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Buried as a footnote in English speaking games history, Xevious’ influence nonetheless reverberates across history. In Japan, Xevious was a cultural milestone the size of Space Invaders, establishing the format for arcade shoot-em-ups.
Cooked up as a response to the popularity of Konami’s Scramble, the initially humble seeming game presented a huge leap in technology and design. Designer Masanobu Endo envisioned a whole world for the game, with its own history, language, and aesthetic.
The enemies were not mysterious invaders, but a previous human civilization coming back to reclaim the earth, inspired by the thought that time itself could make our own people alien to us. Instead of endless starfields, Xevious took place across forests and plains, complete with bases and roads that enemies would travel along, taking place on a one contiguous map, with only large forests hiding the transitions between stages.
Alongside details such as the incorporations of the real world Nazca Lines, it gave Xevious a tangible sense of place, with actual history, instead of an abstract field of targets.
Compared to the fixed patterns of its contemporary shooters, including Namco’s own catalog, Xevious’ enemies were dynamic and would attempt to dodge you, while firing aimed shots directly at you. This would force you to move in response to them, being careful to herd bullets in a way that created gaps for you to escape between.
On top of that, you had to contend with both air and ground targets, each requiring different weapons to take down. Air targets moved faster and could dodge, but your bullets were fast enough that firing directly at them would generally catch them.
Ground targets were slow moving or stationary, but unlike your lasers, bombs needed to be precisely targeted, as they’d only damage the area directly around where they landed. Moving targets required you to lead the target, timing your attack so it’d land right as the enemy moved into your targeting reticle, something easy to mistime under pressure.
Every four stages would culminate in a fight with the Andor Genesis, a huge battleship that could be dodged until it retreated, taken down part by part, or destroyed in a single shot by boldly weaving through gunfire to approach its core and drop a bomb into it.
Under the hood, Xevious had some sophisticated systems governing its enemy behaviors. For instance, certain enemies wouldn’t fire when the player is within a certain distance, to prevent cheap shots where you’re destroyed by bullets that you had no time to dodge. This property would be intentionally exploited by proactive players who would close the distance to limited the amount of on screen bullets, a technique known in the modern shooter community as bullet sealing.
Xevious also features one of the earliest examples of a rank system, which would dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on the player’s performance. Enemies would move more erratically, bullets could get faster, or entire sets of enemies might change. Similar systems are still used in modern games, even outside the shoot-em-up genre, and deciphering and exploiting the rank system has become a high level skill for serious players.
Xevious even features hidden enemies and score items, discoverable by observant players who notice the targeting reticle changing as it rolls over an enemy.
Xevious’ mysterious world building, dynamic systems and hidden secrets made it hugely popular, becoming cited by many creators as a favorite, or as a direct influence on their own work. You can see its influence in games like Gradius, whose designers directly cite Xevious’ use of Nazca Lines as the inspiration for the now iconic inclusion of Moai heads, and the recurring Core boss draws a direct line to the Andor Genesis. Gradius itself is often positioned as a follow up to Scramble, creating a design conversation within the genre, and going on to influence a huge number of titles in its own right.
Taito, the company behind Space Invaders, put out their own vision of Xevious’ ideas with Ray Force, which pushed the split between the two planes even farther. Ray Force extended the vertical plane, having enemies move in and out of an absurd number of visual layers, using sprite scaling to sell the depth. The contiguous play field extended not only forward, but from space into the Earth’s core itself, seamlessly transitioning through several different settings along the way.
Outside of shooters, the emphasis on mystery and secrets would continue into Endo’s next game, The Tower of Druaga, which would require arcade players to collaborate in finding secrets in order to decipher the obtuse requirements to complete the game. Druaga would inspire a culture of arcade notebooks where players could leave messages for each other, to warn future players and equip them with the knowledge they needed to progress.
It’s a cultural artifact that you can see as the predecessor to the Dark Souls player messages, the design trend toward meta progression, which are built in intentionally obtuse ways, designed to be revealed by the collaborative efforts of many players. That mysterious style of action RPG would directly influence other early action RPGs like Hydlide, Xanadu and the Legend of Zelda, with Druraga often cited as inspiration.
With the creation of Xevious, Endo essentially established the framework for the arcade shooter from the go, an impressive feat on its own, but it was the greater worldbuilding that held its audience captive. It proved the desire for games that were more than abstract containers for mechanical challenges, but worlds in their own right.
Positioned as Inti Creates’ 30th anniversary project, Majogami builds upon decades of 2D action game concepts developed at the company. Following Shiroha, a girl gtrapped in a papercraft world, Majogami mixes several styles of craft, framed as a children’s book, mixing detailed illustrations with stages made of cardboard, and bookend its stages with intros and epilogues presented in the style of kamishibai, Japanese paper plays.
By almost every measure, Majogami is a roaring success, delivering on ideas the team has been attempting over several games, and packing it in a stylish presentation, with memorable mechnical floursihes to add emotional impact. That astounding presentation is what makes Majogami’s worst moments so heinous, with Inti Creates indulging in their absolute worst proclivities, using one of their best action games to deliver some of the worst writing they’ve put to paper. It’s peak Inti, a game for perverts in every sense of the word.
Majogami’s central mechanics is Setsuna, a homing slash that cuts through enemies at rapid speed. It performs a similar role to Gunvolt 3’s Arc Chain, allowing you to chain kill groups of enemies and reach distant positions. According to a developer stream, the concept predates Gunvolt 3, but ended up developing alongside it, due to both games’ extended development time.
Setsuna use is limited by Shiroha’s gauge, which refills upon attacking with standard melee attacks, or killing enemies. Setsuna will outright kill many enemies, allowing you to rapidly chain kill them, and move through stages with speed. The wrinkle is that certain enemies need to be attacked from a certain direction to become vulnerable. Certain enemies have shields that can only be broken from vertical, horizontal or diagonal attacks, or they might need to be attacked from behind, when you’re out of their line of sight.
Combined with Setsuna’s meter restrictions, it creates a natural ebb and flow, allowing Majogami to mix high speed sprints with more considering platforming and combat encounters that test your attention. Inti Creates’ Gunvolt series often struggled to build levels that couldn't be trivialized by their characters’ mobility, but Majogami is able to play with similar ideas while striking an even balance.
In terms of level design, you could think of Luminous Avenger iX as a highway, Gunvolt 3 as a closed circuit track with gentle curves, and Majogami as a mix of the two with regular hairpin turns to modulate the pace and keep you on your toes.
Majogmai also shares the Gunvolt series' emphasis on dropping vocal tracks, bringing them into an even more prominent role. After meeting the Astrals, deities of this papercraft world, you’ll gain access to Ascension, which allows them to fuse with your weapon, giving you an extra jump, powered up attacks and an accompanying vocal theme sung by that Astral. Unlocking the next form, Astralize, gains a new armored form, an altered moveset, and has Shiroha joining in on the vocal track, to signify her total synchronicity with her partner.
Ascension and Astralize are better integrated than the similar Overdrive mechanics in the Gunvolt series, where they generally played the role of either a score bonus or last minute save. In Majogami they fill up naturally through fighting, giving them a function similar to a tokusatsu or magical girl transformation, a new form that Shiroha takes on as the fight escalates.
It integrates particularly well in boss fights, where filling up the gauge is nearly guaranteed, and allows you to counter the boss’ super attacks with your own. Each partner powers up different directional attacks, so choosing the right one to counter a boss’ moveset and super attacks is a crucial piece of puzzling out each fight.
The bosses themselves each occupy their own world, materialized by their desires, and warped by the magic of Aradia, the mastermind behind the game’s events.
There’s a memorable rogues gallery here, including a spider made of severed fingers, an insect maid who plays with projections and shadows, and a centaur prince who rules over a toy-like fairytale kingdom.
Penta, the prince, deserves special mention for his treatment. His fairytale kingdom is filled with paper subjects, standing in for the people and family of his actual kingdom, who were destroyed after they refused to acknowledge him as a man, attempting to force him to live as a woman. His identity as a trans man is unfortunately not respected by the Japanese script, which treats him as a woman with the mannerisms of a charming prince, but the English script is careful to only refer to him in masculine language.
Penta isn’t the only queer character either. Louise, who initially shows up as an ally before being forced into battle with Shiroha, makes it clear that her affection for Shiroha is not just platonic. During her boss fight, failing to counter her super attack will have her kiss Shiroha, healing both of them and dragging out the fight. It’s a neat subversion of the usual boss pattern, with the mechanics providing a punchy emphasis.
And that’s about all the good things I have to say about the writing.
Majogami continues to drop well executed narrative touches, but the story itself continues to indulge in creepy sexual jokes that would feel offputting even if the cast wasn’t made up almost exclusively of young girls. Shirori, the only major male character, takes the form of a talisman nestled between Shiroha’s breasts, offering repeat commentary on her and other girls’ bodies--a fact only made creepier on the insistence that the’s Shiroha’s father.
Majogami leans heavily into fetish art and sexualization, with ridiculous character designs and fullscreen animations that have the camera positioned dangerously close to each girl’s crotch.
As someone who argues that sex and pornography are an essential part of the fabric of art, and by extension, videogames, I’m more interested in how sex and sexuality are employed than policing what’s in good taste. But Majogami’s designs are so obvious that it’s nothing more than the id on display, which such memorable designs as “girl with big tits in a bunny suit”, and “girl with FOUR big tits and a mommy voice”, or just straight lolicon bullshit that seems like it’s testing how close it can get to the line without crossing it.
It’s little more than pandering, not really adding to the world or aesthetic, and it all gets worse with the final act revelation that Shiroha is in fact a grade school girl, with the playable character being a mere projection. It makes the events of the game, and all the sexual imagery and jokes, exponentially creepier, and doesn’t feel necessary for the story or its thematic aims at all. It’s a truly dogshit twist that hangs over the game, and alongside the sheer volume of truly bad writing, actively works against the compelling world and aesthetic that Majogami establishes.
It hits at the peak of the game, before the emotional encore on the way to the finale, and drags everything else down with it. It’s offputting enough that I wouldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to play the game after learning it. It’s truly one of the lowest points in any Inti Creates game I’ve played, so of course it’s buried deep in a game with some of the highest highs they’ve ever delivered.
Maybe that makes it the perfect title for Inti Creates’ anniversary. Since their inception, Inti has been marked by compelling action and aesthetics, paired with a radical design philosophy that brings bewildering friction points into what could have been straightforward action games. I suppose it wouldn’t be in character to make a game that didn’t have at least one indefensible decision in it.
Majogami is one of Inti Creates’ best works, wrapped in compelling aesthetics, and delivering ideas they’ve played with for a long time. It’s the ultimate showcase of what makes Inti Creates notable, with all the passion and baggage attached.
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This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.
Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is the current final entry in the series, and the one that finally delivers on the ideas and promises left cooking throughout the series. Gunvolt 3 once again changes up the format entirely, but in a way that finally manages to create a compelling synthesis of the series’ multiple gameplay styles.
Newcover Kirin takes the lead, with Gunvolt reducing to a secondary role. Like Luminous Avenger iX, Gunvolt 3 takes place in a future far off from the events of Gunvolt 2. Gunvolt’s powers have run rampant, and when we meet him he’s willingly surrendered to the Sumeragi Group, who have contained him and are using his out of control output to fuel the electric grid, and corner the energy market.
