My Personal History of the Game

I first knew of the game Sora through another game by the same developers called 100% Orange Juice. 100% Orange Juice is a party game featuring characters from Orange_Juice developed games. The titular character Sora from the game named after her is one of the many playable characters. After looking at screenshots and the gameplay trailer on Sora’s Steam page, I wasn’t interested, and I forgot about it.

100% Orange Juice Cover Art

Fast forward to about a year later, I discovered that you can share Steam games with others, so I tried out a lot of my friends’ games in their library. I was surprised to see that Sora was in one my friend’s library so on a whim I decided to try it out and I couldn’t stop playing…until I got stuck on the 3rd stage. I would play here and there (maybe a short session or two throughout the years) with some occasional long late-night play sessions that ultimately lead me to beating this game at beginning of this year, taking me 2 years from when I first played the damn game to the beginning this year.

What the heck is Sora?

Sora is a bullet hell doujin game first released at Comiket 78. Doujin games are created out of the passion for the media, usually created for fun rather for a profit. (Basically a Japanese indie game) One of the most popular doujin game being Team Shanghai Alice’s (formerly ZUN Soft) Touhou Project which Sora take some cues from with its cast of cute anime girls and bullet hell gameplay, but where Sora differs are its overall tone, focus on fast movement and evasion, and weapon variety.

Where Touhou’s tone are mostly not taken too seriously with cute bubbly characters and settings, Sora’s tone is much darker and more serious with its war-torn setting and conflicted characters. Touhou limits the space players can move with its projectiles, encouraging small percise movement to avoid them, Sora actually encourages players to speed and zip across the screen into certain projectiles, focusing on speed and movement. Touhou has little to no weapon variety with its power up system, Sora has the option of mixing up sets of weapons with its own strengths and weaknesses before starting a stage.

Sora’s Plot and Characters

As mentioned previously, Sora takes place on a war-ridden planet. Skies filled with dark muted colors of black, grey, and brown with an endless barrage of mechs and artillery constantly fighting with no rhyme or reason as no one knows why and how the war originally started.

Sora

The protagonist of her titular game. She was born during the war with ‘a power of fighting’ much to her dismay and is immediately forced by others into the war with no regard to her feelings. Throughout the game, she questions the purpose of this war and attempts to end the war, bringing back the once blue sky told of a young man that saved her during her 1st mission. According to 100% Orange Juice, Sora will always look 16 years old because of the modifications that turn her into the ultimate weapon of war.

Alte

Sham

Sora’s military operator gives the basics to Sora on how she uses her powers before she begins her first mission.

Gameplay of Sora

Gameplay consists of the basic formula of a bullet hell: players must dodge and shoot their way through waves of enemies and projectiles, eventually ending the stage with a boss, but Sora puts a spin on the formula. Sora has a dash mechanic where