This challenging bullet hell shooter boss took 12 years to beat  

Almost 12 years have passed since the arcade release of Cave’s bullet hell shooter DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou. After all this time, Inbachi, the hidden final boss of the game, has finally been defeated on the Xbox 360 version with no continues. Although there have been reports and videos of it being beaten in Training Mode before, this is apparently the first time it has been defeated in a single playthrough with no deaths. 

Part of the DoDonPachi series of Japanese bullet hell shooters, DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou was first released in the arcades back in April 2012, with a console port with bonus features coming to Xbox 360 in May 2013. In November 2020, a reverse port of the Xbox 360 version with yet more additions was released in the arcades called DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou EXA Label (DoDonPachi True Death EXA Label). This version has a new “EXA mode” difficulty. 

The existence of the game’s final boss, Hibachi, was confirmed relatively soon after the game’s April 2012 launch. This is not surprising as Hibachi is a recurring villain from the series who always appears as the final boss. However, based on official hints and other information, rumors began to circulate that there might be a hidden boss in the game that surpassed even the Hibachi in terms of difficulty. In August of the same year, the existence of a hidden boss called Inbachi was officially confirmed. Inbachi was finally defeated with no continues this March, but why did it take so long for someone to record this feat? 

To begin with, DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou is known for its high difficulty level among Cave’s arcade shooter titles. However, the hidden boss Inbachi is so difficult that it wasn’t until 2021 that a no-continue defeat was confirmed in Training Mode. Even the most hardcore shooters could not fully complete the game for nearly nine years! 

The boss itself is of course difficult, as is evidenced by the crazy number of bullets it shoots out, truly living up to the genre name of bullet hell shooter. However, in order for the Inbachi to even appear, players must fulfill an insane number of requirements; no misses, no bombs, all bee perfect stages, a rank of at least 30, and a maximum hit count of over 15,000. In other words, the player must make a perfect run of the game with no mistakes in order to enter the encounter with the hidden boss. Bullet hell shooters are very intense, requiring sharp reflexes and the player’s full attention- therefore playing perfectly enough to reach Inbachi would be very tiring, even for hardcore players who know the DoDonpachi games well. For this reason, it was only thought theoretically possible for a human to proceed perfectly through the whole game and defeat the hidden boss. 

However, a player finally managed to defeat Inbachi during a full, perfect playthrough on the Xbox 360 on March 21, 2024. The player who achieved this feat goes by the name of Sairyo. They had previously beaten Inbachi for the first time in Training Mode using A-EX (i.e. the Type A fighter piloted by Shuri with the EX enhancement). Despite achieving this feat, Sairyo took to X to say that it’s not over yet- they plan to defeat Inbachi in a perfect run again on the arcade version.  

Written by. Verity Townsend based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2024-03-22 10:58 JST)