SHIENRYU
Shienryu is Warashi’s self-publishing debut, originally an arcade game released on Sega’s ST-V board in early 1997. As far as I am aware, it is the only ST-V game running in tate (vertically oriented monitor) configuration, which probably did not help it commercially as it made switching the cartridge more of a hassle for arcade operators. The game was quickly brought over to ST-V’s sister hardware on the consumer side, the SegaSaturn, in June 1997. It’s a decent orthodox shmup with a rank system and a second loop. Unfortunately for a shmup of that era, the soundtrack is really lacking compared to its peers.
Shienryu is pretty much a remake of Daioh, a 1993 shooting game which the same core team had developed at Athena for Sammy’s arcade game division. Daioh itself has an interesting backstory: it is the only standalone commercial release of the Daioh series, a lineage of “sample” games included in almost every version of Dezaemon, Athena’s long-running shmup maker software, and the tradition would continue even after the departure of the original team. As such, there is a new entry of the Daioh series to be found in Dezaemon 2 (1998) on the SegaSaturn, released after Shienryu.
The crimson dragon-looking battlemech you see on this cover is not the (first) player’s (red) ship but the very last boss of the game, DIO, possibly intended to be read “Dai-Ō”. It was also the last boss of, well, Daioh. The title Shienryū 紫炎龍 (purple flame dragon) is probably also a reference to this boss.