V-V

V-Five / Grind Stormer

V-V (pronounced: V-Five, also known as Grind Stormer) is a vertical shooting game developed and published by Toaplan in 1993. It was also ported to the Sega Genesis, under the title Grind Stormer. The game was programmed by Tsuneki Ikeda, who moved on to CAVE after the closure of Toaplan, and it is one of the last two games made by the company. Alongside Batsugun, it is an early progenitor of the bullet hell sub-genre of shooting games, with bullet amounts in later stages of the game amounting to between 70-80 on screen at once. It is considered a "spiritual successor" to Toaplan's earlier game, Slap Fight, due to similar gameplay mechanics. V-V is unique among vertical shmups in the use of a power-up system inspired by Gradius, where the player collects diamond-shaped icons and presses a button to activate specific power-ups; Grind Stormer diverges from this power-up system and instead makes powerups random pick-ups that you collect, more akin to a more traditional shooter, and gives the player Bomb stocks that work much like bombs in other games.