Dynamarisa 3D is a third person action/shooting game developed by Twilight Frontier. If you don't recognize that name you should, they are the ones responsible for developing all of the official Touhou fighting games as well as a few other pretty good fan games.


Dynamarisa 3D is a clone of the Earth Defense series. In these games you fight against a massive horde of giant aliens that are out to invade earth. Enemies include giant insects of both the crawling and flying variety, drop ships, drones, giant robots, and more. Dynamarisa is similar. Patchouli has developed a horde of robots that you, Marsia, need to stop. Along for the ride is a team of faries to fly around and provide additional cover fire and radio chatter... at least until they fly in front of your rocket launcher and die.

You have your standard crawling spider robots


Your flying fairy robots


And your giant robot walkers


There are more enemies, drop ships, and colossal bosses which I will hold off on spoiling for you.

The game features 26 missions of increasing difficulty. Each mission also has several levels of difficulty as well and you are given a medal on the mission screen for each version you complete. Enemies on higher difficulties are more aggressive, deal significantly more damage, and have higher health.


So how can Marisa hope to compete on the higher difficulties? Well the game has a huge weapon arsenal available. There are shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, grenades, assault rifles, and more that Marisa can use. Of course they are all Touhou themed. During a mission enemies have a chance of dropping one of three types of pickups. Health, Armor, and Weapon. Health pickups are golden mushrooms that refill a portion of your HP immediately. Armor picks increase your maximum health and are your only way of getting stronger defensively. With the base health values you can't even take a single hit on the hardest difficulty.


The weapon drops are how you get stronger offensively. The harder the difficulty of the mission the better guns you will get as drops. There are families of weapons with type modifiers. I personally like using the Ying Yang Rifle, the game's basic assault rifle. Earth Defense Force has a similar progression system but where Dynamarisa differs is that it can sometimes toss random extra effects onto your guns. You might get a gun that has extra damage, reload speed, or a wackier passive effect such as vampirism which comes at the cost of a cut to your maximum HP.


Back when I originally played Dynamarisa in 2011 I loved it. I really enjoyed the high tension that came from fighting the hordes of massive enemies. However, today it does not hold up as well. The original Earth Defense Force games have since improved on the formula so Dynamarisa just seems kind of archaic in comparison. A really good example is that you cannot reload your guns. You can only reload/recharge once you run out of ammo, so you need to fire randomly during downtime to empty your magazine so you can be reloaded for the next wave of enemies. The grind to get strong weapons is not fun either. To have a chance on harder difficulties you will need to farm missions you are underleveled for which makes the experience turn into kiting bullet sponges around that can one shot you for twenty minutes.

Despite those complaints Dynamarisa is still a fun game. If you play through just on normal the experience is balanced to the gear you get from the missions. The story is kind of cheesy but has some enjoyable moments and the boss battles offer some intense challenges. I give it 3 Reimus out of 5.