Trivia / DonPachi

• B-Team Sequel: Bee Storm was developed by IGS rather than CAVE themselves.
• Creator Backlash: According to former Toaplan programmer Tsuneki Ikeda, Cave considers the original DonPachi to be " a creative failure". The company wanted the game to be on par with Toaplan's previous games, but they ended up receiving a lot of criticism because the game wasn't on the same level as Toaplan's shmup library.
• Creator's Favorite: Tsuneki Ikeda, one of the staff members of CAVE, considers Exy his favorite Elemental Doll in Dai Ou Jou, citing her enhanced shot and laser, and doesn't consider her lack of bombs an issue for him since he never uses them.
• Development Hell — There is a patch for the Xbox 360 version of DaiOuJou that fixes the numerous bugs in the game (see Porting Disaster). It took about two years since the game was released to make; by the time it was out the sequel DaiFukkatsu was already ported and the DaiOuJou port had been discontinued from production.
• Genre Popularizer — While certainly not the first Bullet Hell game (Batsugun, another such game, was released 2 years before DonPachi), DoDonPachi certainly did popularize the concept.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • DoDonPachi Campaign Version, a single board of which was distributed, and to a contest winner. As such, this version is not available in MAME, and if the board becomes damaged beyond repair, this piece of history (and arrange mode of DoDonPachi) is gone. Forever.
  • Bee Storm has never been ported to a home platform, but at least it was produced for arcades and can be played in MAME.
  • Both Ichimenbanchou and Unlimited were taken off the app markets about a year after their respective releases.
  • Both the original arcade and Xbox 360 releases of True Death have been long out of production. An attempt was made to make the game playable in MAME after the arcade ROM was leaked, but this was rapidly shut down by the legal team of exA to prevent its release from being spread (to no avail as GitHub has all commits publicly displayed), who 'claim' to be the current rights holders for True Death and which had recently released the Exa Label version of it exclusively for arcades. This is despite the fact that said C&D order is widely considered to be illegitimate by both the public and the MAME team, which would almost certainly be lost for exA if MAME ever took them to court. Nevertheless, MAME kept the game removed so as to not cause further trouble, which was a controversial move.
• Late Export for You:
  • Blissful Death was released in 2002 in Japan, and would see no overseas release until 2012, and even then it's a mobile port. For those who want to use more conventional controls, there is still no localized console or PC release (all four console ports are Japan-only, with the PS2 and Xbox 360 ports in particular being region-locked, but the PS4 and Switch versions are not).
  • Resurrection was released for Japanese arcades in 2008, and did not get an official overseas release until 2010 with the iOS port. Its BLACK LABEL edition was released in 2010 and took until 2011 to get localized...for those in Europe and Australia, albeit as a region-free release, while North Americans had to wait until the Steam release in 2016 if they did not want to import.
  • SaiDaiOuJou was Japan-only until 2020^note An Xbox 360 port with no region lock exists. However, it was never officially localized for non-Japan markets., eight years after the original release, when the EXA Label release was made available internationally. However, given the relative lack of an arcade center industry outside of Japan (not helped by the COVID-19 Pandemic ravaging the world in the meantime, making visting arcades dangerous), good luck finding an arcade that has it, or spending thousands on the hardware.^note Arcade games and consumer-software games have different kinds of end-user licenses; the former are meant to make money for businesses while the latter are intended for private non-profit use only, which is part of why arcade games are far more expensive.
• No Export for You:
  • The first and seventh games have proper US releases, and the second has an "International" release (it was going to have a US release, but the US release was cancelled). And that's only for arcades; none of the console releases have made their way outside of Japan (although the mobile ports have been released in America).
  • In a twist of irony, DoDonPachi III, a build of Dai Ou Jou that was meant for the export market and features its own balancing tweaks and an English translation of the endings, didn't get released when it was expected to be, and when it finally did, it was on DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Re:incarnation, which is a Japan-only release.
• No Port For You:
  • DoDonPachi Campaign Version does not have a home port, which is made even more problematic by the fact that only one board of it exists out in the wild.
  • Bee Storm has never been ported to a home platform.^note Aside from its lack of commercial sucess, another likely reason is that Capcom published it, therefore trying to port it would be a rights issue.
  • Strangely, while Maximum was initially released as a Windows Phone exclusive and later ported to iOS, it never got an Android port.
  • DoDonPachi games have been on the platforms of almost every major game platform maker that has existed since the series' creation: Sega^note DonPachi and DoDonPachi on Sega Saturn, Sony^note DP and DDP on PlayStation, dai ou jou on PlayStation 2, Microsoft^note DOJ, DaiFukkatsu, and SaiDaiOuJou on Xbox 360, Maximum on Windows Phone, Apple^note DOJ, DFK, Maximum, Ichimenbanchou, and Unlimited on iPhone, and Google^note every iPhone entry except for Maximum. The odd one out is Nintendo; CAVE did not release any DoDonPachi games for a Nintendo platform until DaiFukkatsu on Nintendo Switch.
• Promoted Fanboy: Alex "trap15" Marshall, a fan of shmups himself and who worked on Game Mods of DoDonPachi and Ketsui, was brought on to port SaiDaiOuJou for the exA-Arcadia hardware and design its exclusive Exa Mode.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Prior to its Black Label release, Cave developed an international version of DaiOuJou called DoDonPachi III, but instead of being a simple release of its original version, it would serve as basis for Black Label by introducing some of its gameplay changes into it, making it a beta version of Black Label. However, this version never ended up being released officially and remained that way for years, outside of a dumped rom of the game in 2017. It would finally see the light of day thanks to M2 as part of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou Re:incarnation. Ironically, this means the version of the game that was meant to be exported has a No Export for You situation as its only release.
• Short Run in Peru: A partial example. The Ketsui arranged sountrack that was produced for the standalone edition of DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL was made by Jake "virt" Kaufman, who is an American. However, the only way to enjoy this soundtrack in any format was exclusive to Japan until 2016, five years later, when DaiFukkatsu was ported to Steam for a worldwide release, including in virt's home country, officially allowing American players to experience it too. Even then, the soundtrack album remains a Japan-exclusive release.

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