Full Run of the first loop of Tatsujin / Truxton (達人 / タツジン), the 5th shmup developed by Toaplan..
Stage Listing:
00-00 - Intro/Stage 1
05:58 - Stage 2
12:29 - Stage 3
18:48 - Stage 4
26:12 - Stage 5
31:54 - Final Boss
33:10 - Loop 2
Tatsujin, or Truxton for those outside Japan, is perhaps Toaplan's most well known shmup today. Maybe it's due to the excellent Sega Genesis / Megadrive port or the enthusiasm from certain reviewers, for whatever reason this game seems to come up the most when discussion Toaplan's catalog.
Truxton takes the formula established in KyuKyoKu Tiger and previous titles and adds one major new ingredient: SPEED. Oh yes, this is the first game after Slap Fight with speed ups, and boy do you move fast when fully maxed out. You move so fast that it can be hard to control, although the game is plenty playable at lower speeds as well.
There are 3 different weapon types: the standard wide red vulcan, green forward shot laser, and full screen blue electric attack, which is kind of the 'featured' weapon of the game (see the Genesis cover art). In addition, you have instantly activating bombs (the iconic 'skull bomb") that do a lot of damage and clear out bullets around your ship. But be careful, you can still still crash into ships and other objects while bombing. You can amass a huge stock of 10 bombs at a time, and they come fairly frequently.
There are 5 stages total, each ending with a large boss fight with the game endlessly looping with increased difficult each time. The bosses themselves are not necessarily that difficult, especially when fully powered and you know the "tricks". The real nasty enemies of the games are not so much these bosses, but the smaller "mid boss" enemies that are littered through each stage. These guys can soak up a ton of damage and many of the have very dangerous attack patterns. Usually bombing them is the way to go.
The main challenge of the game comes from recovering on death, when you get fully powered down and must restart at the previous checkpoint. And it's pretty easy to get clipped by one of the smaller enemies as they come from all directions, so death is almost guaranteed at some point. Thankfully Toaplan has crafted mostly thoughtful checkpoints that are all recoverable with a little bit of knowledge.
You can get extra lives based on score and also 1ups from certain "posts" in stage 1,2, and 5, where you must have the correct weapon to dislodge the 1up. Also, if you survive long enough you can get a 2up at around stage 3 if you haven't died yet.
Scoring basically just boils down to killing everything and lasting as long as possible. If you are fully powered up, you also get 5000 points for each additional powerup, which does add up over time, so try to learn and play at max speed to get these extra points.
Tatsujin is fairly challenging, I'd put it close to KyuKyoKu Tiger's difficulty, although perhaps a tad under that game, so be prepared for a modest challenge even if you are fairly experienced in shmups.