Deathsmiles MegaBlack Label brings together the content of Deathsmiles and its MegaBlack Label expansion on a single board: the player chooses among several flying witches, each with her own firing pattern, and advances through stages that can be traversed indistinctly to the left or the right, an uncommon variation within the horizontal bullet-hell (danmaku) shooter that characterizes Cave.
It's representative of the studio's late period, when the arcade shoot 'em up already coexisted with console versions and the audience had shrunk to a very specialized core of players. Within that circuit, it remains one of Cave's most beloved entries for its gothic-kawaii aesthetic and its surgically calibrated difficulty.
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