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YMMV / DonPachi

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  • Awesome Music: Thanks to an unknown composer for DoDonPachi and Manabu Namiki for Dai Ou Jou and Dai Fukkatsu.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Hibachi's many incarnations. Either seen as a dazzling spectacle and utterly satisfying to finally defeat, or an uncreative attempt to making an ultra-hard True Final Boss who only exists to force top-level players to feed coins in order to finish the game.
    • The Element Dolls and Daughters. Some enjoy their presence in an otherwise drab military shooter series, others feel that they turn the game into Fanservice-laden "moeshit".
  • Broken Base:
    • Autobomb in DaiFukkatsu ver. 1.5. Survival-oriented players hate it because it effectively turns the bomb gauge into a life bar and breaks the concept of lives, score-oriented players fail to see what the problem is because bombing is just as hurtful to score as dying is, and point out that one can simply play Power Style to avert the generous bomb stock. This seems to be a non-issue in DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL and Saidaioujou, where autobomb can be toggled at the start of the game.
    • Are the second loops a rewarding challenge for experts? Or are they an unnecessary form of Fake Longevity?
    • The EXA LABEL versin of True Death has been quite divisive. While regarded as a Polished Port among many for its absolutely minimum input lag, the inclusion of both Arcade and the previously console-exclusive Arrange Mode, as well as the new EXA arrange and the infaous Inbachi mode, the fact that it's exclusive to arcades and has a very high price tag even by the standards of arcade games has had a number of fans booing its inaccessibility (especially fans outside of Japan, as very, very few arcades outside of Japan carry exA-Arcadia hardware), as well as the fact that the exA legal team infamously used this version of the game as grounds to issue a cease-and-desist order to the MAME team to prevent the arcade original from being available on the platform, as the only home version of the game available is on the Xbox 360 and has long been out of print.
  • Complete Monster: Colonel Schwarlitz Longhena/Longhener, debuting in DoDonPachi, organized the Elemental Dolls' attack on mankind and humanity's near extinction. Thinking humans to be irreparably flawed, Longhena founds the DonPachi, to be conditioned via slaughtering their own comrades, to fight the "invaders". In truth, these invaders are a human fleet trying to stop Longhena's insanity. Gleefully revealing the truth, Longhena attempts to simply wipe out humanity.
  • Contested Sequel: Every CAVE-developed game after DoDonPachi:
  • Demonic Spiders: The ring-formation turrets in Stage 5 of Dai-Fukkatsu, which continously fire bullets or lasers and cannot be destroyed except in Arrange A. These turrets alone make this stage one of the most hated in the series.
  • Even Better Sequel: DonPachi was mainly notable for being hard but fair, for its second loop with suicide bullets, and for a few interesting game mechanics. It was otherwise not very interesting in the grand scheme of things. Then DoDonPachi changed the 2-D shooter world forever, and remains a favorite amongst shmup players today.
  • Fandom Rivalry:
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The original edition of DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou is commonly referred to as "White Label" after its white title screen, as opposed to the distinct black title screen of DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Black Label. Contrary to popular belief, "White Label" has never been used offically; this version is instead typically called "Old version" or "original version" instead.
    • The "Washing Machine": Hibachi's final attack in DaiOuJou, which features a screen filling amount of spiralling bullets resembling the interior of a washing machine in motion.
    • In SaiDaiOuJou Hibachi is called "Lolibachi" or "Madobachi"
    • Ketsupachi for DaiFukkatsu] BLACK Label Arrange Mode on the Xbox 360. (See Crossover).
    • The DoDonPachi III build of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou is sometimes referred to as "Gray Label", due to its modifications serving as the basis for DaiOuJou Black Label.
  • Fanon Discontinuity:
    • Most fans don't acknowledge Bee Storm as part of the canon due to being outsourced to a third-party developer and not liking the game. While Call Backs in later games are mainly limited to DoDonPachi, dai ou jou, and DaiFukkatsu, and DonPachi is integral to the canon due to demonstrating just what sort of mental conditioning that DonPachi Squadron pilots must go through, one of the "stage cleared" screens for Daioujou refers to the game as "Donpachi Episode 4", meaning that unless CAVE put out yet another DonPachi game between DDP (the second game) and DOJ (not counting the Campaign Version of DDP, which is a Game Mod and Arrange Mode rather than its own game) that nobody knows about, Bee Storm is an official and canon game in the series.