When Gunvolt’s power begins to cause other Adepts to go berserk, Kirin is dispatched by Shadow Yakumo, Sumeragi’s sister organization, to find and seal Gunvolt’s power before it breaks containment. In the ensuing battle, Gunvolt’s power is contained and he’s inexplicably changed into a god, and teams up with Kirin and Sumeragi as part of a new department dedicated to fighting the out of control Adepts.
Honestly, the story here continues the series trend of mediocre writing, leaving several nagging questions unaddressed, and having Gunvolt team up with his former enemies with nearly no hesitation. It’s a position far from his origins as an anti-Sumeragi terrorist, and he goes as far as to defend the corporation against the factions opposing it.
It’s a waste, but it’s fine as an excuse for the new team based gameplay style. The tag mechanic returns in the form of Kirin’s sealing talismans, which can now be thrown in 8 directions, and streamlines the flow of combat. Landing a talisman builds up temporary damage to an enemy, which is cashed in when you hit them with a melee attack or Arc Chain. Arc Chain instantly slashes through every tagged enemy, and gives Kirin an additional jump afterward, allowing you to consecutively chain kills without touching the ground. As you gain new abilities, you can follow up Arc Chain with various directional attacks and combos.
The talisman system finally delivers a take on the tagging system that’s intuitive, with a moveset that enables incredible mobility while asking you to engage with the enemies and platforming.
Gunvolt’s original moveset made it easy to ignore half the obstacles, and while Copen’s moveset felt powerful and expressive at its peak, it was hard to design platforming challenges that he couldn’t fly over. Luminous Avenger iX2 attempted to address this by building a more melee focused moveset, but its sloppy solutions ended up removing most of what made Copen compelling in the first place.
Kirin’s combos are fast and effective on their own, and when combined with tagging and Arc Chain, allow you to traverse long distances and take down enemies with incredible speed. Gunvolt 3’s combat combines a lot of the powerful abilities of previous games, but asks you to perform them with a more finesse, considering timing and positioning a little more.
Gunvolt, by contrast, has finally achieved the power level that the series has hinted at. Throughout the series we see various teases of what Gunvolt’s moveset would look like if he unleashed his full power, and in Gunvolt 3 they finally deliver it. Gunvolt here acts essentially as a super mode, building power as you fight, then draining it when you switch to him. This version of Gunvolt has multi-directional dashes, infinite jumps and can output huge damage through his tag attacks, Arc Chain and suplex. He can essentially skip platforming areas and guarantee a kill on a boss if their health bar is low enough.
The combination of the two playable characters allows the game to keep the platforming and combat challenging, while having a pressure release valve you can pull when it gets too tough. Admittedly, Gunvolt trivializes large parts of the game even more now, and with good routing you can basically skip the most challenging parts of the game, but his secondary role makes him easier to ignore if you want to challenge yourself. It’s an imperfect middle ground, but it finally aligns the goals of platforming and combat, making scoring runs feel like a natural step towards improving at the game.
If there’s one disappointment, it’s that the boss techniques learned in the second half of the game are just improved or alternative versions of your already existing kit. It keeps the combat focused on fundamentals, but compared to games it’s drawing on, like the X and Zero series, I can’t help but feel there’s a missed opportunity to give Kirin more tools that could allow more expressive, alternative paths through the stages.
Should you go looking for them, Gunvolt 3 has plenty of flaws to pick at. But as the finale to a series, it finally manages to deliver on promises nearly a decade in the making. Its long development period absolutely paid off, making it one of the finest 2D action games of the generation in almost every regard.
Then again, it doesn’t seem like Inti Creates is done with it yet. Gunvolt Trilogy Enhanced, a collection of the three Gunvolt games, brought a few balance changes, and added the Connect iX mode, a five stage time trial mode that allows you to play as Copen, sporting his moveset from Luminous Avenger iX 2, but modified to always use his Bullit Gauge, instead of having it only available during Overdrive. It’s honestly a bit underwhelming, cutting out a huge part of the playable game, not including any story scenes or new abilities, and ending abruptly without fanfare. It’s a neat preview of what an improved version of his iX2 moveset might look like, but not much more.
Of course, Inti Creates need to split the games into yet another release didn’t end there, and the recently announced Switch 2 version of the Gunvolt Trilogy not only sees Copen return to Gunvolt 3, but adds an entire new alternative story mode that imagines what would happen if Gunvolt and Copen teamed up instead. It gives you a less OP, but still empowered, version of Gunvolt with many of his new tools from Gunvolt 3 intact, adds new tag mechanics, and even seems to include new weapons for Copen to use--all alongside a brand new story. It seems to be a fully realized version of what Connect iX promised, but only time will tell if it delivers.
As it stands, Gunvolt 3 caps off a strangely experimental series with a tremendous finale, and after several entries of mixed quality, proves that Inti Creates can still not only deliver high quality 2D art, but a technical and exciting game to go along with it.
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This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.
Built in a short timeframe as yet another stopgap before the release of the continually delayed Gunvolt 3, Luminous Avenger iX 2 makes radical changes in order to differentiate it from the previous two games.
Jettisonning both the original and alternative Gunvolt settings, LAiX2 sees Copen isekai’d into another dimension, without any of his previous equipment, and having to create it all from scratch. Copen now sports the Razor Wheel, a massive chainsaw-like melee weapon. The new weapon marks a more grounded approach to his moveset. He can still dash into enemies to lock on and fire projectiles, but he’s limited to a single air dash before he has to touch the ground, with his grounded dash now allowing him to push enemies away, to give emphasis on his bulk.
Alongside several stages paying homage to Inti Creates’ previous work on the Mega Man X and Zero games, it gives the sense that iX2 was positioned as a game building on Zero’s melee focused moveset.
It’s an interesting approach, and ultimately a failure. Despite some fantastic stage and boss designs, and an arsenal of fun weaponry, it doesn’t provide a satisfying follow up to the technical combat of the Mega Man Zero series, nor the high speed movement of iX1.
Copen’s Razor Wheel combo has noticeable startup and recovery, making it likely that you’ll take damage from one enemy as you attack another. Most weapons also bolster long range abilities, and alongside his ability to lock onto targets with his air dash, you’ll be equipped well enough to never need to use his melee combo in combat.
The air dash limit does make targeting more awkward. Using the dash to get airborne is discouraged, since it’ll immediately waste your single dash, making you unable to dash into a target to lock on to them. It also removes the ability to repeatedly dash into the floor to refresh your jumps, a method to approach carefully from the air. Missing a target is also now more punishing, leaving you drifting slowly through the air, unable to dodge or retarget quickly until you drop to the floor. And while you could previously slam into the floor to recharge your dashes, that ability has been removed, giving Copen worse vertical movement and removing an option that might have limited his vulnerability.
iX2 isn’t an out and out bad game, but it fails to make a compelling case as a sequel, or as its own unique entry. It trades the expressive movement for an underwhelming melee attack, and continually draws comparisons to some of Inti’s most refined work. Even worse, it teases you with Copen’s old abilities, locking his old movement abilities behind the scoring system--or a DLC boss.
To get Copen’s air movement and speed back, you’ll need to enter Overdrive, the previously ornamental mode that causes a soundtrack change upon reaching a certain score threshold. Overdrive returns Copen’s moveset from the previous games, but with a new gauge replacing the bullet system, allowing him to perform multiple air dashes, long hovers and refilling upon colliding into enemies and platforms. It’s presented as a dramatic power up, but it’s hard to feel that way when it’s been achieved by removing abilities rather than adding them.
If you play normally, you’ll never see it either, since entering a checkpoint or using healing will cash in your combo, resetting the counter and returning Copen to his base form. It removes the fast, expressive moveset that used to be the baseline, and turns it into a reward for players who are already good at the game.
iX2 doesn’t really ask you to improve to that point. The standard difficulty is low by series standard, and made totally trivial by the ability to heal an unlimited amount of times. The healing ability existed in previous entries, but it was limited by a lengthy cooldown period. In iX2 you can easily brute force the entire game with this healing ability, and if you die you still have a chance to be brought back with unlimited weapon energy and flight powers restored, thanks to the Anthem system returning.
It’s clear that this is another attempt by Inti Creates to bridge their challenging action game design with broader appeal, but this solution trivializes combat worse than Gunvolt 1, and there are even upgrades to increase your health, or reduce damage to a single point when on the ground. It makes Copen feel overpowered, but in an uninteresting way.
Even funnier, should you fight the DLC bosses you’ll gain even stronger versions of Copen’s existing abilities, including the ability to freeze time, using flight without Overdrive, and more powerful melee attacks.
Should you want an actual challenge, the hard mode is locked behind the tedious task of collecting the optional emblems in all the stages, and then finding and defeating a hidden boss. Hard mode of course disables all of Copen’s upgrades and removes healing, and adds a lives system, making it swing the difficulty in the complete opposite direction, to the point that they added an assist mode for it in a later patch.
It’s a balance philosophy that only exists in extremes, making it a serious effort to discover anything interesting in it.
Despite all of these issues, iX2 does manage to become more interesting on a repeat playthrough, when you’ve gathered more upgrades and extended your moveset.
Weapons have less overlapping utility than in iX1, and with each of them having their own individual energy bar, swapping between them is more practical. Whirling Chopper is the standout here, a melee attack that strikes above you and is able to cancel your current action, ending the recovery of your standard combo and putting you airborne so you can tag the next enemy.
Chaining skills together can make iX2 surprisingly technical, even if it takes a lot more effort than standard play. It brings more complexity to the combat, which goes a way towards filling the gap left by the simplified movement. It’s an inelegant solution, in a game full of inelegant design, but it at least gives you something to dig into
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This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.
Developed as a stopgap entry during the tumultuous development of Gunvolt 3, iX is the first game in the series for HD consoles, focusing exclusively on Copen and taking place in an alternate timeline set years after Gunvolt 2, where Gunvolt is gone and the Sumeragi Group have begun an extermination campaign against all non-Adepts.
The story ends up accidentally stumbling into loaded territory as it attempts to create a more sympathetic hero out of Copen. Copen’s fanatical language is toned down, and Sumeragi is positioned as an unambiguous evil, with few able to stand against them as they take control of the world. But in doing so, it ends up justifying Copen’s worldview from the previous games.
Because Copen failed to exterminate the Sumeragi Group and their Adepts, they have in turn enacted a genocide against the innocent, natural human beings. There’s no real attempt to reconcile or even acknowledge Copen’s fanatical attitude from the previous games, and because of it, it ends up stumbling into a “get them before they get us” framing. There’s no real malice or coherent ideology behind it, but it is a strange feeling to have your cool anti-hero accidentally reflect the thinking of right wing conspiracy theorists, and be right.
Unfortunately, once again, Copen’s moveset is the best it’s ever been , putting Luminous Avenger iX among the peak of the series.
The higher resolution results in an expanded playfield, with more open level designs and room to see what’s coming up ahead. Aerial combos are easier to pull off, with adjustments to the scoring system to prevent combos from ending prematurely.
The extra controls available on consoles allows you to use the right stick to quickly swap weapons, making it seamless to swap between weapons to adapt to each situation (a mechanic seen previously in Mega Man 11). Each weapon now has its own rechargeable energy bar as well, allowing you to keep pushing your offense when one of them empties.
Unfortunately, weapon switching isn’t as practical as it could be, since certain weapons are so much more useful than others. Orbital Edge in particular ends up outstripping nearly every other weapon, hitting near instantly, doing good damage, covering a huge space whether locked on or not, and being energy efficient as well. It’s basically the game’s equivalent to the Mega Man 2 Metal Blade, except even better since it automatically recharges.
