As a kid in the nineties, my experience with a lot of Genesis games (and NES games before them) was that I'd find the difficulty so insurmountable that the thought of ever getting very far seemed completely futile, and I'd inevitably stop playing after getting maybe two Game Overs in a single session. In fact, I'd say this was the norm for me, until the PS1 era. I think this was pretty common for kids at large, too.
Although I always liked video games, I think the high hurdle prevented them from being as compelling during that era as they later became, because it's just not that enticing to play something you know you're only going to see the first fifteen minutes of over and over. Although there were some hard games that my brother and I liked enough to rent repeatedly despite never getting very far (Sunset Riders, Splatterhouse 2 and 3), the rare games that we could beat almost invariably became all-time favorites. Shinobi 3, Bionic Commando (NES), Streets of Rage 2, Gunstar Heroes. Granted, all of the above examples are exceptionally high-quality titles, but I do think the fairness and gentleness baked into their difficulty is a major part of their appeal.
Things are a little different in my adult life: I have more patience, a greater capacity for critical thinking and strategizing, and simply more autonomy over when and how much time I can devote to slamming my head against a video game. In 2019 I forced myself through the agony of Ecco the Dolphin just because I wanted to see that gnarly xenomorph boss at the end. Last year I finally beat Comix Zone after 29 years. And so on.
When it comes to shmups, I pretty much ignored the genre wholesale as a kid, since they were the epitome of the aforementioned high hurdle. But if you're still playing Genesis or Saturn in the 2020s, you're really doing yourself a disservice by not being into shmups, so I've forced myself to acquire a taste for them over the years. Which hasn't been all that hard, since they are often full of cool sights and sounds.
Thunder Force IV's reputation as one of the best games on the Genesis and shmups of all time precedes it, but for my part, I found myself even in adulthood coming up against that same old chestnut, gaming over within the first fifteen minutes every single session. I could see that the visuals were incredible, the music incredible, the moment-to-moment gameplay satisfying and intense, but the game never got its hooks in me, because I just never seemed to get any better. I'd fire it up a couple times a year, wipe out before the end of stage 4, and say, "Guess I've seen all I'm gonna see."
That all changed this past weekend when I discovered the hidden* options menu, which lets you toggle the difficulty to "Easy."
(*The options menu might be mentioned in the manual I don't have, but it's locked behind a command input instead of just being selectable from the main menu like every other video game in history.)
Easy mode made all the difference. The balance felt close to perfect—not so easy as to trivialize the game, but easy enough to keep me continually invested, because I was improving significantly with each attempt. I still got about a dozen game overs before clearing the game, but they did nothing to demoralize me the way they had in every past session on Normal.
The day after clearing the game on Easy for the first time, I played it again and managed a 2CC run. The degree to which I improved within a 48-hour span was astounding, especially after not showing any discernible improvement in Normal mode for several years! I now feel like I’m ready to take on Normal, and more importantly, I’m now a believer. Thunder Force IV is the masterpiece you’ve heard it to be. It also joins such titles as the aforementioned Shinobi 3 and Gunstar Heroes as a quintessential showpiece for the Sega Genesis. When someone asks what the Sega Genesis is all about, this is the answer. The Genesis set a bar for action gaming that remains in effect. It exudes an intensity and a cool factor through its graphics and sound you just don’t get elsewhere.
With that all out of the way, I do have a couple points of critique, just for the sake of argument. Chiefly, I think the game has an issue with feedback that can be a tad severe at times. Action games live and die by their feedback—that is, the way the game tells you what effect your actions caused—not only because the feedback informs your actions, but because it’s what makes video games fun and satisfying. The general rule of thumb in TFIV is that if your shots burn orange when they impact a target, they’re doing damage; blue, and they’re not. There is no difference in sound, as far as I can tell. The problem is, some of your more bombastic weapons produce their own separate visual effects that seem to override this critical feedback. For example, the Blade, which is the upgraded version of your standard forward-shooting shot, seems to always burn orange, no matter what it hits. The Snake, which lobs twin streams of grenades above and below your ship, generates a persistent storm of orange explosions, so it can be impossible to discern if you’re hitting a target or not. Many bosses in this game require precise aiming at vulnerable spots surrounded by invulnerable casing or appendages, so this feedback issue can significantly impede progress, especially for newer players. I still don’t have a clear sense of how to hit the Stage 1 boss’s weak point with the Blade. For some reason, my DPS is always much higher when I just use the regular default shot. (You can see this in my playthrough video.) I also just found the damage feedback on bosses to be generally weak. Most bosses don’t actually offer any damage feedback apart from the color of your bullet impacts—no flashing sprites or juicy sound effect to indicate that you’re doing the right thing. This is particularly lame when you land a direct hit on the weak point with your Thunder Sword, a massive, chargeable energy sword, and there’s just no sign at all that it had any effect. Disappointing in a game this bombastic, especially when held up against the likes of Gunstar Heroes or Contra Hard Corps. Of course, it’s not too hard to forgive this issue when you consider how hard the game pushed the Genesis to run in the first place.
My other critique is that the game is sometimes a tad overindulgent, to where you’re just watching a thing happen for a really long time without much to do. The airship sequences in Stage 1 are the prime example. They’re cool setpieces the first couple times, but after dozens of playthroughs, they’re among the most boring parts of the game. Especially since they betray the longstanding shmup precedent of giant airship bosses that you get to dismantle piece by piece. You never get to destroy this one!
But now we’re splitting hairs. This is still one of the finest action games I’ve ever played, and a great ambassador for the Genesis. If you’ve tried to get into it and it hasn’t clicked for you yet, I definitely recommend playing on Easy (hold A+Start from the main menu to access the options) and cranking up the life count.
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