D shooter music you'll never hear.
  • The Minus Team, on the other hand, gets licensed, somewhat-mainstream-at-least soundtrack.
• Deadly Walls: Averted. The only time a wall will kill you is if you get squished between the side of the screen opposite to the direction of scroll and a wall, or between two walls.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: averted with +01's bad ending; he becomes a middleman for his stalker's "rape by proxy" scheme. Both his stalker's victim and he are traumatized for life.
• Dynamic Difficulty: The Stage 1- boss, in particular. How difficult he is depends on how much of his hometown you destroyed throughout the stage. But you need to commit such heinous acts to crank out lots of points, so...
  • Also, your rank percentage, similar to RayCrisis's Encroachment Meter, but inverted (100% is maximum, 0% is mininum). The starting rank for each difficulty is: Casual - 0% (never goes up, however), Easy - 30%, Normal - 50%, Hard - 70%, Another - 0% (but it rises much faster and falls much slower, and dying will increase the rank instead of lowering it).
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Playing on Casual difficulty makes your ship completely invincible, starts you off with maximum firepower, and all enemies die in one hit, but you can't score any points and the score displays "0, but you don't care anyway", and the game terminates after Stage 5+ or 3-.
• Fan Nickname: De Sushi, The Sushi, and "that sushi game" by some fans.
• Gratuitous Japanese: The title.
• Harder Than Hard: Another difficulty. Aside from increased enemy aggression and resilence, stage layouts and enemy placements are significantly different. Also your rank is more prone to increasing and less prone to decreasing, and hitting 100% rank will lock the rank at 100%, rendering rank decreasing impossible for the rest of the game.
  • Also also, if you enter a Touhou Project character for a profile name, the game will delete all difficulty levels and and force a download of a new level: Level 9. In Level 9, the plot is hijacked by Touhou and the game consists of the Plus and Minus teams allying up to take back their fictional universe. All of the art is now done by ZUN, all methods of input other than keyboard become disabled^note attempts to use Joy2Key or other similar getaround programs will trigger a suicide battery (arcade version), format of the player's C: drive (PC version), or a warranty-proof crash (console versions), and the gameplay totals up to 5 minutes of spellcards, as the gameplay is punctuated by excessive Unskippable Cutscenes consisting almost purely of Touhou memes. If you beat the game, and you used only 1 credit, the Plus-Minus Alliance and Yukari Yakumo sign the Fuck Off Treaty, in which they swear to leave each others' universes alone. Use more than one credit, however, and Ran makes a bunch of Chen clones, and all the Plus and Minus characters get Chen-hugged until they die from cuteness overload.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard, Another.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The Plus Team, in the arcade mode, starts at Stage 1+ and ends at Stage 7+. The Minus Team starts at Stage 7- (their version of 7+) and ends at Stage 1-. After clearing one team's route, you play the other team's route, and they have twice as many signs next to the stage number (i.e. if you cleared loop 1 as the Plus Team, you go on to Minus Team's Stage 7--, not Stage 7-).
• Life Meter: Story mode.
• New Game Plus: After clearing the game with one team with one credit, you are given a free opportunity to start a new game with the other team. Clearing that team's route unlocks a new route: Stage 0.
• Nintendo Hard: No shit.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Arcade mode.
• RPG Elements: Story mode.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Stage 0. To unlock it, you must clear both paths on Normal difficulty with no continues and two of the following three conditions completed: 210 million points across both routes with at least 120 mil on either route, bombs used no more than 5 times across both routes with no more than 3 used on either route, rank at under 100% but over <starting rank + 20%> (for Normal and Hard) or over 95% (for Another) at all times (save for the first stages of both routes).

Tropes Pertaining to the Plot (specifically Story Mode)

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Lampshaded by +01, after being turned down by someone who got with a Minus instead:
  "Relationship 1A. Prerequisite: Criminal record."
• Arc Words: "Strickland...propane..."
• Excuse Plot: Averted, and lampshaded in Story Mode if you mash the Start button to skip the intro scene:
  +01: "Hey! Are you paying attention?!"
• Title Drop: Subverted. The only time "desu shi" is said in the game is when +01 tries to speak in Japanese, but struggles with it. Word of God says that it was inspired by him getting an oral exam translation very wrong.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In Stage 1-, the Minus Team razes the ever-loving fuck out of +01's hometown. You get points for destroying buildings AND people. The Minus team's CO calls out the player character(s) for such destruction, and if one the players is playing as -01, he counters by saying "Oh, it's just a shitty little town anyway, no one we know lives here," to which his comrades agree. Then +01, a normally level-headed and gentlemanly character, shows up and gets QUITE PISSED about it.