    • The more "hardcore" section of the fanbase ignore the officially-localized titles, so Blissful Death, Resurrection, and True Death are commonly instead referred to by their Japanese titles dai ou jou, Dai-Fukkatsu, and "Sai Dai Ou Jou'' instead, respectively.
  • Franchise Original Sin: Bee Storm toyed with the concept of actual protagonist characters about a year before dai ou jou introduced the controversial Element Dolls. While it does have characters with Fanservice designs, fans tend not to complain due to the game not being as in-your-face about them as later games; although another part of it is that most series fans don't even acknowledge Bee Storm anyway...this is despite the fact that IGS had a hand in the creation of Daioujou.
  • Friendly Fandoms: On the flip side, if you are in Japan, it is fine to mention Touhou Project in the same sentence as the Donpachi series, as several Pixiv artists and veteran shooter players in Japan like both series.
  • Fridge Horror — The Fan Nickname for DaiFukkatsu Black Label's 360-exclusive Arrange Mode, a crossover of DaiFukkatsu and Ketsui, is "Ketsupachi". "Ketsu" in Japanese can mean "buttocks". So "Ketsupachi" means "Ass Bee".
  • Game-Breaker:
    • DoDonPachi II has the Laser Bomb, which is charged up by grazing bullets. Someone who is good at grazing bullets can basically bomb enemies ad infinitum whenever there is a bullet-dense section. Notably, it does not terminate your combo like bombs in other games.
    • Strong Style in DaiFukkatsu / Resurrection.
      • Nerf + Dynamic Difficulty — In DaiFuukatsu BLACK Label, playing in Strong Style is often likened to playing on DFK 1.5's second loop. One player commented that "it feels like the enemies are in strong style, not the player."
    • Also in DaiFukkatsu, Bomb Style and Strong Style's auto-bomb mechanic. If you get hit with at least one bomb in stock, you use a bomb instead of dying. It does last shorter and does less damage than a manually-fired bomb, but that you can use your bombs as extra lives is still pretty broken. Moreover, on each successive life, you start off with one more bomb than your last life can hold, so by the time you're on your last life, you're carrying 6 bombs, or rather, 6 extra lives. The BLACK Label version allows you to turn it off, and Version 1.51 Nerfs auto-bomb by taking away all of your bombs if you auto-bomb instead of manually bombing.
      • Do note, however, that if you are playing for score, and unless you are playing Version 1.51 or either of 1.5's Arrange modes, bombs wipe out your combo (alongside getting killed), and thus subvert this trope. A single touch of another bullet will destroy that 15,000 combo of yours whether you die or not.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The Black Label edition of DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, which is an Updated Re-release of the original game with balancing tweaks to make the game a bit easier or more fair, is more widely-played in the West than it is in Japan, where the original "White Label" edition is more frequently played. This is because the Black Label arcade board was a limited-print release unlike the White Label edition, and as such is not as easy to find in Japanese arcades, and until the Re:incarnation port in 2023, the only way to legally play Black Label was via an ill-received port on Xbox 360 whereas the White Label version has a highly-acclaimed port on PlayStation 2, so most people who played Black Label until then did so via MAME. Western shmup players are often surprised to find out that emulation is more criminalized in Japan than in most Western countries, which explains why Japanese shmup players don't simply emulate Black Label and just make do with White Label.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In DaiOuJou, if you wait until the Stage 2 boss's HP bar has fully filled up before you start attacking it, the first hit will do an abnormally large amount of burst damage, around 7% to be more specific.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: The initials for the default high scores for DonPachi read "TOAPLAN FOREVER" when read top to bottom then left to right, as a tribute to Toaplan which had just gone bankrupt. About 25 years later, ports of Toaplan games started gracing modern platforms after the rights issues with those games got sorted out, with former Toaplan employees assisting in their developments. "TOAPLAN FOREVER" indeed.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • It Was His Sled: DoDonPachi is well-known for the twist where Colonel Longhena is revealed to be a slimy Manipulative Bastard who tricks you into killing your allies before sending you off to die for the second loop.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The Version 1.x revisions of DaiFukkatsu are disliked by survival-based players due to forced auto-bomb, effectively turning the player's bomb stock into a health bar and watering down the value of a 1-credit clear. That said, the problem isn't necessarily that it exists, so much as that there is no way to turn it off. Playing in Power Style somewhat remedies this by giving the player a bomb capacity of only one...which ends up making the game far too difficult for many players instead. Fortunately BLACK LABEL and SaiDaiOuJou have the option to turn off auto-bomb, and SDOJ's version of auto-bomb is nerfed by taking all of the player's bombs when used, bringing it into the realm of "useful assist, but doesn't break the game and should not be relied upon too much" for many.
