Samidare 　

Release Information
Type: Vertical Bullet Hell Shooter
Developer:  RebRank
Publisher: RebRank
Release: 2002-2005
Language: Japanese

Description

In 2785, full-scale war breaks out on Earth over the various nations' rights to extraplanetary resources. This war ravages the Earth's environment, forcing humanity to flee underground. It also sees the creation of the M.R.S. (Machine manufacture Research and development System), an automated manufacturing and battle system designed to allow wars to take place without actual human participation. Unfortunately, within five years of humanity's flight underground, M.R.S. has completely taken control of the Earth's surface, and the first exploratory group from humanity's underground Shelters is annihilated.

Not long after this first exploratory mission, the M.R.S. system discovers the Absolute Dimensional Barrier technology and eventually refines it into the Dimensional Absolute Barrier Shield; it uses its SMD series of warplanes to test and perfect the system. Unfortunately, the prototype unit, SMD-00x, disappears after activating the barrier for the first time, and though M.R.S. is eventually able to establish contact with the dimensional void into which SMD-00x disappeared, it's never actually able to find the ship again. Nevertheless, the system continues developing the SMD series, creating smaller, more capable craft such as the SMD-24-0x "Samidare", which is piloted by a humanoid control unit, C-22, and the final unit, SMD-31-FX "Gesshoku", whose control unit, C-23, possesses an advanced, self-aware AI.

Meanwhile, humanity is busy urbanizing its Shelters, developing bipedal robots (armed lightweight walking vehicles, or ALWVs), and preparing to take the fight to M.R.S. Sixty years after the cataclysm that drove humanity underground, it finally emerges to retake the surface. By this time, M.R.S. has developed significant internal defects, and the battle is relatively short. Within two decades, almost all M.R.S.-created automata on the surface have been destroyed.

Samidare's main story mode follows the major missions of SMD-24-0x: its testing against the biomechanical construct Sylphid, its encounter with Anareta, the defense system of long-ruined space outpost Tetra-Biblos, and its encounter with the SMD series prototype, SMD-00x. The extra mode follows a flight of the SMD-31-FX several decades later, after SMD-24-0x makes it back to Earth (if you get the good ending).