Tropes Pertaining to the Characters

• Cute and Psycho: Stage 7+'s boss, an Ax-Crazy Psycho Knife Nut hiding out in an Ghost Town.
  • Yandere: She's +01's Stalker with a Crush. The battle is significantly harder if you are playing 1-player as +01. Not only that, but your continues become disabled, and if you lose all your lives, it's implied that she does...things...to him.
• Face Palm: +02's Smart Bomb has her do this.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The boss of Stage 2+.
• Hot Librarian: +03, a male example of this trope. Subverted in that he works at a modern library that doesn't have the archetypical librarian uniforms.
• Kavorka Man: -02. Despite being ugly, fat, and a bit of an attention whore, he's quite popular among the ladies. In Stage 1+, right before the midboss battle with -02, +01 calls him out on this.
• Misaimed Fandom: According to Word of God, the Stage 1+ boss is supposed to be Fan Disservice for even the biggest Yangire and Yandere fans. It failed.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Each member of the Plus Team takes up some sort of nerdy occupation.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Stage 0 endboss, once down to his last lifebar, slashes his wrists open, causing blood to gush out and his HP to drain out. He's given up and is going emo, right? Wrong. The blood turns into bullets, and he transforms into an Eldritch Abomination, and his lifebar refills completely.
• Stripperiffic: The Minus Team. The Plus Team, on the other hand, is modestly dressed at all times.
  • Yes, -02 is also this, causing massive Fan Disservice.
• Tsundere: +02.
• Yaoi Fangirl: +05. She falls for -03 and (if neither player is playing as her) even switches sides in the Stage 3+ boss battle with -03 just to be with him, even going so far as to nearly quit the Plus Team and forget about the mission. She snaps out of it at the end of the battle.

Misc. / Mixed Tropes

• Porting Disaster: A Super NES fanboy, thinking that everything's more awesome with the SNES, decided to make a homebrew SNES port of the game. TsundeRay shot him in the face. With white wine.
• Shout-Out: One of the achievements is called "False Iffy Curry." It is obtained by exceeding 100,000,000 points. Doing so causes your CO to shout "You cheater! Only Japanese pilots can do that!"
  • Stage 4-'s boss is called "Strut Lut," a jab at a RayCrisis boss who was renamed from "Sem-Slut" to "Sem-Strut" in the American version.
  • When the game starts, hold A and C. If you're playing as the Plus Team, your CO says the Stage 1+ name in Tangut. If you're playing as the Minus Team, your CO says "Ready, go!" in the exact same inflection as Tetris: The Grand Master's "Ready, go!" voice.
• Take That!: The Stage 4+ boss, a 16-year-old who owns a Humongous Mecha: "What kind of boss uses silly magical cards to attack? Real women use a mecha!"
  • In the manual for the 360 and PS3 ports, at the bottom of the safety precautions:
    "Please do not play or watch this game if you are of the belief that Japanese individuals possess inherent shooter ability. Failure to disregard this warning may cause severe brain damage and a one-year ban from Xbox Live / PlayStation Network."
  • There's also a Take That! at PMC in Stage 5+ where a specific enemy type fires a constant stream of fast bullets at you, but they bounce off harmlessly from your ship. A Double Subversion that makes it possibly an Affectionate Parody is when you realize that they distract you from the real bullets, which is a move the aforementioned game often does.
• Take That, Critics!: One critic panned the game for "only being 45 minutes long." Said reviewer was sent a two-inch Fleshlight in response. Another complained that the Plus Team's soundtrack was "outdated bleeps and blips and it would be better if it had more mainstream music, like the Minus Team's soundtrack." Said reviewer was kidnapped by the developers, then forced to attend Video Games Live.
• You Bastard!: Use more than 9 continues and you'll face an Unwinnable alternate Final Boss at the end of Stage 7+ or 1-, which was funded by the money you've been putting into the machine (arcade version) or made from the salvagable parts of your destroyed ship stock (console version). Oh, and your continues become unavailable, to save you time (and money, if you're playing the arcade version). This punishment is not mentioned in-game, in the manual, on the website, or other publically available official material.

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