While Examu is known predominately for their air-dash-heavy fighting series Arcana Heart, the small 30-person company has tried their hand at quite a few fighters since their inception in 1999. Aquapazza, Nitroplus Blasterz, and Arcana Heart’s numerous sequels all did well enough to keep this small company with big competitive dreams afloat. Every fighter that Examu has put out has survived long enough to make it to consoles, and some have dedicated-enough followings to garner major tournament play to this day.
With one notable, console-less exception.
Daemon Bride was the second franchise from Examu after their modest success with Arcana Heart. Examu’s work has an obvious style and market: their games and settings are at the intersection of cute anime and competitive Japanese arcade culture. Where Arcana Heart leaned heavily towards the cute anime side, 2009’s Daemon Bride was an attempt at being more serious, detailed, and gritty. Its projectile-focused gameplay evoked the frenzied, nuanced pace of the shmup genre, while its airdash and homing cancel mechanics still kept it spiritually close enough to Arcana Heart. Since Arc System Works’s BlazBlue had come out the year before, I can imagine Daemon Bride was an attempt to get in the ground floor of this more grown-up anime resurgence.
It didn’t work. Daemon Bride received one title update in 2011 (Daemon Bride: Additional Gain) then quietly disappeared from the market. Examu’s later works, Aquapazza and Nitroplus Blasterz, backed far away from Daemon Bride’s shmup inspiration, and returned to Examu’s cuter, less serious looking art style.
Those that still want to play it will have to make a bit of a trek over to the Japanese arcade Game a-cho. Thankfully, the good folks there have provided us with hours of recent high-level gameplay footage. Regardless of Daemon Bride‘s fate, there was something special enough there in its direction to keep some players playing, even today.
Source: GAMEacho