Deathsmiles breaks with Cave's vertical shooter tradition and goes for horizontal scrolling, with a group of flying teenage witches facing demonic armies in a gothic fantasy world. Its shooting system allows attacking simultaneously forward and backward, a design solution built specifically for the horizontal format. It came out in 2007, already in the final stretch of the golden era of Japanese arcade-board shooters, and it's one of the most polished productions in Cave's catalog: adjustable difficulty, very careful aesthetics, and that dense bullet design that made the studio famous.
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