Xeno Fighters

Xeno Fighters is a freeware Shoot'Em Up fan game designed by Alluro (whom you may know as JudgeSpear from Mushroom Kingdom Fusion and MUGEN) drawing from Raiden Fighters primarily, but references to and bosses from other shooters are rife throughout the stages.

The current^[when?] iteration in development is Xeno Fighters R, with vastly improved engine, art, and game mechanics over Xeno Fighters EX, released in 2003.

The forums for the game can be found here. The wiki can be found here, which links to videos, and general information. The Shmups forums thread, which is the original online discussion about the game's development, can be found here.

Tropes used in Xeno Fighters include:

• Asteroid Thicket: Part of st. 7 in the original. A similar situation appears in the middle of the remake's st. 6-B, although that place happens to be inside an alternate dimension.
• Battleship Raid: Dreadnought Echidna, the boss of 8-2.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the 8-END scenario, the invasion is over, but Earth's ecosystem is still trashed and resource-depleted, and ATHENA has been disbanded, which you can see in the 7th stage's ending. On top of that, Earth is poised to make a retaliatory strike at the actual Keto homeworld.
  • The original ends this way too, except there is no true final stage.
• Bonus Boss: Any boss in the optional EX stages.
• Bonus Dungeon: The EX Stages, reached through finding all the Miclus in certain levels and getting the EX Medal from the last one you destroy. If you want to go directly to the BRES Colony, you'll need to complete the sixth EX stage.
• The Cameo: The guest roster of playable fighters, along with many bosses of the game. The guest fighters and the EX stage bosses have no connection to the plot except for Black Heart and Black Heart mk2 and the P-38.
• Dynamic Difficulty: As of v0.10 Beta.
• The Empire: The Keto. Actually, the Keto warring with Earth are a bunch of war criminals and their armies exiled from the Keto homeworld after their failed attempt to turn it into The Empire. BRES is part of their plot to turn Earth into a colony ahead of schedule; the human members of BRES get to be the Persia-style satraps of Earth.
• Easy Mode Mockery: In the original, if you're playing on easy mode, you're not going any further than stage 4, even if you win. You need to be playing on normal or higher to see the rest of the game.
• Escort Mission: 5-B requires you to keep the F-117 Nighthawks assisting you from getting torn to shreds by the BRES navy, if you want to go on to 6-B. Consider how hard the original level was...
• Face Heel Turn: A war hero of the first war with the Keto assists BRES because he feels that Earth has descended into decay.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Amada Vipros's Serpent Seeker subweapon, Zaiva's Fragarach's Gale, the Pollux's (AKA Gemini Red) Cyclopean Laser, and the Raiden mk-II's Plasma Lock-On Beam.
• Fun with Acronyms: Black Reach Eternal Stratocracy. Derived from Bres, a major leader of the Fomorians in Irish myth.
• Guide Dang It: Some Miclus locations and some of the stage branching objectives.
• Heel Face Turn: One of the offspring of the original war criminals ultimately becomes disillusioned with BRES and leads a small contingent in defecting.
• Humongous Mecha: 6-B boss Dullahan, a semi-autonomous unit that can perform dimensional jumps completely on its own.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: An optional setting to further emulate the arcade experience. As of yet, it hasn't been implemented.
• Joke Character: The Galaga ship and its clone, the Hoplon from the old arcade game Phoenix. Becomes a subversion when fully powered up.
  • As of v0.12, both have now been cut from the game for balancing reasons.
• Leitmotif: A number of the guest fighters have their own stage clear music, primarily from their source games. Some of them go so far as to have their own theme during the final half of Stage 9.
• Lethal Joke Character: The 194x series P-38, and the Gyagara from Galaga.
• Lethal Lava Land: The second section of 4-B, underneath 2035 Iceland.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: There are just four original ships. However, the cameo ship roster is something to speak of, bringing the total number of unique playable ships to 16.

• Marathon Level: The true final stage, Stage 9 (BRES Colony) lasts over seven minutes from start to boss appearance. Compare this to other stages that are about two minutes to four minutes long.
  • The original's levels could be quite long too. 2035 Iceland was about the same length as the BRES Colony until the remake's version came along.
• Multiple Endings: Three endings are planned. The worst is BRES pulling off an emergency activation of every fault line and supervolcano on the planet to protect their past campaign fronts. The medium is destroying the Dreadnought Echidna...but BRES successfully shuts down the rift leading to their base, meaning they're still out there, and Earth is still much worse for wear. The best is BRES's base and campaign being hopelessly crippled, and humanity coming into contact with the primary, peaceable Keto population, but Earth, or rather, this Earth, disappears years later.
• Nintendo Hard: Being a manic shmup, even the easier difficulties can be overwhelming to newbies.
• Puzzle Boss: 5-B boss Citadel Geryon. The only way to hurt it is to get the support aircraft to crash into it.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Keto again. And again, not really applicable. While the Keto are a reptilian race, only the war criminals who started the whole mess qualify as "abhorrent". For more evidence, see the Heel Face Turn entry above.
• Theme Naming: Most bosses have a name consisting of (metal/gemstone) (Greek or Celtic mythical creature). Silver Banshee, Jasper Gigas, Jade Hydra, Obsidian Peryton, etc.
  • Zaiva has a similar theme in its weapons, taken from legendary weapons from Irish myth--Fragarach, Brionac, and Caladbolg.
  • The Phyxius' weapons are named after various references to Hell.
  • The two ships from Gemini Wing are given the names of Castor (blue) and Pollux (red), who are twin brothers in Greek and Roman mythology who became part of the stellar constellation Gemini, becoming the two brightest stars in the group: Castor (Alpha Geminorum) and Pollux (Beta Geminorum).
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Stage 9 is accessible only by completing all the objectives in the B-stage path, or directly from Stage EX-6.
• Timed Mission: In the original, fourth stage boss Orion XD-6, a massive bomb complex found deep underground in 2035 Iceland, has to be destroyed within two minutes and thirty seconds, or else you're punted directly to a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • The same deal with the remake's new version of 2035 Iceland. The bomb complex has become a three stage rocket, called the Orion Arrow, and must be crippled before it arms the geological destabilizer. You will gain more time for destroying each part, to simulate the mechanism being crippled. Unlike the original, if it succeeds in arming its defenses, you will be punted to a special stage not able to be reached outside of failing Stage 4-B, or failing stages 2, 3-A, and 4-A all in a row.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Even the Keto renegades' own motive for taking over Earth is about this. An extra several decades are just what they need to build an armada to conquer their just-now-war-ravaged homeworld. Please note that they were the reason it's war-ravaged in the first place.
• True Final Boss: Balor, the control center of the BRES colony. Expect this thing to be quite difficult once it's made. Until then, Ziyudee is a placeholder.