A few other weapons still manage to make an impact despite this, such as Anchor Nexus, which allows you to basically do a Sonic homing attack towards the closest enemy, damaging them and tagging them for your main weapon. Photon Detonator drops a huge explosion that’s great for clearing group up enemies, and Rising Cyclone has both use as a vertical lock on attack, lifts you up during activation, giving you some extra vertical movement in tight spaces. And to enhance all those is the new Darkness Trigger, which gives you enhanced weapon properties and damage in exchange for constantly draining health when you’re not locked on.
If you’re going for pure efficiency, Orbital Edge is less technical and covers almost every situation, but there’s still enough utility between the rest of the weapons that you can integrate them into styling on enemies as you run through stages.
These small refinements to Copen’s playstyle have huge reverberations, giving him one of the most expressive movement in the series, and raising the speed of the game even higher, with tons of incentives to return to score attack stages.
Between the refined movement, highly detailed pixel art, and endlessly replayable structure, Luminous Avenger iX is the first game in the series that confidently achieves all its goals. It provides an expressive moveset with a compelling playground for it, and sets it at just the right pace, so that every return trip is enjoyable.
So of course they changed it all with the next game.
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This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.
Gunvolt 2’s story doesn’t give it much gravity, but it’s bizarre to play as a character basically attempting to personally enact a genocide. His dialogue mirrors language used by real world bigots to justify a variety of prejudices, and while there are slight complications to his storyline, his worldview is never properly challenged.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, Copen is pretty cool. In addition to being able to use a variety of boss techniques, Copen’s basic moveset builds elegantly on Gunvolt 1’s existing systems.
Copen carries over Gunvolt’s Prevasion and Flashfield, but instead of using energy it consumes Bullits, ammo used for Copen’s air movement. Copen has an 8-way airdash which travels a huge distance, and can tag enemies by dashing into them. Tagging allows both his regular and special weapons to home in on the target, and rebounding off enemies and walls refills one Bullit, allowing him to chain air moves indefinitely if played skillfully.
Should Copen run out of Bullits he’ll no longer be able to perform air actions, but he’ll automatically hover the ground after air actions, letting him still cover a good distance. Alternatively, he can slam to the floor to refill his full stock of Bullits, making him able to get into and out of the air at high speed. The moveset calls to mind DS era Sonic games, where you can instantly accelerate to high speed, and chain enemies together to gain extended air time.
Beating a boss with Copen will also unlock their EX Weapon, an ability that adds to his long and short range arsenal, and dramatically powers up his tag attacks. These cover a variety of trajectories and functions, enabling you to cover wider areas and cut through areas and bosses even faster. Weapon energy is shared between all of them, so you’re not given a lot of incentive to switch on the fly, but it recharges quickly enough that you'll have almost every weapon available within moments.
By comparison, Gunvolt’s moveset is nearly unchanged, and feels limited. Aside from a few new EX moves, his kit is essentially the same, including the same situational trajectory changing weapons. Gunvolt’s grounded movement is slower and his tag mechanic is less immediately parsable than Copen’s, making him almost redundant in his own game.
The dual protagonist structure does at least allow for a more interesting narrative, with events playing out through multiple perspectives, and the boss order mixed up depending on which protagonist you’re playing as.The finale even presents a memorable climax, with Gunvolt needing to summon the Muse’s song to resist the overwhelming might of Copen, requiring you to use the microphone to sing the lyrics of the song that’s been playing throughout the game to power him up.
It’s enough to justify the return of Gunvolt’s playstyle to the second game, and alongside Copen’s fantastic movement and gunplay, it marks the second game as a more confident and refined entry than the first.
Still, Copen is still limited to being half the focus of the game, and his moveset begs a bigger sandbox than the tight stages that could fit onto the 3DS hardware.
That’s where the next entry, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX, comes in.
CANON FIRE is made possible by the generous contributions of readers like you. Support more writing like this on Patreon. Thank you!
This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.
Started by ex-Capcom staff, Inti Creates began their career with some original Playstation entries, before returning to collaborate with Capcom on the Mega Man series, creating the Zero and ZX series, and helming the return of classic Mega Man with Mega Man 9 and 10. When the 3DS appeared, they saw an opportunity to return to making their own original action games, self-published, with full creative control. Enter Azure Striker Gunvolt.
Gunvolt’s Mega Man DNA is undeniable, something maybe inevitable given the company's history, and series director Yoshihisa Tsuda's work on Mega Man 7 and Mega Man X2 at Capcom. Mega Man 7's influence is particularly potent here, with a similar structure of two sets of boss stages, broken up by intro and interstitial stages.
Compared to the conservative return of Mega Man 9 and 10, Gunvolt instead takes wild swings with the structure and mechanics of the series it builds on. The most radical of these is practically removing direct attacks. Protagonist Gunvolt carries a gun, but its miniscule damage makes it impractical for taking down enemies. Instead each shot fires a Dart that tags the enemy, allowing Gunvolt to lock on with his Flashfield, sending a surge of electricity into them. Flashfield also acts as both an offensive, defensive and movement tool, destroying incoming projectiles, doing contact damage, and slowing your descent. It’s limited by your energy gauge, which slowly recharges when grounded, or when manually reloaded.
The tag mechanic gives it a rhythm similar to rail shooters like After Burner or Panzer Dragoon, where satisfaction comes from the anticipation of lining up multiple targets and watching your missiles home in on them. Optimal damage and movement often involves tagging enemies as you sprint up to them, leaping over, and electrocuting the enemy behind you as you set up to tag the next enemy. Stages become a time trial of routing your attacks and reloads, keeping your momentum up and your gauge constantly filled.
Balancing the gauge is important since it also allows you to use Prevasion, Gunvolt’s main defensive skill, which entirely negates damage as long as you have enough meter, and you aren't attacking. Essentially, as long as you keep reloading your meter you can avoid taking damage in almost all situations, with the only penalty being to your damage output and score.
The Prevasion system seems to be a direct response to the reception of Inti Creates’ past titles, which built them a reputation of making highly involved, and unapproachable action games. Prevasion allows a player to stumble through the game without engaging with any of the mechanics of the game, brute forcing encounters through persistence alone. That's what I did on my first attempts, and it was only on the third time, playing more intentionally for this retrospective, that I became aware of any of the nuances of the system. Even during speedruns you'll see players abuse this system to skip past most enemy encounters, making the act of playing the game seem almost optional.
To encourage engaging enemies Gunvolt employs a Kudos system, which rewards you for various actions like enemy takedown, tagging an enemy multiple times, and killing them while in the air. Build a high enough combo without being hit and a pop song will begin playing, sung by Gunvolt’s partner character, Lumen. Killing enemies also grants experience, leveling up Gunvolt and unlocking new skills and more HP.
Since none of these skills are mandatory, they mostly serve to reward already skilled players with more variety and even more ways to stack damage. It's a problem Inti Creates has struggled with in their Mega Man Zero series, but here the gap between casual and serious play is even more exacerbated.
Gunvolt doesn't ask you to engage with most of its mechanics until the final area, where a combination of boss rushes and increased damage forces you to be more careful with the damage you take. Even bosses can be brute forced through sheer luck, since one of the most reliable ways to beat them is to die.
Upon dying there's a random chance to trigger Anthem, a last second anime power up song which greatly enhances Gunvolt's abilities and gives him infinite energy, trivializing platforming and nearly guaranteeing a boss kill.
On my initial playthroughs I beat nearly every boss by racing to wear down the boss’ health bar, surviving their super attacks through repeatedly refilling my energy gauge for Prevasion, then launching a powerful Skill to finish them off. If that didn't work, I simply had to try again until Anthem randomly activated. Talking to your team between missions also increases the chance of Anthem activating, which makes this a consistent strategy for getting through the game fast.
It was only on my THIRD playthrough that I even tried to engage with the scoring system, after learning the other entries. When played for score, Gunvolt becomes about routing, speed and precision movement, lining up enemies so you can tag them multiple times, then leaping over them and shocking them for the aerial attack bonus as you approach the next target. The extra skills become more useful, too, since they grant bonuses for finishing off enemies and cash in your combo, which is lost when you take a hit, even with Prevasion active.
Scoring is a soft failure point, shifting the difficulty from survival to avoiding hits. Getting hit is a non-event to anyone trying to see the end of the game, but catastrophic for scoring. It’s an arcade mentality, where you can credit feed to see the end, but need to engage seriously in order to finish the game without several deaths, or with a high score. It’s an unconventional platformer design, but it’s not a bad one. But the implementation is inelegant and it doesn’t have the variety to support it.
A huge part of this is that Inti Creates have created a Mega Man style game where you don’t learn new abilities from the bosses. Among the few English language development interviews, Inti mentions the boss weapon feature was in at one point, but was cut to focus on tuning the base mechanics.
In its place are a crafting system reliant on random drops, which barely gives you enough materials to craft a single item during a standard playthrough, and new guns that change the trajectory of Gunvolt’s Darts. Most of these are so situational that they’re useless, and they become harder to quickly switch between as the number increases, leaving me to use only one of them that wasn’t the standard blaster.
Instead, the ability to use boss weapons is given to Copen, Gunvolt’s rival character and eventual series deuteragonist. Copen ends up as a more interesting character than Gunvolt, and as the series progresses, begins to gain more emphasis, not unlike Zero from the Mega Man X series. Despite constantly being called a terrorist, Copen takes a standard anime protagonist centrist position that shuffles him to wherever the plot needs him. Copen instead starts off as an extremist position, unwavering in his faith.
Copen is religious fundamentalists that believes Adepts, people with special powers like Gunvolt and the boss characters, are an abomination before God, and need to be exterminated, or they will bring ruin to the world. To this end he fights against both Gunvolt and the Sumeragi Group, who are attempting to forcefully control the world’s Adepts.
As a mirror to Gunvolt, his position makes sense, and it turns Gunvolt into the voice of reason against two sides with fanatical goals. Unfortunately, everyone including the developers thought Copen was really cool, leading to him returning in the sequel as the second playable character.
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Released in 1993 for the Super Famicom, Sanrio World Smash Ball mixed elements of tennis, soccer, and breakout, with some absolutely devious level design to create a surprisingly competitive title. Despite its Japan only release, it has since gained a cult following internationally, with a fan translation and rebalanced Tournament Edition hack now available. It's even drawn a respectable crowd at my local fighting game meetups.
Now, 33 years after the release of the Super Famicom game, Sanrio Characters Smash Festa has released, a modern sequel that expands the roster, refines the mechanics, and packages it up in brand new 2D artwork. I'm not sure what led up to this, but I'm happy to report that it carries over everything that made the original so exciting.
The mechanics are largely unchanged from the original: you can hit the ball from either the left or the right, with your relative position changing its trajectory, and when your special meter fills up you can unleash a powerful spin that sends the ball forward at a high speed. Various blocks and obstacles populate the stage, forcing you to repeatedly chip away at your opponent's defensive wall, and redirecting your ball in different directions.
New to Smash Festa is the ability to lob the ball, which can be used defensively to slow down the ball, or to toss it over players and certain obstacles. You can't lob the ball over destructible blocks, so you won't bypass defenses with it, but it's useful for changing the pace of a match.
Smash Festa’s special meter is split into three segments, with a single segment used for lobbing the ball, and a full meter required for your high speed smash. The three segment requirement means smash attacks are less frequent than the original, keeping matches from devolving into races to see who fills their meter first, and creating a calculation between cheaper defensive specials and risky offensive ones. The original also required you to hold a button while standing still, but in Smash Festa this has been simplified to simply standing still, relieving some tension on your thumbs.
