Thanks to Clear River Games for the review code
Title: Mamorukun Recurse!
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 09/25/2025
Story
In this vertical shooter from G.Rev, you take control of Mamoru and his friends, who have all ended up in the netherworld. Now they must embark on a quest to defeat various demons and yokai, defeat the forces of darkness, and get back home!
This does have an actual story mode, rather than the usual barebones plot most shooters end up with. Unfortunately, the plot in said story mode is painfully dull and barely does much of anything besides stitch the stages together and give a thin reason for doing so. You can pretty much treat it as a beginner mode for seeing every stage the game has to offer. The translation was also incredibly stiff and hardly made grammatical sense.
Presentation
Just like Under Defeat earlier this year, Recurse takes an earlier G.rev arcade title, polishes it up and adds some various visual options to help enhance things. The normal Arcade mode is still a vertical oriented game, and you once again have the option flip the game sideways for use with your Flip Grip or whatever the hopeful Switch 2 equivalent will be.
The game uses 3D models just like Under Defeat, and just like that game they are incredibly basic looking, reminding me a lot of a polygonal DS game with some extreme upscaling, and somehow looking worse than Under Defeat despite this game coming out years after that one. The HUD is still presented well enough and there are a few decent border options to choose from here for the Arcade mode.
The other two modes also have the option to be presented vertically if you so desire, but also like with Under Defeat you can play the game in 16:9 Widescreen with extra screen space. It helps make the stages easier to see, but dear lord does it make the already rough 3D models look even worse when they get zoomed in on after clearing a stage. Under Defeat at least felt natural looking the way it did, since you don’t really need to hyperfixate on whatever a plane or tank’s polygons look like, but in Mamorukun ReCurse the muddy visuals are a lot harder to ignore, especially blown up in widescreen on an HD TV. (lord help you if you have a 4K one like I do)
Thankfully, the music is pretty solid. Not outstanding like Under Defeat, but pretty energetic and enough to keep you going throughout the levels. There’s also Japanese voice acting present, but I honestly wish the characters would stay mute, since it gets incredibly grating especially in the story mode cutscenes. There’s also a gallery with a good amount of unlockables, including concept art, arcade flyers, and various key art assets, which are all scanned in incredibly well.
Gameplay
Mamorukun Recurse is a vertical shooter, and depending on what your settings are or what modes you pick, the controls might be quite different. The traditional Arcade controls consist of a rapid fire shot and a chargable curse bullet, and you aim both while moving as you would in a game like Kiki Kaikai. You can’t face downwards and aim, however, and thus you’re stuck aiming either sideways, diagonally or forward.
Your rapid fire shot can get upgraded by collecting powerup capsules, and with each character having their own shooting style, you really just have to find a favorite, stick with it and have a pretty good time. Of course, there is the ReCurse part of the title, with the curse bullet being this game’s main gimmick. If you shoot a curse bullet briefly, it’ll create a small little circle for your character to step into and get a powered up shot for a brief period of time, allowing you to mow down enemies and make things easier.
However, if you charge up the curse bullet and fire it at enemies or even bosses, they get the increased power and are much trickier for you to deal with, but defeating them earns a lot of points. That’s where the fun risk/reward comes into play, and it makes scoring for the normal game mode pretty darn fun, even if I found the scoring of Under Defeat’s Arcade mode to be a bit more enjoyable. All in all, this Arcade mode is a pretty solid shooter with good variety to it.
The other two modes on the other hand, not only let you go crazy in widescreen, but also lets you aim your normal shot with the right stick. This is pretty weird to get used to, and I never could click with that control scheme and stuck with the traditional one. The Story Mode is the aforementioned mode where the plot takes place, and has you and a group of characters all working together to clear each stage, with every character acting as a life. If one falls, another will pick up the slack, and if they all die, it’s game over. You can switch characters on the fly with a shoulder button press if you happen to have a preference, and I found this mode to be decently fun and a good way to practice all the characters.
The true highlight of these extra modes is the Netherworld Adventures mode. This one has you choosing from three characters to act as lives ala the Story Mode, only to throw you into remixed stages or gauntlets consisting of various challenges. These range from pretty typical replays of arcade stages to pure bullet hell remixes that make every enemy shoot an insane amount of bullets upon dying, along with their normal fire getting a massive boost.
Needless to say, these challenges are for absolute masters of the game, but they also make for being the best place to use the curse mechanic to increase that score, and the mode I had the most fun with by far for online leaderboard purposes. It really is compelling to just try and see if you can survive a bullet hell remix of a stage, yet along a gauntlet of several of them on limited lives.
Online leaderboards return like in Under Defeat, and they also note the difference between the wide and vertical modes, which is a good thing considering how the visibility differences would completely break the balance of the leaderboards if both had to share the same one.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Mamorukun ReCurse is yet another fun shooter from GRev ported well to the Switch. It has a pretty good Arcade mode, a dull, if easy for beginners Story mode, and the highlight of the package with Netherworld Adventures and the unlockables in the gallery to go after.
It might not reach the same musical and scoring highs as Under Defeat did for me earlier this year, but this is still yet another well done port, and I continue to welcome these G.Rev revivals. The twinstick shooting option is still pretty clunky and not as easy to use as I’d like it to be, but from the various characters and playstyles to choose from, online leaderboards to keep you coming back, and a fun risk/reward element with the Curse bullets, Recurse is still a pretty enjoyable time.
I give Mamorukun ReCurse! a 7 out of 10.