The 1992 PC Engine Super CD-ROM shooter God Panic: Shijō Saikyō Gunden (“God Panic: Supreme Strongest Army”) is a genuine oddity. One barely documented on the English language Internet, to the extent that I had to rely on a somewhat dodgy machine translation of the Japanese manual to have any idea what it was even supposed to be about. We know it was sold by Teichiku, a nearly century-old record company that had a brief, largely unremarkable fling with video game publishing in the ’90s. The developers behind it seem to have been Sting, an outfit founded in 1989 by some ex-Compile employees. Compile? As in my favorite shootgame studio of all-time? Yup! I’m sad to say, however, that fans of such legendary Compile titles as Blazing Lazers and Musha really shouldn’t get their hopes up for this one.
One look at any given screen of God Panic will place it firmly in the wacky cute-’em-up subgenre, à la the better known TwinBee and Parodius franchises. Each of its stages has a silly, seemingly arbitrary theme like music, baseball, or Japanese mythology. Your “ship” is a little anthropomorphic ninja rodent fellow named Mouse Boy who gets contacted by none other than God himself and asked to fly off and save the day when an attempt to create a new universe goes awry and results in a hoard of kooky monsters appearing to wreak havoc.
Story-wise, that’s all you should need to underpin a quality shooting experience. Pity the gameplay isn’t there to support it. God Panic is such a bare-bones, perfunctory feeling product that there honestly isn’t much in the way of design or mechanics to comment on. Mouse Boy has a single linear weapon upgrade path that first sees his standard straight shot get augmented by a pair of small option satellites. These satellites then upgrade to three increasingly powerful shot types (lasers, lighting, homing) as more power-up icons are collected. A limited stock of up to five bombs allows for clearing away enemy shots in a pinch while also dishing out heavy damage across most of the screen. Other than that, there are collectable speed-up icons as well as ones that will either restore one pip on Mouse Boy’s health bar or expand said bar from its starting capacity of three up to a maximum of six.
Basic as that all is, it’s the level design here that truly let me down. God Panic’s five stages are short, often wrapping up just when I thought they were getting mildly exciting. Worse yet, the designers had the nerve to pull the rather cheap trick of making you play through them all twice via a second loop before you can fight the final boss and see the ending. The only concession to how tedious this obviously is is that second loop versions of levels are recolored and most (though not all) of the enemies are given new sprites. There’s a spooky Halloween angle to the redone art, such as giving the disrobing geisha enemies from stage three purple skin and bat wings. In my opinion, it’s not enough to compensate for the levels themselves being fundamentally unchanged.
On the plus side, God Panic’s soundtrack is interesting. Not spectacular, mind you, only strange and eclectic enough to stand out. You get obvious jokey homages to Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” sprinkled in amongst moody piano dirges and a ragtime end credits. It’s a proper trip and makes listening to God Panic arguably more fun than playing it. It’s also the sole justification I can spot for why the game needed to ship on a CD-ROM as opposed to a simple HuCard.
Between the refillable health bar and stock of three continues that allow you to keep on playing right on the spot you died with no break in the action, God Panic is notably easy by genre standards. I would cite that as a potential point in its favor, since I consider beginner-friendly shooters a very good thing in general. Alas, it just so happens that the PC Engine is already home to multiple great works in this vein, most notably Star Parodier, which presents much the same style of comedic vertical scrolling action with exponentially more depth and polish. Not to mention Air Zonk, Coryoon, Magical Chase, Seirei Senshi Spriggan…I could go on, but you get the idea. If you’re a PC Engine fanatic like me and bound to get around to the deepest of deep cuts like this eventually, you probably won’t hate it. It’s too trifling for that. That said, don’t expect to love it, either, as the minimal effort invested marks it as one of the least essential games of its kind on the platform.
Twentieth Century Gamer 