The real game changer is the addition of doubles. Smash Festa now allows four players, in teams of two, to face off, which changes the dynamic and allows for some nasty new level designs. A duo can now transition between attacker and defender positions, double down on defense, or double up on another player to bully them and try to score before their defensive wall is broken.
Several stages have unrestricted movement, or use breakable blocks to restrict movement, allowing you to run right up to your opponents’ goal and pressure them. Other stages restrict movement so that getting to another side takes a long time, encouraging one player to hang back and play goalie.
Each player has their own special meter, which changes the meter dynamics. Do you play it safe and each spend it defensively, split into offensive and defense roles, or risk it all and both go for two powerful smash attacks?
The team dynamics are bolstered by the variety of new cast members, now sporting dedicated roles. There’s the usual mix of balanced, speed and strength roles, alongside one dedicated to building meter faster. The total number of playable characters is now 21, up from the measly 4 in the original game. The new roster corrects the previous massive oversight of not including a playable Hello Kitty, adds more recent favorites like Kuromi and Cinnamoroll, as well as adding a good number of popular, but less recognizable Sanrio mascots. A good number of the characters were unknown to me, but seem to be pretty popular in Japan according to recent popularity polls.
Smash Festa starts with more characters than Smash Ball, but the majority will need to be unlocked by playing through the 50 stage single player campaign. (Hilariously, Kuromi is the last character unlocked, as if they knew a good portion of players would be in it just for her).
The campaign is thankfully not very difficult, taking about two hours to complete, and giving you a good tour of the various stage layouts, punctuated with a number of doubles games. Completing it allows you to challenge it again on higher difficulties, but otherwise there isn’t much else to do on your own, aside from creating custom matches with the CPU.
With that said, Sanrio Characters Smash Festa is still a welcome surprise. A sequel to a cult classic SNES game, released 30 years later, with everything that made the original compelling intact, updated with a modern cast and modern artwork. It’s something I’d daydream about while playing the original, and somehow it’s here and playable.
The only wrinkle is that the game is currently still Japan only, appearing on the Switch eShop and Steam, but strictly region locked on PC, with no English translation or announced plans to bring it over. It’s still relatively accessible if you’re willing to create a Japanese eShop account and buy eShop credits through a third party, which is how I played it. The amount of text is also minimal, with menus being easily navigable through trial and error or translation apps.
My first session with Smash Festa turned out to be an immediate hit, with matches becoming surprisingly competitive right away, with the ease of play and appeal of Sanrio characters providing an easy in for everyone. It’s easily a worthy successor to the original.
With an advanced machine gun controller and story following an elite anti-terrorist squad, Ghost Squad takes the aesthetics of tactical military shooters like Rainbow Six and brings it to the arcades. Alongside a simulated recoil, and a firing mode selector Ghost Squad’s controller sports an additional “action” button that performs various contextual actions such as rescuing hostages, destroying mines or parrying knife attacks. Between the varied interactions and tense situations Ghost Squad puts you in, it sells the idea of being an elite soldier able to surgically dismantle the enemy force, but in a high speed arcade package that’s uncommon among tactical shooters. Thankfully, that’s balanced by a hammy, over the top presentation common among SEGA arcade games, keeping it from steering into the ultra serious, propaganda like tone that many similar shooters fall into.
Lightgun technology is often the first association when it comes to arcade gun games, Ghost Squad uses an infrared pointer to track your aim, allowing precise positioning via an on screen cursor. Compared to lightgun shooters, which need to allow a certain amount of leeway to account for imperfect calibration and aim, Ghost Squad allows more precise hitboxes. As a comparison, early entries in House of the Dead--SEGA’s most recognizable lightgun series--have encounters happen at closer range, creating larger targets that allow some imprecision in high tension situations. Ghost Squad has a wider field of view, with targets appearing at longer distances, and as a consequence of its more precise aim, allows it to emphasize headshots as a tactic for fast takedowns.
To show this off, the airplane stage features a hostage situation where the boss uses a human shield, and you only have one chance to land a headshot and take him out. The imprecision of lightgun technology might cause you to accidentally hit the hostage if not precisely calibrated, but because you can see the single point where your bullet will land, landing the shot is almost trivial, with a short timer instead providing the tension for the situation.
Other setpieces break up the pacing and put the technology to good use, with precision sniping sections, a helicopter takedown where you need to continually track it to acquire a lock on, and the aforementioned bomb disarming, hostage restraining, and melee sections where you quickly use the action button to perform context sensitive actions while looking out for enemies. The addition of a second button and pointer controls allows Ghost Squad to break up the typical arcade shooter pacing, and gives you more ways to interact with the world aside from firing a gun.
Don’t let that fool you into thinking that the gunfeel is lacking. Ghost Squad’s gunplay aces both the audiovisual and physical feedback. Shots cause enemies to flinch based on hit location, with the same kind of snappy reactions that made House of the Dead so satisfying. Score popups reward you for quick and precise shots, and environments are littered with destructible objects that turn the area into a mess over the course of a gunfight. The controller itself is heavy, imitating the look of the real life MP5, with punchy, machine gun-like recoil that encourages you to stabilize your aim by pushing the stock against your shoulder. The addition of the action button and firing mode selector give both your hands something to do, and lean into the fantasy of holding a powerful weapon.
The original cabinet ran on the SEGA Chihiro board, an arcade board based on the specs of the Xbox, with the later revision, Ghost Squad Evolution, using the Lindberg arcade board, both which saw titles like Outrun 2 and Virtua Fighter 5 show up on them. The original version had an unlock system that allowed players to use a player card to store save data, with successive plays unlocking new weapons and costumes, and increasing the difficulty of the missions. Evolution added more options, and additionally unlocked weapons, allowing North American players to play with them, since they previously did not have access to the cards used to save data. In my personal experience I also found that Evolution had more responsive cursor tracking, but that could have been due to poor calibration on the original cabinet.
Despite being based on Xbox hardware, Ghost Squad never received a port to the Xbox or other home consoles of the generation, likely due to the difficulty of adapting the IR aiming. The Wii ended up being the one console to bring the game home, with the IR pointer capabilities of the Wiimote providing a perfect substitute. The home version obviously can’t replicate the physical experience of the arcade cabinet, with the Wii controller being absolutely dwarfed by the heft of the gun controller, and lacking the intense mechanical feedback. Paired with a Wii Zapper shell, however, and it does provide a good enough facsimile of the experience to appreciate the unique qualities of Ghost Squad. There’s also no shortage of Wii controller shells with detailed recreations of firearms, including one modeled off the MP5.
The Wii version also finally allows English speaking players to engage with the unlock system, with enough options to keep you playing for hundreds of sessions. Thankfully, the game runs about 20 minutes, keeping the pacing snappy, and preventing fatigue from the constant high tension action. With arcade cabs becoming increasingly uncommon, the Wii version provides a more than suitable replacement for most people, and even outside of original hardware, emulation can replicate most of the experience, with even more pointer precision.
With the tacticool trappings of military shooters, and a campy presentation that lightens the baggage associated with them, Ghost Squad is a perfect demonstration of rail shooter excellence--fantastically paced, varied, and making excellent use of its technology to break out of the usual genre trappings. Its mechanical precision makes further playthroughs more rewarding, and it can be completed in only a little more time than it takes to read this article.
Originally released in arcades, Silent Scope differentiated itself from other gun games by focusing exclusively on sniping. Using a unique dual screen setup and taking place within Chicago and its surrounding areas, it’s a unique entry in the rail shooter genre, one that required some atypical solutions during its translation to home consoles.
Unlike the familiar lightgun setup, which detects flashing hitboxes to confirm shots, Silent Scope pairs a full size screen with a mounted sniper rifle replica, sporting a small screen embedded in the scope. The main screen displays a general overview of the situation, with a sniper cursor giving you a general idea of where your gun is pointed, and the scope displaying a zoomed in view for acquiring targets. Set at the correct distance, the two screens sell the illusion that you're looking through one screen into the other.
I suspect the actual mechanics involve something similar to LA Machineguns or other rail shooters like Space Harrier, where the controller communicates its absolute position on the swiveling mount to determine where it's pointing, not unlike an analog joystick.
The illusion is further sold by the heft of the controller, which weighs enough that you'll want to brace it against your shoulder, and even practice breath control to keep your aim steady. With your eye up to the scope you can quickly switch between the two views by opening and closing each eye. In my case, I used my left eye to watch the larger situation on the large screen, switching to my right eye to “zoom” into the cursor for precision aim, all without having to shift my body position.
For maximum efficiency you'll also want to develop smooth and confident targeting. The clock is always ticking, and each kill earns a few seconds, so being fast is essential to completing a run, since even if you get through an area you might find yourself running out of time during the boss fight.
Silent Scope doesn't fully simulate bullet physics, but bullets do have travel time, requiring you to lead moving targets, and creating small delays before hits are confirmed. Given the strict timing, I learned to carefully line up shots, pull the trigger, then immediately move to the next target, having them lined up as the bullet hit. It takes a certain amount of discipline and physical technique that many other arcade gun games don't emphasize, giving additional satisfaction to the process of developing muscle memory.
I’m lucky enough to have access to the arcade machine thanks to Galloping Ghost, an arcade located in the Chicago suburbs, and the cabinet felt oddly at home with the assortment of Midway titles created in the city. As for the actual depiction of the area--it’s not particularly accurate. Chicago’s downtown streets are oddly wide and spacious, and the highways and football stadium don’t have any notable characteristics, and as you chase the terrorists into Wisconsin, up through Milwaukee and Green Bay, there aren’t many notable locations. Still, it’s a neat bit of scene setting, especially with the area map that appears between stages, showing your route through the states as you progress.
The stages themselves are smartly paced, and branch into three different areas after the initial downtown battle, bringing variety to the start of each playthrough. After the downtown shootout you can either chase the terrorists across the rooftops, highway or football stadium. The stadium is the highlight, with one of the terrorists comedically carrying away the President’s daughter, as football players attempt to tackle him.
As you enter Wisconsin your ability to search for targets is tested, having you search through hotel windows to find hidden terrorists among civilians, then enter a mansion at night, using night vision to pick out targets in the dark. The night vision section is particularly exciting, as enemy flashlights can give away their positions, but alongside flares can temporarily blind you, making timing your shots tricky.
The variety of situations keep Silent Scope expertly paced and varied over its short run time, and keep its methodical gameplay full of tension. It did thankfully receive a number of console ports, though not without some compromises.
The one lightgun translation came with Silent Scope Complete, which ported the entire series, and came packaged alongside a rifle controller. The limitations of this controller give some insight into the difficulty of translating the game to standard lightgun setup. The scope functionality wasn’t replicated, but instead required you to sit at a certain distance from your TV, and look through the hollow scope into the scoped view on the TV. It does seem to track your movements, but requires the brightness of the TV to be set to the point where the colors are entirely blown out.
Because of the limitations of lightgun technology, most console ports are instead controlled with a standard controller or ,when possible, a mouse. The Dreamcast and PS2 ports both support the mouse, though oddly this isn’t mentioned in the packaging or manuals. It’s by and far the preferred method, and when mastered allows you to hit targets faster than even the arcade game.
Like the arcade game, a general targeting reticle shows your current cursor position, and hitting the right mouse button will zoom into the scoped view, with the left mouse button naturally firing. It’ll come naturally to anyone familiar with PC FPS games. The controller buttons are largely the same, with the analog stick instead moving the controller, and the option to add modifier buttons to speed up and slow down the cursor for more precision. It’s perfectly functional, but not ideal during moments where the camera is in constant motion.
