Battle Mania: Daiginjō (Mega Drive)

Prepare for trouble! And make it double!

I could swear it was only last year that I made the acquaintance of Vic Tokai’s unjustly obscure Genesis action romp, Trouble Shooter (aka Battle Mania in Japan). Turns out it was all the way back in 2021! It’s sobering just how fungible memory can be. In any case, this fast-paced, quirky, and accessible gem of a shooter instantly became one of my favorite games of its kind for the system.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that it had a Japanese-exclusive Mega Drive sequel released in 1993 called Battle Mania: Daiginjō. The term daiginjō is used to denote the finest quality rice wine. In other words, the developers are promising a more refined, top-shelf take on the original’s formula. Sign me up for that!

Daiginjō resumes the comic exploits of two teenage girl mercenaries with big guns and jetpacks named Mania and Maria, or Madison and Crystal in the English localization. This legally-distinct Dirty Pair (Soiled Duo?) is once again tasked with saving the world from a random bunch of weirdo baddies while hopefully also bringing in enough cash for junk food and car repairs. The tone is consistently zany, complete with heroes and villains alike regularly breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge that they’re in a silly video game. It’s well worth checking out the English fan translation by Jon Najar for this reason alone.

Gameplay-wise, this is an all-around bigger, better Trouble Shooter. There are nine stages to blast through instead of six, representing a satisfying mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling segments. The control options now include eight-way shooting rather than limiting you to firing straight left and right. Oddly, you will need to go into the options menu and manually enable eight-way shooting, as the old method remains the default. Why you wouldn’t want to is frankly beyond me, though. The added offensive flexibility elevates Daiginjō tremendously and most enemy and boss patterns seem tailored to work in harmony with it.

The rest of the mechanics should be quite familiar to Trouble Shooter veterans. While you technically control both girls simultaneously, Mania/Madison is the only one who can take damage. This takes a little getting used to when it comes to dodging enemy attacks. Eventually, though, you’ll learn to keep your eyes focused on Mania. Your standard rapid-fire shot is complimented by your choice of several limited use sub-weapons that do things like sweep the screen with lightning or cause Mania to sprout giant chainsaw blades for a short time. Sub-weapon activation is dependent on a charge meter that empties with each use and slowly refills thereafter. A life bar system is in effect and running out of health results in a game over. Extra hit points and continues naturally accrue at a brisk pace, however, so there’s ample resources available to see you through to the end credits. Funnily enough, every hit taken is punctuated by a voice clip of Mania yelling “Shit!” I have to assume that would have been omitted in a hypothetical international release.

On the audiovisual side, Daiginjō has also received a serious shot in the arm. The graphics pack much greater detail and the soundtrack is downright intense. Certainly more intense than I expected for such a goofy premise. Kudos to composers Shigenori Masuko, Yoko Suzuki, and Fumito Tamayama because some of this stuff rocks almost as hard M.U.S.H.A. or Thunder Force IV! This is easily one of the best looking and sounding Mega Drive releases overall, something I couldn’t imagine anyone saying of Trouble Shooter.

In short, Battle Mania: Daiginjō delivers on its subtitle’s promise and then some. Trouble Shooter was a modest, if charming little game. Its sequel is big, bold, and polished to a mirror sheen, all without sacrificing an ounce of that offbeat charm. Something this superlative coming courtesy of an otherwise mid-tier studio like Vic Tokai has to rate as a minor miracle. Such a shame that it’s never been released outside its native territory and that Mania and Maria disappeared from the gaming landscape altogether following their brief cameo in another Japan-only title, 2001’s Segagaga for the Dreamcast. They’ll always be two of my favorite protagonists to come out of the 16-bit era. I’m glad they were at least treated to one hell of a swan song.

Gley Lancer (Mega Drive)

Even a system as famous for its spaceship shooters as the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive has its share of noteworthy regional exclusives that North Americans like myself missed out on back in the day. Take Gley Lancer. This much sought after side-scroller was released exclusively in Japan and South Korea in 1992 by Masaya, the same branch of Nippon Computer Systems (NCS) that brought us Wings of Wor, Langrisser, and the utterly bonkers Cho Aniki series. Gley Lancer’s initial limited distribution led to massively inflated secondary market prices, a situation that persisted for decades until the game finally received physical and digital re-releases across a host of platforms in 2021 and 2022. ’92 originals are still pricey, mind you, just not “whole paycheck” pricey.

