It's the year 1977 and the evil Gogoh Army from space is attacking Earth! Japan (and the entire planet)'s only hope comes from the Supercharged Research Center, who developed the Combining Mecha Vulkaiser to fight against the invaders. Go, Vulkaiser! Restore peace to the Earth!
Supercharged Robot Vulkaiser, aka. VULKAISER in all caps, is a Horizontal Scrolling Shooter developed by Astro Port (the makers of SATAZIUS) and released on Steam in Summer 2015. The game is made to be a huge pastiche of 70s and 80s Super Robots, especially Mazinger Z, Voltron and Voltes V, complete with episode titles and big yellow English subtitles, in the form of a Bullet Hell shooter.
The basis of the gameplay is that at fixed points the Vulkaiser can combine with one of the other four Kaiser modules and gain new special attacks. You only have one life, and when one of the Kaisers is destroyed it is gone forever, but the robots are repaired in between levels, replenishing a bit of life. Shooting charges up the modules' special weapons, that when fired cancel some of the enemy bullets.
Witch-Bot MEGLILO
is another bullet hell game set in the same universe, this time a Vertical Scrolling Shooter. The wacky premise is that Meglilo, a Magical Girl from the Magic Kingdom, gets killed during one of the battles between the Gogoh Army and the Supercharged Research Center, and Prof. Amamori himself rebuilds her in the form of a cyborg with huge firepower and the ability to stop time.
Now is the time to combine the strength of five:
- Adjective Noun Fred: Supercharged Robot VULKAISER, following the naming theme of early robot anime.
- Affectionate Parody: Of early robot anime in general. Witch-Bot Meglilo is a parody of Chargeman Ken! specifically, with Ken's parents and younger sister making cameos in the stage 4 cutscene.
- Bullet Hell: Higher difficulty levels ramp up the amount of bullets shown on screen.
- Cyber Cyclops: Several enemy vessels and robots, most notably the first boss.
- Destructive Savior: The skyscrapers in the first level will be damaged and destroyed by your bullets, and there is no way to prevent them getting razed.
- Evil Knockoff:
- The fourth boss, Supervillain Robot Warukaiger, is a bigger purple Vulkaiser armed with copies of the four modules. Beating it nets the achievement "Never Buy Bootlegs".
- Meglilo has Meligro, a cyborg witch almost identical to her made by the Gogoh army, who kidnaps her sidekick and takes him on the Gogoh lunar base. (It sounds better in the original Japanese: Meguriro/Meriguro)
- Flechette Storm: Needle Kaiser's special attack. As Kimiko says, her module is not about precision but about covering the biggest area possible.
- Horned Humanoid: General Roz, possibly as a homage to Voltes V's Boazanian people. Meglilo has General Lily.
- Lighter and Softer: The game and its spin-off Meglilo are much more colorful, campy and light-hearted than every other Astro Port shooter before or since.
- Make My Monster Grow: A curious example. You always fight Roz on his mecha, but for the final showdown with him you fight... Roz himself, grown to Vulkaiser's size and shooting energy blades and other stuff.
- Planet Eater: Vulkaiser destroys the Gogoh base on the Moon, but then Gogoh appears and swallows the Earth whole!
- Prequel: To Armed Seven and Mechblaze set 12 years earlier. It serves as an origin as to how Earth's military became advanced enough to have mechs and space stations as early as the 80's.
- Punny Name: Supervillain Robot Warukaiger is named after "waru", a Japanese word meaning "bad".
- Recurring Boss: Roz usually shows up mid-level, piloting a different mechanical creature every time.
- Redshirt Army: At one point in the final level, the Vulkaiser is surrounded by what remains of Earth's armies, inspired by the robot's tenacity to fight the enemy all together. They all get blown apart in seconds, leaving Vulkaiser to fight alone once again.
- Rocket Punch: Vulkaiser's Missile Fist.
- Smart Bomb: Every Kaiser module has a different Omega Weapon to blow up enemies and cancel the enemy bullets.
- Spot the Imposter: Parodied when, during the battle between Vulkaiser and its Evil Knockoff Warukaiger, apparently Professor Amamori could not tell one apart from the other. Despite Warukaiger being bigger than the robot he himself developed, and also being a different color.