Curiously, there’s even a GBA port. Like the console ports, it relies on a standard control scheme, but without any alternative control options due to its portable nature. Like many GBA games, it uses prerendered graphics, translating each scene into a static renders that fade between screens, and none of the dynamic camera movements of the arcade game represented. It also removes all the references to real world locations, most likely due to the original game coming out in 1999, while the GBA port released in 2002.
Unlike other lightgun games like SEGA’s House of the Dead series, Ghost Squad or LA Machineguns, Silent Scope didn’t receive any ports to the next generation of consoles, which ironically would have been perfect for it. The Wii’s infrared pointer technology would have been a perfect substitute for the arcade controls, similar to the way that Ghost Squad’s infrared tech was translated for the Wii port. Games like Time Crisis received both dedicated infrared pointer controllers, as well as PS Move support, and going a generation further, the Wii U had similar scope implementations in games like Star Fox Zero. Even the DS could have provided an upgrade to the GBA version, with its basic 3D capabilities, and built in dual screen setup, which could have allowed fast aiming with the touch screen, and simultaneous displays of the scoped and unscoped views.
Currently, the arcade versions of Silent Scope are not emulated, so the Dreamcast and PS2 ports remain the best way to experience. Thankfully, they provide a complete experience and are easy to emulate as well. It might even be preferable to playing on original hardware, since I found that the PS2 is picky about which USB mice it recognizes, since anything but the most basic, wired mouse without extra buttons would cause the game to malfunction.
Easy to pick up and put down, Silent Scope represents the spirit of a quintessential arcade shooter, but offers enough nuances and variation to keep it fresh for a long time. It easily ranks alongside the best of the arcade lightgun games, even if the series remains buried compared to its contemporaries.
An uncanny mix of aesthetics and design sensibilities, The Citadel is bathed in an oppressive atmosphere. Cold, monolithic structures loom over the horizons, patrolled by cultists, drone and stormtroopers, rendered with hand drawn billboard sprites that starkly contrast with the harsh 3D of the environments.
Combat mixes the movement and level design of early FPS games, with a modern gun fetishist’s arsenal. Enemy attacks can be dodged or shot out of the air, and your character can move at the speed of an F1 car. But claustrophobic corridors and precarious drops make careful movement a necessity, and limited resources mean running and gunning is a long term liability.
Health points are severely limited, with your maximum values draining with your hunger, and oxygen limits your ability to move quickly, requiring you to constantly keep your resources stocked up to avoid being stuck in a desperate situation without the resources to escape it. Ammo drops are frequent, but armored foes tank enough hits that landing headshots is near mandatory for preventing weapons from running dry. Pistols and shotguns need to individually reload bullets, and fletchettes come in large quantity drums that can be accidentally tossed if reloading carelessly. Stages need to be completed in a single run, with checkpoints only available when spending your limited amount of lives at checkpoints.
It creates a survival horror-like economy where managing encounters with fodder enemies is key to keeping resources stacked for more dangerous encounters. I found myself peeking around corners, taking cover, carefully lining up shots, and compensating for gravity over long distances.
As the campaign continues, your arsenal grows, and weapon and movement upgrades begin to shift the balance in your favor. The horror then shifts from the desperate terror of survival, to the devastation that you visit upon the enemy. You might still be vulnerable, but the catastrophic effects even basic weapons have on the enemy begins to overwhelm the initial terror you had when facing them.
Bullets cleave their skulls into fragments, ejecting rib cages, limbs and innards across the environment. Surfaces become streaked with blood, and alt fire modes cause enemies to twitch and scream and their bodies are electrocuted or burned over the course of several seconds. This culminates in mech sections where you’re armed with boosters for generous vertical movement, anti-personnel rounds, artillery and explosives that shred through the opposition.
All of this is rendered in high detail sprite work, the garish colors and organic forms of each piece of viscera contrasting with the cold, harsh lines and colors of the environment.
Each enemy’s face is obscured by robes or masks, part of their fanatical dedication to the organization. It’s only in their deaths that you get a glimpse of their humanity. Fragments of their faces are left behind, caught in grimaces of pain, tears in their eyes as they stare back at you. The dissonance of seeing a grotesquely illustrated anime girl erupt from militaristic uniforms creates its own uncanny discomfort, which carries into the designs of the bosses you’ve been sent to obliterate.
Known as Angels, each boss represents a facet of humanity, twisted into body horror idols, worshipped and weaponized, at times against their wishes. One even begs you to put her out of her misery, kept alive for the religious agenda, unable to stop herself from attacking you. The Citadel’s storytelling is sparse, but the few details point to a suffocating future, with a fanatical spirituality driving both the enemies and the protagonist, The Martyr.
The Martyr is described as a human from a past world, with none of the cybernetic modifications that have become common in this world. She’s depicted in a fetish wear styled outfit, which alongside the religious themes brings to mind the aesthetics of Aeon Flux, which the developer has cited as an influence.
Unfortunately, this design, along the anime art style, seems to have been enough to trigger accusations that The Citadel is a work made to satisfy a sexual fetish, causing a wave of harassment against the developer and labeling the game as a guro game. The accusation doesn’t hold water, and seems to come from a strange Orientalist revulsion that doesn’t apply to Western artists who more explicitly combine sexual and horrific imagery.
For all its excess, The Citadel has a considered, even tactical approach to violence. Compared to the joyous fountains of blood in many modern games, it even feels restrained, keeping the violence impactful through its whole run time.
As I played through The Citadel I kept thinking about the War on Terror era military media. The paranoid fear of being deployed in a place where every civilian could turn into an enemy, where any space could collapse into a fireball from an IED. The dissonance of their tacticool depictions of military discipline and technology, where trained operatives cut cleanly through the enemy, supported by shock and awe campaigns of remote surveillance, drone strikes and superior firepower that can literally liquify inhabitants, remove their homes from the map, and reshape borders.
The Citadel carries similar contradictions. It’s a layered terror. A horror taking place at both ends of the barrel. A revolting spectacle that you can’t tear your eyes away from.
With so many games now touting photo modes, videogame photography has now become part of the culture. It’s a good way to slow down, engage with the game in another mode, and appreciate the tremendous amount of labor and artistry put into the worlds of modern videogames.
Lushfoil Photography Sim turns this into the entire focus of the game, focusing on exploring and photographing meticulously rendered slices of real world landscapes. A lack of wildlife or NPCs keeps the focus on finding subjects within the environments and architecture, and using the camera simulation to create expressive scenes. The simulation part is emphasized, with a variety of fixed and variable focal lengths, with manually adjustable settings like aperture, shutter speed, ISO and filters. Each environment also has an old digicam or drone to find, allowing you to photograph the scene from different angles or give it the old low resolution point and shoot look.
Importantly, Lushfoil brings an element of physicality and uncertainty to the act of taking photos. A typical photo mode gives you total control, allowing you to pose characters, place the camera anywhere, and even change up the lighting conditions, and pressing the shutter is basically a screenshot button. Lushfoil simulates the act of exposing the photo, and while the camera can give you a real-time preview of what your applied settings might look like, the final shot will look different depending on your settings. It could end up brighter or darker, or with more parts of the image out of focus than you intended.
Shots also need to be taken from your physical position. You have to walk to an area to get a shot, working the angles when there isn’t a path you can stand on. You also need to plant your feet to crouch or lean, keeping the analog stick precisely held to keep your position. You can’t lie prone either, so extreme low angle shots require some tricky positioning. Even when you find the drone, it has a limited range it can move away from you, keeping you physically restricted in the shots you take.
Small tutorials help you learn the basics of photography, and give you examples of how to apply the technique. The long exposure tutorial was great for helping me understand how to capture motion blur, which I applied to capture the effects of wind. It eases you into looking at the environment with those concepts in mind, and how you can manipulate the image to express the feeling of what you see.
The game part of Lushfoil directly contradicts the lax, easy introduction to photography. Lushfoil starts with a limited number of locations to explore, with new locations and variants unlocked after finding collectibles and recreating particular shots. Cheats can be used to bypass this, but even with this option it unintentionally creates a tourist-like experience, where you’re pushed to capture specific scenes and vistas, leading to a guided, homogenous experience instead of a creative one.
I attempted to ignore this aspect, but occasionally I’d accidentally recreate shots, making me feel as if I’d wandered into a theme park, where I was tracing steps on a guided path the developer laid out for me. I’d rather have snapshots and collectibles be optional objectives for completionists, with simple exploration unlocking new areas.
Exploring areas is rewarding enough by itself, with dense detail put into recreating each location. Photography invites you to slow down and take in those details, but walking through them is joy enough.
Enough time in each however, and the same limitations that make it creatively challenging, begin to feel, well, limiting. Despite being based on real locations, each area is only a small, cordoned off slice of the area, and the theme park style construction of it begins to show through.
That’s where Lushfoil Photography Sim has an advantage over other simulation games -- you might not be able to drive a truck, fly a plane or run a farm, but photography is still relatively accessible. You likely already own a device with a decent camera, and even smartphone cameras allow you to use various apps to gain more manual control. I can’t pick up a drone on a whim, or travel to any of the places featured in Lushfoil, but I can pick up a camera. So I did.
I’d dipped into photography as part of other projects, but being able to play with the myriad options in Lushfoil convinced me to finally give it a serious effort. I managed to find an old entry level DSLR for a reasonable cost, and started applying ideas I’d learned in the game.
Lushfoil manages to convey a real passion for photography, and successfully makes an argument to try it out, with guidance on exactly how to do that. It allows you to play around with a lot of tools, find what you like, without any of the real life pressures, and plenty of beautiful views to try them in.
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LIPService is a series that puts a spotlight on notable ROM hacks and fan works.
A total conversion hack built upon Super Metroid, Super Junkoid takes the mechanics of its base game and creates a new game out of it by radically altering the context and aesthetics of all its parts. Bosses, abilities and sounds are reused, but by remixing their placements and artwork Super Junkoid creates its own original adventure that uses the player’s familiarity with the original work to create an uncanny atmosphere.
The story begins with a young girl named Junko saving a snake from dying in the sun. Becoming obsessed with her, the snake follows her everywhere, eventually even into her dreams, where it worships Junko as a goddess, and creates a dream realm dedicated to her, trapping her within.The game begins with her waking up, her bed mysteriously caught in the middle of snowy forest scene.
Super Junkoid carries the vibe of an RPG Maker horror game. It begins with mundane environments like snowy mountains and distant cityscapes. As you descend deeper it evolves into disturbing temples dedicated to Junko, lakes of blood, haunted laboratories and the labyrinthine guts. The obsession of the snake grows clearer as you descend, going so far as to attempt to replicate her, with mangled duplicates of Junko populating its depths.
Junko herself is rendered as a cute young girl, a magic wand replacing Samus’ arm cannon, with whimsical substitutes for each of her abilities. The morph ball turns into a rat transformation, complete with the cute touch of Junko holding the wand in her mouth. Missiles turn into baseballs, and the various suits turn into amulets and trinkets. The more “moe” artwork for her character provides a contrast with the horror of the situation, amping it up.
The environmental art is the real star, reusing parts and motifs from Super Metroid, but more often transforming tilesets until they’re barely recognizable, with deep, saturated palettes that add to the surreal atmosphere. Hatches are changed into the crow doors from Doki Doki Panic, the new context making entering their mouths threatening, as if each door you pass through brings you further into being digested by the snake, with the increasingly organic environments adding to the feeling.
