Sol Cresta

Sol Cresta is a vertical-scrolling shooter video game. Assuming the role of three different starships — the Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susano — the player is tasked with completing seven stages by shooting them whilst having to avoiding collision with them and their incoming projectiles. Each stage is broken up into several subsections lasting five minutes each. The player starts with a single starship and collects the other two as power-ups, at which point a standard formation of three is formed.

Shields and coins are the two other power-ups and grant the player extra hit points. The game utilizes a "free-form docking system", in which the three starships can utilize various attacks depending on their formation. The red starship shoots red lasers that take down larger waves of weaker enemies; the blue one shoots missiles that home in on targets; the yellow one fires a drill-like projectile in a straight line, dealing an increased amount of damage. All three ships are also capable of using a charged shot that builds as enemies are taken down.

In the Cosmic Year 101, the humanity is struggling to defeat the Mandler army, which has teamed up with the Mega Zofer in order to take over the Solar System. This forces humanity to retreat to Laomedeia, the twelfth moon of Neptune. The Solar Recovery Army Sol Cresta, led by war hero Go Kurogane, is then formed in resistance to the Mandler army. Humanity's last hope is now reliant on the ability of Yamato, a cutting-edge docking fighter, and its three pilots, Sho Tendo, Luna Zarnitsyna Sheena, and Dril Martin, in order to free the Solar System from the reign of the Mandler in one final battle.

Sol Cresta was directed by Takanori Sato, with music by Yuzo Koshiro, while PlatinumGames' chief designer Hideki Kamiya assumed the roles of creative and story director.

Kamiya wrote in a PlayStation blog post that PlatinumGames had come to be known as "the studio that makes action games", but that as a studio, they wanted to make games of varying genres. The desire to make Sol Cresta was born out of Kamiya's love for arcade shooting games and similar retro titles with simplistic gameplay that he had played while growing up as a child, with said love bleeding into many of Kamiya's other works such as Bayonetta and the original Devil May Cry. In 2018, Kamiya initially revealed his idea about the free-form docking shooter to PlatinumGames' studio head Atsushi Inaba, who quickly became interested as Kamiya explained how he wanted to modernize and innovate upon influential legacy shooters of the past. While in these talks, Kamiya expressed regret about how making a sequel to another company's brand would go against PlatinumGames' mission to always create their own original titles, and Inaba resolved Kamiya's reservations.

Sol Cresta received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.

Destructoid gave the game an 8 out of 10, praising the docking system, technical polish, clear visual style, sound design, and soundtrack, while criticizing the high price tag. Nintendo Life gave the title 7 stars out of 10, lauding the imaginative formation building, triple-craft coordination, various shot types, bonus scoring system, and soundtrack, but found issues with the lack of cohesion, polish, filter options, and fiddly formations. Nintendo World Report cited the five difficulty settings, in-game achievements, and soundtrack as the game's positives and wrote that the repetitive boss types and lack of visual clarity were minor drawbacks.