Capcom's Strider series holds the distinction of starring one of the coolest ninjas in video games. Hiryu feels like he was designed to look as rad as possible, from the blue suit to the red scarf to the tonfa-esque cypher blade, and his appearance was partially influenced by Spawn (another hero engineered to radiate style) because Capcom character designer Harumaru saw some Todd McFarlane books one day. Even Hiryu's name (飛竜, "flying dragon") is cool, mostly because it taught me that 竜 is the Japanese simplified form of the Chinese 龍, a character in my own name.
But despite his coolness, Hiryu is better recognized for cameos in the Marvel vs. Capcom series instead of his own franchise. This is most unfortunate, especially considering that Strider's one of the earliest video game examples of a cross-media property. Way back in 1988, Capcom greenlit a Strider comic with the help of the Moto Kikaku mangaka group while also assigning two internal divisions to helm an arcade game and an NES title. The intent was to make Hiryu into a hero who would span multiple mediums and be recognized everywhere, from the printed page to the pixelated screen. And that sorta worked, but not as well as Capcom hoped.
The first and most famous Strider - the 1989 arcade release - begins with Hiryu gliding onto the towers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in a truly iconic bit of spritework. Within three seconds, you're hit with an array of action as Hiryu strides forward, explodes enemies in half with his cypher, and does a signature flip where all of his limbs flail outwards in a mid-air cartwheel. The action and setpieces never let up, and over the span of the game's five levels, Hiryu fights a council of politicians who morph into a multi-limbed robotic centipede, runs from mountain avalanches, explores dinosaur-filled Amazon jungles, hitchhikes a ride on an airship, and battles robotic anti-gravity cores in the fringes of outer space.
Strider is a blend of a hundred different things that the developers considered cool. But beyond all of the set pieces, the factor that sticks out to me the most is the Cold War futurism that drips from every level, feeling original but somehow dated at the same time. What other games start with your character infiltrating the "Kazakh Federation" and end with them fighting the sorcerous Grand Master Meio, a dude who seems like a thinly-veiled stereotype of a communist dictator gone wild? What other games commit to their "born in a geopolitical era of tension" vibe by featuring speech samples in multiple languages, including Russian, Japanese and Mandarin? Strider came out right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you can feel it. On that note, I don't think Kazakhstan has appeared in any other franchise as much as Strider. Honestly, the world would probably be a better place if more people associated Kazakhstan with Hiryu's adventures instead of Borat.
Strider didn't receive a decent conversion for home consoles until the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1990, and the NES "port" that came out around the same time wasn't a port at all. Instead, NES Strider is an early Metroidvania, and one that I actually enjoy a fair bit. This opinion goes against the norm, since while I can recall NES Strider getting lots of promo in Nintendo Power when I was growing up, popular internet consensus these days tells you that it's a broken game with controls that feel like they're stuck in a beta phase.
I can't refute that - NES Strider's controls stink, especially when you're forced to pull off a wall jump that's impossible to do unless you have perfect timing. (Thankfully it's only a mandatory move at two points.) The game's also got a weird glitchiness about it, with enemies respawning at an utterly aggressive pace and the edges of the screen flickering way too much every time Strider moves an inch. The bugginess of NES Strider supposedly kept its impending Famicom port from ever being released, making it a rare example of a Japanese game that sold in North America but not in its native country.
And yet, the ambition to NES Strider is admirable. The trend of backtracking through levels and using items to unlock previously inaccessible areas might be commonplace now, but it wasn't in 1989. The plot, while burdened by a messy English translation, also features far more of a story than any other game in this franchise thanks to its heavy basis in the Strider manga. (Which is pretty cool, by the way, and partially readable in English thanks to a fan scanlation of its first three chapters.) Instead of simply facing Grand Master Meio, Hiryu's got to dig out corruption from the ranks of his organization, and it's nice to actually get some insight into his companions, from a fellow Strider named Kain to a guy named Ryuzaki who left his Attack-Boots in China.