The environments paint a clear picture even without direct narrative, with tableaus decorating the backgrounds. Images of Junko repeat throughout in statues, stained glass windows, and eventually replicas of Junko, living, dead and partially animated. A few areas even require you to intentionally take damage, gritting your way through as your health depletes, only able to catch your breath at the hot spring safe rooms.
The snake’s appearances throughout are all desiccated and rotting, with leftover parts of it forming the entrances to deeper parts of the map. It’s clear that the snake’s idea of worship is one with no care for Junko herself, but one of control, and even consumption. These feelings eventually coalesce in chimeras made of exposed skeletons and viscera, warped by the snake’s obsession.
The chimeras are the best demonstration of Super Junkoid’s uncanny recontextualization of Super Metroid’s parts. Many of the original game’s most iconic bosses are used for the chimeras, with their patterns and behaviors immediately recognizable even in their transformed forms. It adds to the feeling that this is wrong, that something is out of place.
That extends to the moveset, which has its order remixed, and sports small tweaks to change their restrictions or make them easier to use. The wall jump is now a dedicated upgrade intended to be used frequently, Speed Booster can now only be used when in rat form and likewise Shinespark now uses ammo, but can be done anywhere, without the need to run and charge it up first. It’s all enough to throw off someone familiar with Super Metroid, but ultimately how you use them in Super Metroid is how you use them in Super Junkoid.
The jumps have the same strange nuances of the original. Air time is long, and you’ll get a somersault variant if you’re moving, which changes your jump physics and is required to pull off moves like the wall jump. Wall jumping works against your muscle memory from other platformers, requiring you to somersault into the wall, then push away from it for a second before pressing jump, rather than performing the inputs together. Once the rules are internalized it’s satisfying to pull off, but knowing those quirks are essential.
Notably, pulling the wall jump off consistently was one of the few times I felt the latency of my emulation method mattered. I originally played Super Junkoid on a lower end emulation device, and the inconsistent latency made it difficult to perform the wall jump with any consistency, due to the tight timing requirements. Switching to a more modern emulator like BSNES quickly removed that issue.
The level design is where Super Junkoid distinctly pulls away from its Super Metroid origins. Super Metroid and its contemporaries tend to push for more sprawling map designs, extending horizontally, with labyrinthine corridors to create the sense that you’re exploring a massive space. Super Junkoid’s maps are dense, layering on top of each other, and repeatedly looping back to connect to previous areas. Instead of creating a sprawling space by giving you a large area to walk through, it extends into the background, showing you other areas you can’t reach, hinting at an endless dream space.
Areas begin split into a tier of surface levels, before leading you deeper into the dream. The wings of the map funnel into a buried hub area, before pushing you further down, and down once again for the final confrontation. The emphasis on your vertical descent amps up the threat of the latter half of the game, and alongside the progressively more threatening environments, lends to that feeling of being consumed.
Progression in Super Junkoid isn’t strict, with many areas allowing multiple approaches. It ended up making walkthroughs hard to reference, as I’d often find I had reached certain items before progressing to the point the other player was currently in. This was unintentionally exacerbated by various major updates to the game, including the new DX version, which added several features as well as majorly reconfiguring parts of the level structure. Until I realized this, it made even recorded playthroughs of the game seem unreliable, as I’d hit the same area the player had reached, only to realize that it was structured completely differently. It was as if we shared the same dream, but recalled it differently.
That dreamy, half remembered feeling is what makes Super Junkoid successful to me. A few moments show its limitations as a ROM hack, but it’s largely successful at using any familiarity with the original game to add to the uneasy atmosphere it builds. The progression from the cute, fantastical surface areas to the gory, disturbing depths never feels edgy or unearned, and the escalation drives home the desperate obsession of the dream’s creator. Super Metroid’s strengths are put to good use, with only small changes for a modern audience. Super Junkoid was clearly made with love for the original’s quirks, and a desire to preserve the character its friction creates.
Many contemporary entries in the genre struggle to find their own identity, having to come up with novel takes on abilities, layering RPG elements upon their progression, or providing deep, complicated combat to keep your attention.
Super Junkoid manages to create its own identity without any of these, telling a new story with pre-existing parts, building upon them with original visuals, rich atmosphere and layered level design. It manages to impress through the technical work needed to refashion the original game, and its many outstanding artistic choices. It’s a collage that a keen eye can comb through to see its original parts, but combines in a way that adds to a cohesive, blended whole.
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LIPService is a series that puts a spotlight on notable ROM hacks and fan works.
A ROM hack for Rockman 7, Rockman 7 EP presents a complete overhaul of the Super Famicom game, remixing stage layouts and bosses, adding new weapons, gadgets and mechanics, and packing it full of playable homages to other games. Developed by Puresabe, famous for Rockman 4 Minus Infinity, Rockman 7 EP brings a similar philosophy, pushing the limits of the game engine and hardware.
A playful spirit runs through EP, with a philosophy similar to Kaizo Mario hacks, where expectations are continually subverted as part of the humor of the game, often at the player’s expense. The difficulty is more tempered, not reaching true absurdity until the final stages, and prevented from hitting unreasonable levels by a continuous stream of resources the game feeds to you. Refusal to use them can make the game seem insurmountable, but acceptance will result in less deaths than the vanilla game. It’s a challenge that comes not from a desire to create a punishing and restrictive game, but as a consequence of the sheer number of limit pushing spectacles that Puresabe has crammed into the game.
The base power level of the player and enemies starts way higher. Enemy counts are increased to the point where they often hit the Super Famicom sprite limit, bosses have new attacks and patterns with increased health, and endgame encounters need speedrun level skills to complete without spamming Energy Tanks.
To “balance” that you’re immediately given a full set of restorative items, full lives, and constantly have your health refilled after big encounters, with a full set of items available at the shop for nearly no cost. Spikes no longer instant kill, and several powerful gadgets are provided from the start, including ones that shield you from damage, rescue you from pits, or home in on enemies. The most powerful of these are limited, but judicious use of items allow you to plow through any area.
Health and energy can now also be filled to 200%, slowly draining to 100% over time. A last hit mechanic makes it so you can survive any attack that drains you to zero health, turning it into an almost Sonic style ring system, where having a single point of health will allow you to continue fighting no matter what hits you.
A new quick select system allows you to immediately switch to a weapon or gadget with a face button and direction combo, meaning you rarely need to enter the menu to change equipment. Each of the eight directional combinations corresponds to the boss’ placement on the title screen, making it easier to remember what slot each weapon is placed at.
The amount of new tools and weapons make EP{ a way faster, technical and exciting game than its vanilla incarnation. You can blast through huge groups of enemies with the right weapon or gadget, and by the end you get powerful burst movement that allows you to trivialize even more of them. The revamped weapons have way more utility, and you’re supplied with so much weapon energy you don’t need to be stingy using them, which makes your arsenal feel more like a complete moveset than a set of situational tools.
One of my favorites is King’s Slash, the revamped Slash Claw. It can now be used to cut through bullets, and no longer drains unless it hits an enemy, making it safer to mash. The tip of the attack also causes a critical hit, multiplying its already substantial damage. With the right spacing you can now rack up several critical hits in a row, deleting health bars. The improved utility moves it from a niche tool to an outright replacement for the Mega Buster.
Burn wheel turns into Self-Burning , a high cost, high damage weapon that causes contact damage to enemies, allows you to walk through fire or lava, and boils enemies in water. Bullets can still cause you damage however, and the high cost means you’ll want to avoid using it in areas filled with projectile enemies, where it’s hard to sustain for long periods.
Freeze Cracker is transformed into Silver Bullet, which immediately splits into an 8-way burst that does high damage, and can be used shotgun style to hit enemies and bosses with every shot at the same time.
Even weapons like the Proto Shield, which required a lot of effort to obtain but weren’t very useful, have been given a big overhaul. Here it’s a boomerang style weapon that blocks bullets, can be rammed into enemies to cause damage, and can be thrown and held in place to cause continuous damage, at the expense of causing you to take more damage yourself.
Boss invincibility frames have also been dramatically decreased to allow you to stack damage, too. Traditionally, bosses have long periods of invincibility between hits, but in EP you can stack damage as fast as you can hit them. It changes the dynamic from being about timing a small number of big damage hits to choosing weapons with the right trajectories to counteract boss patterns. It’s a more tactical, rather than puzzle-like approach.
The relentless new pace of the game is occasionally broken up by new stage gimmicks, once again pushing the technical limits of the engine, and bringing the gameplay structure closer to that of the Playstation Mega Man games. There’s a Beat area where you navigate through a spike maze while fighting against gravity, almost like Flappy Bird or Balloon Trip. There are several SHMUP stages, complete with Gradius homages, and even one with a ranking system. And there’s even the return of the dreaded snowboarding sections, though this time missing a jump doesn’t mean instant death, and you can even cheese the entire area by intentionally falling and having Beat carry you past obstacles. My favorite gimmicks are the less drastic ones, like Shademan’s stage, which is now a Castlevania homage, complete with staircases and destructible candles that drop items.
The sheer number of new gimmicks is astonishing on a technical and creative level, though how enjoyable they are to return to is variable, leading to severe highs and lows. One of the biggest problems with EP overall is how it prioritizes showing off over playability, leading to huge difficulty jumps between areas.
You can brute force any area with the resources you’re given, but it encourages sloppy play. Learning areas is less rewarding when you can spend a tool or recovery item to bypass the area, especially when it’s often faster than trying to play properly. By the end of the game Rockman 7 EP gives up entirely on providing a proper challenge and absolutely spams enemies and obstacles at you, prioritizing spectacle while giving you near infinite resources as it hits you with nearly impossible attacks and actual bullet hell patterns.
The infinite resources even reveal themselves to be part of the game’s thematic core, as it hits you with a very late title drop that reveals what the “EP” part of the game means. The capitalistic theme continues into the final credit roll, where it reveals previously hidden statistics the game has been tracking, corresponding achievements, and the financial cost of every life, weapon and item you’ve used throughout the game. If there’s any place that incentivizes a replay, it’s here, where you can attempt to cause Dr. Light as much or as little financial damage throughout a playthrough.
Rockman 7 EP also manages to be greedy in the amount of new dialogue it adds. The original Rockman 7 was wordy by Mega Man standards, but EP has magnitudes more, with new original dialogue, complete with an abundance of narrative flavor and irreverent jokes and references. It borders right on the edge of too much self-awareness, but it has just enough earnestness to get by.
This is also where the second layer of patches come in, as the hack was originally created in Japanese (hence Rockman 7 EP, and not Mega Man 7), and requires an additional translation patch by Zynk Oxhyde. Without it you might still be able to enjoy the sheer technical effort on display here, but a lot of the finer details are less self-explanatory, making the translation essential.
Rockman 7 EP is easily one of the most impressive ROM hacks I’ve had the pleasure of playing through. EP is both a technical and design showcase, with a radical approach with ideas that push the boundaries of the original game and what the larger series could look like. It intentionally reaches unreasonable levels of chaos and difficulty in pursuit of spectacle, but in the process creates one of the most mechanically satisfying takes on the series.
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Telling the story of a woman trapped by the mysteries of her childhood home, Go Home Annie builds an adventure wrapped in the narrative world of the SCP Foundation. Bits are chosen from the community created horror project, for flavor, puzzle inspiration, and scene setting. Annie, our titular protagonist, is a former criminal working under the SCP Foundation’s Anomaly Replication branch, involved in various projects attempting to understand and recreate the supernatural effects of anomalous objects.