  • It's Hard, So It Sucks!: dai ou jou is criticized by some shmup fans for pumping up the difficulty but without doing much to make the game more fun or accessible for people who may not be highly-skilled at Bullet Hell games. The game's Hyper mechanic certainly doesn't help, as the player is forced to use a Hyper if they have one in stock, and using Hypers raises the game's rank, something that can only be mitigated by bombing or dying. The Black Label revision fixes up some of the rank-related criticisms, but the PS2 port of DOJ is based on the original "White Label" instead and it took 20 years for an acceptable port of Black Label to be released, the DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou Re:incarnation release (the Xbox 360 version in the interim is widely regarded as a Porting Disaster due to its bugs, long loading times, and stolen source code).
  • Memetic Badass: Hibachi, one of the most notorious True Final Bosses in genre history.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Moral Event Horizon: Longhena sending out the player to kill off his own comrades, falsely accusing them of being alien invaders.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: Most games in the series have "Just a couple more shots!", the line spoken by the announcer when the current boss is almost dead. The Arrange mode of DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL is known for saying "Just a couple more shots desu!"
  • Narm: Hibachi's new voice in Ichimen Bancho, it's already lazy and whiny on its own, but if you heard of her previous voice and compare it to the new one, it's downright hilarious. Also, Inbachi's Death Cry Echo sounds less like she's dying and more like she's having an orgasm.
  • Narm Charm:
    • "Battle for the Last" from the mobile ports of DaiFukkatsu should by all means not make sense for a Hibachi theme, given that Hibachi themes are typically lightning-fast gabber pieces of doom and gloom. Instead, it ends up sounding like the most heroic final showdown theme in a Shoot 'Em Up ever.
    • The ending of Maximum has Dr. Daugh boasting about the wonders of EVAC's weapons in a thinly-veiled speech about how challenging and awesome CAVE games are. He's not wrong.
  • Older Than They Think: DoDonPachi Campaign Version features a prototype version of the Hyper mechanic. It also introduced the idea of having the value of bee items being multiplied by your current combo. In a way, it is a prototype DaiOuJou, especially considering its extreme difficulty. This version was presented to the winner of a scoring contest that happened in late 1997 to celebrate the release of the Saturn port; this was approximately 4.5 years before DOJ was released.
  • Overshadowed by Controversy: The 360 port of dai ou jou had some glitches and obnoxious load times, but was otherwise relatively workable. What it's more known for is that the port used stolen code from the PS2 port.
  • Player Punch: DoDonPachi features the classic twist that unveils should you unlock the second loop. Colonel Longhena gleefully reveals that the "Mechanized Aliens" he briefed you on prior to the mission were in fact your allies, and that you just slaughtered your poor friends without knowing it. He then declares that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and his special forces intend to dispose of you. "See You in Hell!" Nearly anyone who doesn't believe in Play the Game, Skip the Story probably wants to kill the bastard themselves at this point (and should they be skilled (or willing to spam continues) enough to finish the game, they do).
  • Polished Port:
    • The PlayStation 2 port of Dai Ou Jou by Arika was quite groundbreaking for its time and introduced a lot of useful training and quality-of-life features. It features a Simulation Mode that serves as a stage practice mode, and you can adjust various parameters such as which portion of the stage to start at, how many Hyper stocks to begin with, how much rank to begin with, and so forth; furthermore, this mode has pre-installed replays by top players, allowing you to study their routes. Not only does this game allow you to save replays, you can actually take over a replay while it's running by performing any gameplay input. This version also adds a No Bullet Mode, intended to help players learn combo routes, and the infamous Death Label, a Boss Game mode on horse crack.