- This Is a Drill: Drill Kaiser's weapon, and also the first boss' giant drill. Defeating him nets an achievement called "Drill that Pierces the Heavens!" Meglilo too has a drill as one of the modules she can use, which also can be used to cancel bullets.
- Two Girls to a Team: Kimiko Usui (pilot of the Needle Kaiser module and Professor Amamori's assistant) and Suzuna Jujo (pilot of the Drill Kaiser).
- Unobtainium: Vulkanium, the material Vulkaiser is made of. Probably a nod to Mazinger Z's Japanium.
- Womb Level: The sixth and last level is set inside Gogoh itself, and the enemies there are organic in nature.
- You Killed My Father: Suzuna Jujo fights to avenge her parents killed by the Gogoh Army.
Tropes exclusive to Witch-Bot Meglilo:
- Baphomet: An image of him appears whenever Meglilo enters the "Märchen Dimension" to battle against the bosses. It could be a hint of what Prof. Amamori really did to resurrect her...
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: Meglilo reaches the Gogoh base on the Moon in stage 5 just by flying there. But she's a cyborg powered by both science and magic, so it's not like she cares.
- Cute Witch: Meglilo was one, she flied on a broom before being killed and reconstructed by Professor Amamori. The original Japanese title calls her "Majo-borg" or "Witch-borg".
- 11th-Hour Superpower: The last stage is General Lily launching an assault with Gogoh monsters that are invulnerable to Meglilo's weapons. All seems lost until the combined wishes of the children of the whole world help Meglilo unlock the "Omega System": a beam made of heart-shaped bullets that lets her wipe out everything.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Nitrone is the only character wearing glasses (besides Prof. Amamori) and is a sociopath who enjoys turning people into human bombs because she feels it's "romantic" when they blow up.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: Happens sometimes in the cutscenes, as part of the crude and/or dark humour that contrasts with the cutesy graphical style inspired by 70s Magical Girl anime.
- Kick the Dog: The first stage is literally preceded by a cutscene of two people hitting a dog with bats, they are revealed as the henchmen of Kichy who, as a cat person, thinks dogs are her main obstacle to world domination.
- Meaningful Name: Kichy sounds like "Kitty" and is a Cat Girl, Nitrone is specialized in bombs and Amp uses music as a weapon.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Meglilo is a cyborg magical girl who can fly, stop time and teleport.
- Nominal Hero: Meglilo does not lift a finger whenever she sees someone being harassed by suspicious characters, and they invariably meet a grisly end, whether they are a dog, the entire audience of a theater or her own sidekick. Sort of justified because, as soon as she came to Earth and saw someone who needed help, she was brutally murdered, but still...
- Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Gogoh generals Meglilo has to face at the end of each stage, before the final showdown with General Lily: Kichy, Nitrone, Sakura, Amp and Meligro.
- Shout-Out: Several of them.
- In the cutscenes every boss is accompanied by a couple of Fat and Skinny henchmen who all look the same, a lanky moustached guy and a squat bearded dude, before revealing themselves as Gogoh agents. A clear reference to the bad guys of the Time Bokan metaseries.
- The baker who gets blown up before Stage 2 looks like Uncle Jam from Anpanman.
- As stated above, the game as a whole is an Affectionate Parody of Chargeman Ken! and the whole "human bombs" thing is taken from one of that anime's most infamous stories. Meglilo's sidekick Billiken is a duck-like creature that parodies Chargeman Ken's Barican, a robot dog (?) that looks like a sort of duck.
- Amp and her henchmen are dressed like KISS during her concert.
- Colonel Sanders is among the audience at the concert.
- Standard Snippet: The BGM for the fourth boss, which in-universe is Amp's rock concert, is a rock version of Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King".
- The Tunguska Event: After defeating the final boss, Meglilo is flying above the Tunguska region when suddenly her father appears and asks her to demonstrate her newfound powers. She obliges... and obliterates everything including him in a huge explosion. The incident is then passed off as an attack by the Gogoh army. Even though the game is set in the year 1977 and the Tunguska incident happened in 1908 in real life.