After committing an unspecified crime following the disappearance of her father, she’s recruited to run trials in a replica of her childhood home, revisiting it again and again as the Foundation attempts to extract all the anomalies haunting the house. As is often the case, a containment breach occurs, sparking the events of the game and giving Annie a chance to return to her real life home and finally put her trauma to rest.
Go Home Annie doesn’t provide a satisfying answer to the many questions it asks, resolving with an anticlimax that leaves arcs incomplete and no concrete direction for what happens next. But along the way it does manage to deliver some memorable story beats and surreal imagery.
Most of the game’s puzzles involve a complicated spot the difference, finding details in the environment, then assembling the parts to recreate the scene. The first half of the game revolves around using a camera and videotapes, viewing haunted scenes as you walk through the place where they occur, then recreating details to reveal parts of the house previously obscured.
It’s a great mechanical and narrative device, tying the traumatic past to the present and giving it a way to become physically realized in the present. The way it splits attention between two viewpoints, and seamlessly transitions from the mundane to the surreal is very impressive, giving the adventure a dreamlike quality where the grounding of reality can give way at any time.
Annie’s tether comes in the small but likeable supporting cast, who have preestablished relationships atypical of the usual foundation and D-Class dynamics, clearly invested in seeing Annie achieve her goals despite their positions as her overseers. They provide a touch of humanity and even genuine bits of humor between the high tension chapters of the story. There’s even a few anomalies that Annie’s developed a friendly relationship with, their positions as objects controlled by the Foundation providing a common link to bond over.
The second half of the story propels itself towards a conclusion, barreling into escape sequences, set pieces and eventually dropping the camera mechanic to focus on delivering more surreal moments. Some of its best imagery is here, and you get the sense that this moment is one that this is a final performance that Annie has been rehearsing for, as she continued to live through her trauma during her time at the Foundation.
A few new revelations come to light, but ultimately leave additional questions that the game doesn’t take the time to provide an answer for. After some great build up, it grinds to a halt with a series of mirror and light puzzles that lead to an abrupt conclusion. It was so abrupt I thought it had to be a fake out, but there’s only a small post credits scene that doesn’t lead to anything else.
Even with those issues, the relatively short run time kept those last few slow moments from becoming truly tedious. There’s enough inventive imagery on display that the disappointment was more about how much the game leaves on the table, rather than what it delivers. As a self-contained story within the SCP universe, it manages to be compelling through its own narrative and atmosphere, without relying on your recognition of the greater universe to provide motivation.
055: Absolum brings the arcade spirit of its fantasy inspirations roaring into the modern age
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This piece contains minor mechanical and plot spoilers.
The latest from Guard Crush Games, one of the main developers on Streets of Rage 4, Absolum takes plenty from their work on SEGA’s brawler. The skeleton of the game can be seen in their experiments with Mr. X Nightmare, SOR4’s roguelike mode. The abilities, status effects, items and alternative movesets all appear in a less developed form there. Absolum builds an original RPG world around those same ideas, complete with equipment and magic systems, and a detailed history of its many fantastical factions.
Fantasy conjures the image of a sprawling adventure, but where Streets of Rage 4 was built primarily on SEGA’s console series origins, Absolum takes to the arcades for its inspirations. Absolum’s action takes place in runs of an hour or less, using the familiar modern structure of roguelikes to resurrect an arcade playstyle that’s fallen out of favor in the mainstream. Death means starting from stage one, and while you can grind your way into a few more chances, clearing the game will require you to fight your way from the start at least twice, with the conditions around these winning runs further demanding you get into that arcade mindset.
To synthesize its setting and structure, Absolum builds on the legacy of Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups. Capcom’s Tower of Doom and Shadows over Mystara earned a reputation as some of the most complex arcade games, with diverse character classes, branching paths, a detailed stats and equipment system, and real time inventory management. Each was designed to recreate the feeling of a tabletop RPG session, with each run having the potential to grow into a new adventure.
Absolum’s drawn comparisons to Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown, and that’s for a good reason, since Dragon’s Crown draws on the same legacy, with director George Kamitani even serving as director on Tower of Doom. But while Dragon’s Crown leans heavily into the DnD’s party based RPG elements, Absolum builds on the arcade mentality, and redesigns Capcom’s systems to streamline all the moments of downtime and push its speed and momentum.
The slow inventory management has been replaced with a single item slot, with item limits and frequent drops encouraging liberal use of them, and incorporating them into combos. Loose gold is hoovered up, rewards are always spawned with enough choices for both players, to prevent arguing and item theft. The branching paths play a major part of the journey, splitting and converging, with more areas and questlines revealing themselves on subsequent runs. Camps appear on different parts of the map, giving you downtime to heal, buy equipment, and hear more about the world.
Layered upon this is a free flowing combat system that builds on the technical complexities of its predecessors, but arms each character with a toolkit that opens up the creative possibilities. Absolum’s universe moveset includes light, heavy, special and super attacks, paired with varied movement and defensive options. If Streets of Rage was Street Fighter, then Absolum is Darkstalkers.
Every character can dash, sidestep, and parry, rapidly able to change their positioning and cancel into defense at a moment’s notice. Even the dedicated bruisers can travel fullscreen in a second, and build air combos that keep enemies in a prolonged juggle state. Absolum’s basic combo system builds on Guard Crush’s work on Streets of Rage 4, allowing you to extend combos even further by pushing enemies to the edge of the screen, or attacking them while downed.
With so many options to continue a combo, a hard limit has been imposed to prevent infinites and tedious exploits, in the form of the Overpressure system. As you continue a combo, Pressure builds up, eventually putting enemies into an Overpressure state, where the next hit nets bonus damage and ejects the enemy into a hard knockdown where they can’t be hit until they recover.
Repeating moves incurs a penalty and ends a combo sooner, discouraging looping the same attacks, but the limit can be intentionally exploited in your favor. For example, a common beat-em-up loop is the jab reset, where you do the first few hits of your combo, then wait to reset back to the first part of the chain, keeping enemies perpetually in hitstun.
Absolum allows three loops of this resets (or similar ones done by resetting the chain with dodge attacks) before it triggers Overpressure and ejects the opponent. But since the goal of the jab loop is generally to keep an enemy out of the fight and unable to retaliate, the hard knockdown from Overpressure achieves a similar effect, with less tedium. Eventually, you can even find items that extend, or remove these combo limits, or incorporate Overpressure tactics to inflict some special state.
Absolum’s combat is full of nuances like this, and the unlockable movesets only give you more to consider. Long after I beat the game I was finding new details that changed how I play. Cider, the dedicated combo machine, can pull themselves or the enemies closer depending on if you tap or hold the special button. Karl, the dwarf grappler and gunner, has a reload ability that can not only juggle with its startup and recovery, but can also be used as an active reload to cancel the recovery of some special moves and gain half a bar in the process. Brome’s air combo can be used to both pull and push enemies depending on how many hits you do, allowing you to choose between extending damage or creating distance.
The juggle system from Streets of Rage 4 returns, allowing you to wall bounce enemies against the edges of the screen to continue the combo, and any move can be used to hit knocked down enemies, creating many combo routes.
Elite enemies and bosses will tank your initial hits, preventing you from freely comboing them, and forcing you to learn their patterns and defend appropriately. Reacting appropriately will set up a punish combo, allowing you to rack as much damage as you can before they enter a hard knockdown and recover. Even the final boss can be comboed like this, allowing combo fiends to wreck a boss within a few good openings if they’ve got tight defenses. It’s a familiar rhythm for fighting game fans, and it allows boss fights with a noticeable bump in difficulty from standard enemies, without invalidating the skills and expression built up in the rest of the game.
The same meticulous care has been put into its developing Absolum’s world. The story begins in media res, introducing you to the stakes and players within a few minutes, implying a long history between its characters and world, without any lore dumps or long winded scene setting. We get the ideas of who the characters are in short snippets of commentary and dialogue, optional descriptions of vistas, and fireside chats between runs. Every character and faction has a history with the world, even if they only show you a fraction of it.
The environments are illustrated in an almost ligne claire style, with bold colors and sharp lines, but with deep shadows and small touches of movement and parallax to maintain visual clarity.
Secret areas open and close between runs, encouraging you to pay attention to the environment and test which parts of it are interactive. There have been so many points where I attempted something out of curiosity and was surprised that it worked. Many secrets are hidden in plain sight, with only experimentation or community knowledge making them obvious. The very first screen of the game has a secret, easy to miss on the initial runs. Discovering the expansive number of secrets is a community effort, and I found myself constantly exchanging notes and trading information with friends. It lends a sense of world much bigger than the fighting grounds you travel through.
Like the Dungeons and Dragons games it pulls from, Absolum is packed with detail that pulls from an eclectic set of sources. Dungeons and Dragons is now seen as a bog standard medieval fantasy, but I can imagine that at the time of Capcom’s arcade games the Forgotten Realms still had plenty to capture the imagination, with hybrid creatures such as the Gnoll and Owlbears, monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Beholder that provided new takes on classical beasts, and the incorporation of cosmic horror in the bestiary, it’s hard not to see why it drew players in, and inspired works like Record of Lodoss War.
Absolum aims for that same fresh perspective on fantasy, remixing the familiar for the modern age. Absolume borrows hybrids like the Gnoll--human-hyenea hybrids--and adds its own, like the axolotl-human hybrids and mushroom trolls. Typical power structures and roles are revisited: goblins are now the tree dwelling race, spiritually connected to the forest they’re birthed from, with an insect-like lifespan that prioritizes their community over individual lives.
Elves have become a sort of hybrid with dark elves, worshipping death and building a lavish capital near the gateway to the underworld, growing into a holy site for pilgrims to journey to. Their spiritual practices build on the memories of the deceased, with their knights channeling energy from the underworld, and strengthening themselves with those memories.
The dwarves are not born of flesh and blood, but forged by a patriarchal figure known as the Underking, guided to create the most advanced civilization, then driven to near extinction when the Underking succumbed to madness.
Cider and Brome give insight into the fantastical view of identity, something modern fantasy finds itself experimenting with as awareness of real life gender identities expands. Cider is initially presented with a confused identity, referred to with gender neutral pronouns, and interchanging between using “I” and “we”, while referring to themselves. Through later conversations we learn that this is a literal “we”, as Cider was once a master thief who dived into the afterlife to retrieve her soul, but came out with a second one, both occupying a clockwork cyborg body.
Cider occasionally makes reference to missing body parts, has visible prosthetics, and their disability is reflected in talk of their frailty and having the lowest health values. Their body ironically makes them the most mobile, with a high run speed and the ability to traverse distances with their grappling arm, not unlike Devil May Cry’s Nero, who also prominently features a prosthetic arm.
Brome’s situation is a bit more mixed for me, as the details of his story are awkwardly revealed by Karl straight up asking “weren't you a female?” before Brome praises him for being able to tell, and confirms it. Brome’s transition turns out to be one of desperate survival, laying eggs then changing to a male form in order to fertilize them, out of fear that he was the only surviving member of his race, and that it would die out with him.
Brome’s identity is tied to the state of the world itself, with his people being born of the world’s magic, and his relatively recent birth meaning he was born into a world that had already been systematically eliminating his people before he was alive. His change to a masculine identity comes with a desire to protect, and an unbridled hatred for his oppressors, reflected in his dialogue and the naming of each of his special attacks. It also reflects the real world physiology of frogs, with some species able to change their gender.