    • The Switch port of Resurrection by Livewire is a more faithful port of the original Xbox 360 release than the PC port. Not only all the slowdown issues and lack thereof were fixed in this port, but it also adds descriptions to every mode in the game, something that was lacking from both the 360 and PC ports. Of all the versions of Resurrection available, the Switch version is the definitive one by far.
  • Porting Disaster:
    • The Xbox 360 port of DaiOuJou is not just glitchy, it nearly caused legal trouble! A patch came out that resolved some of the glitches...two years after the port's release...after it went out of print.
    • In the Windows port of DaiFukkatsu the Ketsui arrange mode introduces a lot more slowdown than in the original 360 version of it.
  • Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
    • The original version of dai ou jou takes away all of the player's lives upon entering the second loop, and they can only get one extra life per stage by clearing the stage without dying or without bombing. Furthermore, continues are disabled entirely for this loop. This was disliked because it teased the player with a harder set of stages only to throw them off the machine. The DoDonPachi III build allows players to carry over up to three lives to the next loop, while dai ou jou Black Label not only allows carrying your entire life stock to the next loop, but continues remain allowed until the very final stage.
    • dai ou jou Re:incarnation originally only applied the visible hitbox setting to the original version of the game, not dai ou jou Black Label or DoDonPachi III. This led to complaints and further belief that M2 was putting the original version above all the other versions. Fortunately, the hitbox display was patched into Black Label and DoDonPachi III within a couple of weeks.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: In dai ou jou, if you have Hypers in stock, pressing the bomb button will deploy a Hyper instead of a bomb. This wouldn't be too bad, but activating Hypers also spikes the rank, and even once the Hyper wears off, whether on its own or you firing an actual bomb, some of the rank effects will linger. Somewhat fixed in the Black Label revision, which nerfs the rank increase from using a Hyper. However, it still doesn't solve the problem of there being situations where a bomb might be preferred over a Hyper.
  • Sequel Difficulty Drop: DaiFukkatsu, particularly version 1.5. Strong Style is particularly overpowered, the game has mandatory autobomb, effectively giving you 15 starting lives, and this game's version of the Hyper can cancel enemy bullets. This is a huge contrast to dai ou jou, regarded as one of the most brutal games in a series that's already Nintendo Hard.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: After DFK paved the way for easy one-credit clears, True Death kicks the difficulty back up to DOJ levels. Hypers no longer cancel bullets, autobomb returns but can be disabled and takes away all of your bombs if triggered, and the difficulty curve picks up sooner.
  • Sequel Displacement: DoDonPachi is far better remembered than DonPachi, mainly due to DoDonPachi taking DP's bullet patterns and action and cranking them up to eleven.
  • Sequelitis: DoDonPachi II is one of the less well-received installments. It didn't help that it was developed not by Cave, but by IGS, a lesser-known Taiwanese development team.
  • Signature Scene: The True Final Boss fights of Daioujou, DaiFukkatsu, and SaiDaiOuJou are by far the most iconic parts of the series.
  • Tainted by the Preview:
    • DoDonPachi True Death EXA LABEL put off many fans from the moment it was announced, as it was the first time in seven years that the game had gotten a new port after the Xbox 360 version drew complaints for issues like input lag (and inconsistent input lag, ranging from 4-6 frames), only to be an arcade rerelease rather than a new consumer port, rendering it largely inaccessible to gamers outside of Japan, the only country to still have a relatively healthy arcade scene. While it is sold globally, and in fact is the first edition of the complete game to be released outside of Japan (DoDonPachi Unlimited uses True Death as a base, but it's so truncated compared to the original game that it doesn't count), the number of public arcades in Western countries that carry the game can be counted on two fingers. Failing that, the only way to get ahold of a current print of True Death is to spend thousands of dollars on that particular release.
