Bit.Trip Fate

I will follow the Bit.Trip series wherever it'll take me.

After playing Bit.Trip Fate, a fantastic re-imagining of the soon-to-be overdone genre of "bullet hell" games, it's clear to me that Gaijin Games are a making their games using black magic or something, because every type of game they've tried to make has turned out fantastically. From the Pong/Guitar Hero mash-up of Beat to the Canabalt-esque platforming of Runner, these are easily some of the best downloadable games ever made. And if they ever decide to put all of them on a disc at some point in some sort of awesome collector's edition, I would be all over that.

What the series so far has examined in depth, without resorting to outright stating so or using a Master's thesis or what have you, is the inextricable link between movement and music in videogaming, presented as a retrospective on various control schemes and types of games, all wrapped up in an incredibly pleasing retro-futurist Atari 2600 aesthetic. Fate is perhaps the most successful realization of this conceit as a straight-up videogame, because whereas a game like Runner demands absolute perfection, Fate is a game that puts the player in touch with every aspect of their "gamer-ness," drawing upon wells of stored-up muscle memory and videogaming conventions to make your way through this wholly unique game.

As with Bit.Trip Runner, you take direct control of Commander Video, the protagonist of the series. This time, though, you're joined by a variety of "stars" from the indie gaming scene, most notably Meat Boy from Super Meat Boy. The game is "on rails," so to speak, but you can move Commander Video left and right along this path. Seeing as the game is a bullet hell shooter, this means that you're also in charge of spraying the screen with bullets while engaging in the virtual dance that avoiding the dozens of bullets on screen requires.

A significant difference from this game and pretty much any other shmup is the intrinsic relationship between the gameplay and the music, and this is cemented from top to bottom in this game. Shmup rhythms have often been tied to music, but Fate is probably the first game to make this so abundantly clear. Ships explode into bleeps and bloops; bullets become a part of the soundtrack; and the soundtrack itself, a gloriously well-realized shift from the overtly-videogame-y sounds of past Bit.Trip games to a more downtrodden, dubstep style soundtrack here, swirls itself around the gameplay so seamlessly that it makes the developers seem like some sort of gaming geniuses.

The game is nowhere near the level of insane, "screen filling with bullets"-type gameplay seen from Japanese bullet hell shooters from a company like Cave, but I've always found that type of design to basically be a kind of difficulty circle jerk. Don't get me wrong – like all Bit.Trip games, Fate is probably overwhelming for the average gamer, but this game's difficulty seems much more honed than in those Cave shooters.

With that being said, I'm not too sure if I have some hidden reserve of shooter talent, but I found I was dodging and shooting with relative ease for the most part. Like in Bit.Trip Beat, the game is about scoring as many points as you can, but get hit too many times and you enter into a rhythm-less "nether" world, and you need to shoot your way out if you want to survive. This gives you many chances to atone for getting hit.

But I'd say that that wasn't what made my experience easier than past Bit.Trip games. Those older Bit.Trip games have fantastic controls in their own right, but in Fate, they're simply glorious. Movement speed is tied to your shooting – stop shooting and you can move faster, but shoot and move and you can finesse your movements in between bullets. That's a bullet hell convention at this point; what isn't is the game's Sin and Punishment 2-esque standard control scheme. See, the game uses the Wiimote and nunchuk configuration, meaning that you can essentially be two places at once. This gives you ultimate control over your character and feels just absolutely perfect.

Unfortunately, there's only one or two niggling little problems with the game. The main one is that, unlike with other Bit.Trip games, this game gives you the choice to use either the Wiimote and nunchuk configuration, or to do some twin-stick shooting with the Classic Controller. Both work exceptionally well, but seeing as the whole series is structured as a "control scheme retrospective," giving the player the ability to choose their control scheme sort of destroys this aspect of the series' cohesion.

As well, after the benchmark that Runner set with its unbelievable graphics, Fate seems a little bit like a step back. Sure, it's all very Rez-inspired, but it's simply not as gorgeous to look at as Runner was. That could have to do with the game's more apparent "seriousness," and it's still a great looking game that fits in very well with the Bit.Trip ethos, but it's a bit of a disappointment nonetheless.

That said, this is probably some of the best $6 you could spend this year, and Bit.Trip Fate is, like its overall series, monumental. Seriously Gaijin, make me a collector's set. I'll buy ten of them.