It’s a clear effort to represent a diverse crew of characters, even within a fantasy setting, and while many of the details add a charming wrinkle to the usual presentation, it sometimes feels like a gotcha to pre-empt the inevitable arguments. Cider isn’t non-binary or plural--they are literally two people. Brome is transmasc, but that’s because it’s biologically accurate. It’s messy, but at the very least, Absolum isn’t taking a safe approach, and isn’t scared to commit to a complicated worldview.
That complex approach extends to the structure of the game. Initial forays have a familiar roguelike structure, unlocking more tools, areas, abilities and upgrades to create more variety and make it easier to survive. By the time I completed the game, I had most of the upgrade paths maxed, not because they’re strictly necessary, but because I relied on those tools to bail me out due to my lack of knowledge of enemy patterns and defensive mechanics. These upgrades expand the margin of error, giving you multiple changes to fail before ending your run.
This is where the second loop comes in.
After beating Azra, the oppressor forcing his tyrannical rule on the world, he rewinds time, revealing Absolum, the true final boss--a cosmic horror gestating and ready to be born. To challenge Absolum, you’ll need to complete another run--remixed and more oppressive--and if you don’t make it with an extra life to spare, your run will end when Absolum opens the fight with an unavoidable, instant kill attack.
Reaching the final area has a merchant warning you of this opening attack, and offering you the chance to buy an additional life, albeit at a higher cost than any other item in the game. Meaning if you haven’t saved some gold during your run you might be out of luck.
These requirements initially seem brutal, but they reflect a more lenient take on the “second loop” and “true final boss” concepts seen in many arcade games. To reward skilled players for reaching the end of the game, some arcade games will loop, allowing you to restart from the beginning of the game, often at a higher difficulty.
Some games will even hide a second final boss behind this second loop, requiring a tremendous display of skill to even see them. Hibachi from the DoDonPachi series is a notorious one, having strict requirements for accessing the second loop, and being difficult to defeat in a series that is already known for its high difficulty. Absolum’s instant kill attack can even be seen as an homage to Shadow Over Mystara’s final boss, Synn. For comparison, Synn has three difficult to avoid instant kill attacks that occur during the start of each phase, with little warning or time to get to safety.
Defeating Absolum will require you to alter your playstyle. You’ll need to learn proper defense, and start balancing equipment purchases with the opportunity to earn an extra life. To make things harder, the world changes after you first beat Azra, opening up new events, and creating portals within stages that bring in enemies from other areas, as well as new bosses, drastically altering the enemy formations you can expect to see. To balance this you’ll also have the chance to use Azra’s time magic, with several powerful new abilities.
Beating Azra is difficult, but the ability to extend your lifebar and earn the ability to start with two extra lives gives you an ever increasing margin of error. The second loop ratchets up the stakes and squeezes down on those margins, asking you to prove that you’ve been paying attention.
I admit, I was kind of being carried during that first loop. I was able to beat Azra on the first try, taking some big losses, but able to get through thanks to the generous clash frames on Galandra’s special attacks, and landing some extended combos. But even the simple change of putting late game enemies into the early stages, before I had built up my character with equipment and abilities, revealed how much I relied on outpacing my enemies with damage to survive.
Having an extra life effectively subtracted from me, without any other considerations, put enough pressure on me that I became aware of my remaining health, and engaged in actively defending myself, learning enemy patterns, and routing my journey with consideration for the difficulty and rewards of each path.
The second loop successfully plays into expectations of both the arcade and roguelike mindsets. Roguelike players generally expect to do multiple runs in order to see everything, and arcade players often make clearing the game without continuing their goal. The roguelike genre has been responsible for repopularizing the idea of a run based game, and Absolum uses this to push the player towards the arcade ideal of a one credit clear.
Dedicated arcade gamers often mark the completion of a game not by seeing the end, but by doing so without continuing. Initial runs are considered data for this goal, scouting enemies and bosses, and planning routes for proper attempts to clear the game.
Because arcade games were designed around the economy of player time and money, many would allow you to see the end by simply feeding credits into the machine, without properly learning the game. That made seeing the ending trivial, if expensive. Home ports and emulation further trivialized the difficulty of clearing an arcade game, since the penalty for failing was effectively removed. And as the arcade style structure fell out of popularity in favor of longer play times, the idea of the one credit clear became something only die hard players chased after.
By presenting itself as a roguelike, Absolum takes the expectation of death resetting progress, softens it by slowly giving you more leeway and variety, then challenges you to demonstrate your mastery after your initial victory. The room for error is still relatively large, but it sets up similar stakes.
Even the stages are designed with this goal in mind. Level layouts are largely static aside from a few detours and the order you see them, and you can reliably expect a certain formation of enemies or set of items when traversing the same area. It gives you a set of obstacles that you can prepare for. Absolum’s overall roguelike philosophy is to be predictable to change your approach, but dynamic enough that you’ll constantly be changing your approach.
But the world of Absolum isn't static. As the story progresses parts of the world will change, causing new routes to open up, new characters to arrive and quests to reveal themselves. It’s a world that persists through death, and reacts to it, framed in a narrative of two great powers--a maternal immortal whose philosophy is built around natural chaos, and a paternal authoritarian who rewinds time to put things back in their place when disrupted. Characters are trapped in a cycle, but that doesn’t prevent them from growing and changing.
Absolum’s deep consideration of the inspirations it draws from and the world that justifies it all, comes together in a perfectly tuned synthesis of modern and arcade sensibilities.
I’ve said before that action games are like pieces of music, defined by their rhythms, breaks, and the instrumentation they play with. And if the arcade brawler’s thumping rhythms mirror rock, and the modern roguelike mirrors the improvisational grooves of jazz, then Absolum is a pitch perfect jazz fusion album. A double LP in a beautifully illustrated record sleeve, with a world of beautiful details that reveal themselves on repeat plays.
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After giving Phantom Breaker a second chance at localization with Phantom Breaker Omnia, Battlegrounds, the beat-em-up spin off that found unexpected success over a decade before, has received its own refresh, bringing the brawler to yet another generation of consoles. Rebuilt in the Unreal Engine, Ultimate adds some graphical enhancements, additional features, and rebalances the entire game. It doesn’t initially seem like a big change, but the rework does a lot to make what was once a good looking slogfest into something that lives up to its potential.
Without repeating too much of my previous thoughts on the original, Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds comes from Masotoshi Imaizumi and Masaki Ukyo, collaborators from Fil-in-Cafe and Treasure who’d co-develop Mad Stalker, a PC brawler which would become the basis of many influential fighting games and beat-em-ups, including Asuka 120%, Yu Yu Hakusho Makyo Toitsusen, Guardian Heroes and Panzer Bandit.
Battlegrounds follows closely in the format of Panzer Bandit, synthesizing many of its ideas with Phantom Breaker, the fighting game that preceded it. Alongside these concepts comes an RPG-style progression system, complete with experience points, stats and skill trees. This remained the largest issue with the original Battlegrounds, even after the updated Overdrive Edition, which added new mechanics and reordered the skill tree.
Where Panzer Bandit and Guardies Heroes gave you all your tools at the start and relied on you learning and incorporating them as you progressed, Battlegrounds teases you with them, then strips you of even the basic options, then makes you agonizingly earn them back, grinding experience points and rationing them out between new abilities and stat upgrades you need for basic survival. It dragged down the whole game, and meant hours of tedious grinding each time you wanted to try a new character.
Ultimate rebalances the whole game, with director Masaki Sakari describing the approach as throwing in anything they thought was fun, then fixing and balancing it after. New moves have been added, enemy numbers have been increased, their formations mixed up, and it now runs at a higher resolution, with a wider viewing angle and support for more players.
The tweaks here have created a drastically different flow from the original. The sheer number of enemies and item drops creates an aesthetic experience closer to something like a Vampire Survivors style game. Enemies flood the screen until they overlap each other, experience gems and powerups rain down, rapidly filling meters that allow a constant barrage of powerful moves that tear through crowds to unleash even larger cashouts. Playing with more players can ramp up the chaos even more, as the enemy count scales and the screen fills with even more extreme moves. In later stages, the flow of Ultimate is closer to something like a 2D Musou game, where individual enemies no longer matter, and the focus is instead on picking out the problematic enemies and controlling crowds to give yourself some breathing room.
The increased drops also drastically speed up the RPG progression, and alongside the reworked skill tree, gives you earlier access to most of your skills. It could take nearly the entire game to unlock all of your important attacks in the original Battlegrounds. In Ultimate, nearly every important move, including your most powerful ones, can be unlocked by stage 2, leaving the rest of the game to seek defensive skills, upgraded versions of existing skills, or increase your baseline stats.
Ultimate also adds co-op with bots, allowing up to 3 CPU players at a time, letting you grind experience for multiple characters at the same time. It’s more a bandage than a fix to the underlying problem, but combined with the increased experience points, it no longer feels like you’re starting from zero whenever you choose a new character.
It’s a big boon, since Ultimate greatly expands the playable cast. In the same spirit as Treasure games like Guardian Heroes or Bleach Dark Souls, Ultimate makes every enemy playable without regard to balance or viability. Fodder enemies with only a few moves, boss characters that obscure the screen or even the bonus truck whose only abilities are driving slowly and ramming the opponent. Any of them can be brought into co-op or versus mode, and even leveled up to increase their stats. Running co-op mode with 3 onmyoji variants casting a storm of elemental attacks, or running a stage over with a crew of boss characters is incredible fun. It adds a small sandbox element that allows you to tune your approach to stages, keeping me playing long after I’d seen the credits.
Ultimate even adds a new DLC character and stage, collaborating with internet personality Kaho Shibuya, and featuring an LA stage where you fight through riot cops at LAX before chasing a Donkey Kong parody to the convention center. It’s a bizarre combo, but like the rest of Ultimate, it seems to be tuned for fun first, with making sense of it a minor concern. Kaho herself is a baking themed magical girl, smacking enemies with a baguette, forming shields from sliced bread, tossing toast like shurikens and turning enemies into cupcakes. It makes the wacky tone of the original feel downright reserved by comparison, and is accompanied by some of my favorite voice lines and animations.
The voice lines are now presented in both Japanese and English, with the game receiving a few more touches to its localization thanks to publisher Rocket Panda, who brought Phantom Breaker Omnia to English, and returns with the same voice cast. Like Omnia, it receives a remixed OST as well, bringing three excellent variations to the soundtrack, though my favorite is still the FM synth style one.
Ultimate also benefits by the greater context of Phantom Breaker being playable. Seeing how directly Battlegrounds translates the mechanics of Phantom Breaker to the beat-em-up genre gave me a much better appreciation for the effort that went into building Battlegrounds’ systems, and I was even able to apply my experience with the fighting game to better use my available tools, and understand what all the unlockable skills were.
It made crowd management and navigation easier, and helped me find a rhythm that involved more than blocking and waiting to land a big combo. I understood how to slip past enemies who were locking me down, or use my various air options to escape and reposition. It even made the versus mode more appealing, since I could exploit the mechanics in high difficulty fighters that demanded use of the full moveset. Higher difficulties became about more than grinding enough stats, and mobs became fodder to style on. The same way the expanded cast gives you a sandbox to mess with, the rebalanced game flow turns Ultimate into a sandbox to explore various mechanics inherited from its fighting game predecessor, filling in a missing link in Mad Stalker’s legacy.
Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds isn’t fundamentally different from its previous iterations. Mechanically, you’ll be using a lot of similar tactics, similar combos and fighting similar enemies. But after a decade of refinements, with a massive effort to rebalance the game, Ultimate brings you to Battlegrounds’ best parts much faster, cutting out nearly all the tedium that dragged down the original release.
