Cho Aniki Zero is more than a little creepy. A unique game, of course, but in a very unsettling way.
About ninety-three per cent of the cast (the rest are robots) is three-quarters-nude, and horror of horrors, all but one of them are men. The creepiest are Adon and Samson - really huge, muscular men (the subtitle of the game is 'Muscle Brothers') who are almost always in awfully homoerotic poses. Writing about it makes my stomach roil. And there are the two naked babies Misha and El.
Anyway, the only normal-looking characters are the two playable ones - Itadon's a guy (and yes, he's muscular as hell too but at least wears pants) and Benten's the only female character. And she is pretty hot. Actually, she's very hot. They had to make this game sell a little somehow, after all.
I'd have preferred not to have naked men or babies flying around the screen, but you have to pick a sidekick alongside the character you're playing - Itadon can pick between Samson and Adon and Benten has to stick with both Misha and El.
The story is that BuilderPlanet is running out of protein so Itadon and Benten set out to kill off Balzac II the Villain. Quite a simple and idiotic story, with no speech narration, and it's all told through the opening but the story's never the focus in bullet hell games - the gameplay is.
So what about the gameplay? It's decent. You fly horizontally around the screen shooting stuff, you can change directions, and you can use traditional bombs (called Eruptions - it's not as bad as it sounds) and Men Beams - basically laser attacks - though if you pick Benten it's called the Splash Beam and is more of a screen-sweep. Your sidekicks shoot alongside you and absorb bullets. Enemies drop protein capsules and man-juice which you can pick up for more bombs and lasers - let's just call them lasers. You can change your direction, which is a feature not all bullet hell games have. The graphics are nice - the models and environment are 3D - and the music is fine too. There isn't that crazy sense of speed because backgrounds are static, but overall the game does well in the gameplay, graphics and sound department.
One thing to complain about is the presentation. The title and options menu makes you expect it's gonna be hella oldschool - 16-bit graphics and choppy sound effect - but it's not like that, which is good. The Pause screen is just a simple 'PAUSE' written across the screen in WordPad font and you can't exit to the main menu or anything (you have to quit the whole game). In the options menu the control scheme indicates that you can access the options midgame by pressing O, but you can't.
Overall, Cho Aniki Zero is a good bullet hell game for someone who can maintain an indifference to a lot of the stuff shown and implied in the game, and can simply focus on shooting everything, but if you're sensitive to such things then definitely avoid it.