    • During a pre-release M2 livestream of dai ou jou Re:incarnation, it was revealed that the "White Label" edition of the game will serve as the main version of the game, featuring leaderboards, M2 Gadgets, and Arcade Challenge, while the Black Label edition of the game gets relegated to the "Extra" category, meaning it won't receive the same treatments. This disappointed a fair number of players who prefer Black Label for what they consider to be an easier and more balanced game, especially since Black Label was made by the programmer of the game, Tsuneki Ikeda, and touted by him as the "corrected" version of the game. While most of those critics are glad to at least have Black Label playable, it still stings a bit that it's treated as a side dish rather than the main event. Many of these fears died down once the game came out, since Black Label does come with Gadgets and leaderboards, although Arcade Challenge, Arcade Osarai, Luna Tour, Super Easy, and the Arrange Modes are still based on the "White Label" edition.
  • That One Level: Stage 5 in Resurrection. While shmup final stages are generally expected to be hard, this one is exceptional due to the presence of ring formations of indestructible spinning turrets that can easily kneecap a 1CC attempt or cause copious credit-feeding.
  • That One Rule: The DoDonPachi series' most prominent scoring mechanic by far is its combo system; destroying enemies within a sufficiently short interval of each other accumulates combo, and to oversimplify, the higher your combo, the more points you get from destroying the next enemy. At first, this seems like an interesting concept, but it becomes apparent that the best way to score is to build stage-long chains, which require extreme levels of memorization of where each enemy is, far beyond what is needed in a survival-based run, because destroying enemies too quickly will leave you without any enemies to combo off of before the combo timer runs out, breaking your combo and hurting your score, and depending on where the combo breaks you can miss out on tens of millions of points (DoDonPachi 2-loop and Dai Ou Jou 1-loop top-level plays end in the hundred-millions, Dai Ou Jou 2-loop into the single-digit billions). While there are players who do enjoy playing for combo and thus for score, the vast majority of players find the strategies for comboing to be very complex and confusing and prefer to play purely for survival instead (it helps that for those going for 2-loop clears, there are several ways to unlock loop 2 without needing to score, like collecting all bees or dying fewer than a set number of times).
  • Vindicated by History:
    • DoDonPachi II: Bee Storm was widely panned upon release due to being outsourced to a third-party team and lacking a lot of the design principles of the original DoDonPachi, reusing a lot of the same graphics, and having some strange quirks like even "popcorn" enemies having a considerable amount of health and having to choose between conventional bomb or laser bomb at the start of the game (you can't have both). However, in the years that follow, while it's still not regarded as highly as the CAVE-developed games, people have discovered this game through emulation and found it to be a good title that's more beginner-friendly than most of CAVE's in-house catalog, featuring easier patterns and the mechanic of grazing bullets to generate bomb if using laser bomb (in a manner similar to Psyvariar) and a robust electronica-focused soundtrack with plenty of tracks (the original DoDonPachi gets some criticism for only having three stage themes — stages 4, 5, and 6 just reuse the themes of stage 1, 2, and 3 respectively — while the True Final Boss gets a unique theme for phase 1 only before reusing the regular boss theme for phase 2).
    • dai ou jou, while widely regarded as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel to Bee Storm, was still met with contentuous reception upon its release in 2002 due to its high difficulty even by arcade game standards, which ended up alienating a lot of non-veteran players. However, over time it has started to be better-received for refining a lot of DoDonPachi's rougher design and taking less time to get to the game's more challenging elements (the first stage of DoDonPachi is often derided by hardcore shmup players for being a fun warm-up level the first few times but getting tedious when one has to play it every single time). Part of this has to do with the game's PS2 port, which was the only way to play the game for years unless one was lucky enough to live near an arcade that carried the game or was willing to pay top dollar for the PCB itself, being based on the more difficult original "White Label" version of the game as opposed to its more forgiving Black Label version, but the game becoming playable in the MAME arcade emulator as well as the release of the Xbox 360 port (albeit one with some major problems) allowed players to check out the Black Label version and give the game a second chance. Less positively, the game's improved reception is because its successor, DoDonPachi Resurrection, is an even more divisive sequel due to straying so much from the formula of the previous two games and forced auto-bomb. dai ou jou would later get an M2 ShotTriggers release, DoDonPachi dai ou jou Re:incarnation, with a lot of beginner-friendly features and modes to help ease in new players such as Super Easy mode, the three Arrange Modes, and the Arcade Challenge practice mode.
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