This is a port of the arcade version of Psikyo's 1997 horizontal combination bullet hell/hack-and-slash shooter, which was also released for some consoles including the PlayStation. It has more of an RPG theme with 3 characters and includes magic attacks and hand-to-hand fighting attacks, and trades lives & one-hit kills for a life bar and only one life.
This game was designed to take advantage of 32-bit polygon graphics and it shows, both in the improved graphics over the older titles and in the rough edges seen in the characters, which is more readily apparent when you play the game on an HD display. Like all the developer's other efforts the visuals and soundtrack are arcade-perfect and this version allows controls for magic selection to be done by the shoulder buttons by default on controllers, which is a welcome addition. So far my main complaint is a big one-the translation of the original Japanese text to English is bordering on Google Translate-quality, which is on the poor side with numerous grammatical and spelling errors. Ever played a game that talks about the "week point" on the Continue screen? Me neither. The manual is also riddled with bad English and similar errors & typos. Also missing are some of the alternate play modes in the console versions-this is just arcade mode and the Score Attack mode with online leaderboards.
If you can overlook the bad English throughout, it's another solid Psikyo port by the developers but it seems like they're now starting to rush them as new ones are coming every 10 days or so on average (Dragon Blaze is due only about a week after this game's release, which was t7/22/2020). Still a must-have for Psikyo fans, but let's just hope this slight downward trend in quality doesn't continue. I'm fine with the devs taking a breather and a little more time between games to make them better.

As a kid, I always visit my neighbor to play this game with him because I barely get any PS1 games as a gift on either birthday or Christmas, but now, I'm a grown-ass man, and seeing this game popped on Steam on Christmas last year, I got it with no hesitation, and I'm glad I did.

The good:
+ Tight control.
+ Nostalgic soundtracks and 2D artstyle.
+ Definitely hard, but fair. At least you have a life bar, unlike many other bullet hell shmup that you will die in 1-hit.
+ Flawless optimization on Steam Deck, which is what I'm playing on the whole time.
+ This game did a solid job for mixing shmup and hack-and-slash, creating something unique of its own

The bad:
- Despite this game gives sum DnD vibes, there's no RPG elements (unless increasing HP from power-up count?)
- Since this is an arcade port, expect some bullsh!t difficulty. Everything appeared so fast it makes Vergil moved at a snail-paced. Combine that with dodge and block button, so have fun doing no-damage run after 6900 failed attempts.
- Wanna 100% this game? Get your real-life friend ready. Cuz 3 achievements required you to play with your friend with different character.
- They kept typos from the arcade version. Talk about "Arcade Perfect" XD

This is, once again, a unique and fun arcade shmup. Plus, it's only $10, so pick it up if you're interested.

And side note, thank you, CITY CONNECTION, for preserving this game. I was about to play the game via PS1 emulator, but since you ported this game so well, I deleted it from my Steam Deck.

Sol Divide -Sword of Darkness- is easily my least favorite Psikyo game I've played. It carries many of the elements I didn't care for in their other horizontal scrolling character shooters (Samurai Aces) and added several mechanics I'm not convinced work very well, or at very least over-complicate and jumble up the game.

Sol Divide -Sword of Darkness- adds a melee attack to the STG formula. Which I'm the kind of player that generally loves getting stuck in. However, the melee feels stiff, slow and far too much of a risk for what the player gets out of it. It seems like the game wants it used only when the enemies charge the player character to push them back.

Perhaps more important than the melee attack Sol Divide also offers a robust magic system. I think perhaps too robust with nearly a dozen different spells. Many of which the player will only get to cast once or twice during an entire game. I'm not even sure the player can cast every one of the spells their character has access to in a single game without careful planning of their use. Added on top of this is a sort of rock, paper, scissors elements where enemies are more vulnerable to certain kinds of magic. Which is neat in idea, but given the vast number of spells, the overall short game and lack of enjoyment of said game, I seriously doubt I'm going to ever figure out without checking a FAQ/walkthrough of the game. And I'd be fine with the large number of spells if I could cast them more often. But other than the first few, these spells require the player's magic meter to be practically full for the more powerful ones. And that's assuming they still have access to those powerful spells. And all of this is done while still playing a standard shmup. Overall, while I find use of the magic system necessary to the player's success in the game, it's too distracting and cumbersome to be of much enjoyment.

The stages to Sol Divide feel incredible short. The player faces a few enemies, most on the more powerful side of shmups, and then are upon the boss. The game has a half-hearted attempt as paths but doesn't really seems follow through. The game also allows the players to up the number of continues, but using a continue put the player back at the beginning of the stage. The shooting feels underwhelming as there are few popcorn enemies with the rest being fairly spongy outside of using magic attacks. Because of the player character is a humanoid, I found it tough to dodge enemy attacks. Doubly so due to the melee system where if the enemy engages the player they have limited space, and if the player engages the enemy their movement is limited. Conversely, I found the boss fights actually pretty fast.

The graphics are not very impressive to me. I player characters are overly pixelated and blocky. While most of the enemies are pretty uninspiring. The backgrounds are okayish in places. But overall, I do not find the game to pleasing to the eye. The sound and music are functional.

It's very possible I'm missing something on how to play this game. But there isn't much of anything that grabs me to want to figure out what that might be. At some point, I want to beat this game, but I see trying to do that as slog. However, I want to praise the game for adding some uncommon elements and trying something uncommon in STGs. Even if I found the execution lacking. Ultimately, I cannot recommend Sol Divide -Sword of Darkness-. There are so many more enjoyable Psikyo games, not to mention other shoot 'em ups.