Strider never blossomed into one of Capcom's sequel-studded franchises of the '90s. The NES game was a bold but flawed experiment that didn't get much traction, and while the arcade game performed okay, many of its key developers left the company soon after its release. In the European market, though, arcade Strider received dozens of ports for home computer systems that really couldn't handle it, like the ZX Spectrum. Tiertex, a local developer behind a handful of these ports, got the rights from Capcom and made Strider II, a sequel with shockingly bad level design which also goes under the name Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns. Capcom effectively retconned Tiertex's work with an in-house Strider 2 in 1999, riding off of the wave that Hiryu received from his inclusion in Marvel vs. Capcom.
Released for the arcade and Playstation, Strider 2 seems to take place two thousand years after its predecessor, with the Hiryu the player controls a clone of the original. It's never entirely clear, as the plot was clearly just an excuse to have Hiryu fight a reincarnated Meio. Forgettable story aside, the game spans as many environments as the first Strider, and the opening level sees Hiryu fighting terrorists in Neo Hong Kong to the beat of some darn good music which sounds suspiciously like the Ozzy Osbourne song Shot in the Dark. There's also a rival Strider named Hein who wears an all-white uniform in a nod to Hinjo, the main character from Tiertex's Strider II, which is a polite ode to a game that Capcom has all but disowned nowadays.
My biggest issue with Strider 2 is that each level is divided into small chunks, with the player forced to sit through loading screens while the next segment loads. Most PS1 games released during this era suffered from long loadtimes, but it's annoying to deal with the same thing in an arcade game. Maybe the load screens are meant to give players a breather before the next spree of button mashing, but I feel like the game's pace suffers tremendously. It's hard to fall into the same "blaze through, slice 'em with the cypher, do a billion flips along the way" rhythm that the first Strider inculcated when you've got to wait five seconds after every major encounter.
Strider 2 released during a period when action platformers were nearly nonexistent in the arcades, and a 30-minute experience - which is about how long it takes to beat the game once you know what you're doing - wasn't going to really cut it on the PS1. And so the series went back into dormancy until 2014, when Capcom once again enlisted the services of a third party. Double Helix Games' Strider is yet another retread of Hiryu versus Meio, but there's a surprising ton of DNA from NES Strider present. These go from the music, which features an awesome remix of the NES game's level 1 Kazakh theme, to the decision to make Hiryu's journey into a full-fledged Metroidvania.
Double Helix clearly poured a lot of love into their work, and I give 'em props for that NES inspiration. But there's something missing from the experience, which is probably why you don't often see 2014 Strider on lists of the best recent Metroidvanias. Unlike the world-spanning levels of the other Striders, this one takes place solely in Kazakh, which is large but very samey. As a result, the game feels padded despite not being terribly long, and the in-game map is far too confusing due to different planes that Hiryu can jump across. While Metroidvanias are one of the few genres that tend to activate my completionist tendencies, I never felt the need to explore every nook and cranny or snag every ability. It's a shame, because Double Helix was almost there in melding Strider's disparate gameplay styles and finally bringing Hiryu back to mainstream stardom. But they didn't stick the landing, and Amazon Game Studios bought Double Helix right after Strider released, ensuring that the devs probably won't ever get the chance to improve on their formula.
It's been almost a decade since Hiryu got his own game. He most recently showed up in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, and Capcom threw Strider fans a bone with the character Zeku in Street Fighter V, who has a Hiryu-style skin and is said to be the dude who founded the entire Strider order. All of this is neat, but it's baffling that Hiryu - despite being one of the coolest ninjas in gaming - has never had a solo title truly take off since his debut. Some of this might be due to the fact that Capcom has to credit (and presumably pay) Moto Kikaku whenever Hiryu appears, and one could argue that the original arcade game's balls-to-the-wall action and high difficulty don't have a place in Capcom's catalog any longer, or at least aren't as money-printing as new Monster Hunters and Resident Evils. But I think you could easily make something like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice starring Strider Hiryu, and I wish someone would. After all, we're talking about one cool ass Cold War ninja here, and he deserves to shine once more.
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