So what’s a gley and how does one lance it? At first, I suspected that the name represents the same sort of accidental L/R swap that routinely cropped up when old Japanese games dabbled in the Roman alphabet. The player ship here is certainly grey, after all. Then again, it’s not like this was changed when we did eventually see an official English translation in 2021, so maybe Masaya just loves the sound of it.

In any case, the Gley Lancer, or Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer, to give it its full title, is humanity’s top-of-the-line prototype starfighter in the oh-so-distant year 2025. It was designed by the Earth Federation Navy to repel a powerful alien invasion fleet. When the aliens capture the Earth flagship Oberon, piloted by Admiral Ken Cabrock, his daughter Lucia is distraught. Doubly so when her superiors deem a rescue mission too risky. Despite only being a lowly ensign, Lucia decides to steal the Gley Lancer prototype and blast off to save her father before it’s too late. Honestly, it’s not a bad little story by shooting game standards and the cut scenes supporting it are pretty dang snazzy. I always appreciate when developers go above and beyond the genre norm by giving you some proper characters to engage with.

Once you’re underway, you can start to dig into what makes Gley Lancer truly shine on the gameplay front: Its simple, yet remarkably robust weapon mechanics. Your main ship is limited to a basic straight shot, so you’ll be relying on satellite pods called “movers” for the lion’s share of your firepower. While movers superficially resemble the better known options from Konami’s Gradius, they’re much more flexible in their application. You can select between seven distinct mover behavior patterns. Perhaps you want to have them point in the direction you’re traveling, or the opposite one, or rotate around you, or auto-target whatever’s nearest to them, and so on. Many mover configurations also allow you to hold down a button in order to halt their regular motion and lock them into a specific firing angle.

On top of that, movers are cabable of emitting seven different shot types. These include spread shots, narrow focus lasers, flamethrowers, and ricocheting green blobs, among others. Seven awesome weapons and seven ways to employ them make for a healthy amount of player experimentation and replay value.

Glay Lancer’s eleven stages are similarly varied, presenting a mix of wide-open spaces and claustrophobic interiors that collectively force you to make smart use of your ship’s ability to toggle between four speed settings on the fly. The environments themselves are boilerplate sci-fi: Space scenes, alien planets, cavernous techno-bases, etc. That said, they’re gorgeous examples of the form, with plenty of vivid color and parallax depth. These lush visuals are further bolstered by one of the finest Mega Drive soundtracks I’ve heard to date. Composer Noriyuki Iwadare (Zero Wing, Lunar, Grandia) pulled out all the stops to bless us with this FM synth tour de force. Good enough to listen to outside the game itself? You bet!

Assuming no major mistakes, a complete playthrough of Gley Lancer clocks in at a fairly substantial forty minutes. A new player is likely to take much longer, of course, since one-hit deaths are the rule and dying results in a trip back to the most recent checkpoint sans movers. Despite this, I actually found Gley Lancer to be one of the more forgiving Mega Drive shooters, owing to its unlimited continues, frequent checkponts, and the ease with which you can rack up extra lives. Two tougher difficulty settings are also available if that’s not your cup of tea.

Whether in terms of quality, quantity, or accessibility, Gley Lancer represents a real bounty for old-school shooting enthusiasts. One precious few of its contemporaries can match, let alone exceed. It’s such a solid piece of work, in fact, that the closest it has a bona fide shortcoming is the way it falls just short of being as slick and polished as the top-shelf works by Compile (MUSHA) and Technosoft (Thunder Force III and IV) that run on the same hardware. Still, I’m confident that if it had seen the light of day here back in the early ’90s, it would now be fondly remembered as part of the upper 10% or so of Genesis shooters. It’s gleat!

Pulseman (Mega Drive)

The 1994 action-platformer Pulseman debuted at a critical juncture for its then-obscure developer, Game Freak. It was the tiny studio’s seventh game, with none other than 1996’s Pokémon waiting in the wings as the lucky number eight that would forever define their creative destiny going forward. As such, Pulseman can be considered the last gasp of the plucky, independent, “throw whatever we can think of at the wall and see what sticks” Game Freak. With a bottomless triple-A gold mine to tend, they would never again be just a close-knit group of former gaming fanzine contributors going their own way. They would be rich as Croesus, however, so let’s not feel too bad for them, eh?

Mere proximity to Pokémon isn’t the only interesting thing about Pulseman’s release, either. Often described as a Japanese Mega Drive exclusive, it was briefly made available for download in North America via the niche Sega Channel subscription service, similar to Alien Soldier and Mega Man: The Wily Wars. In Pulseman’s case, though, a game centered on a half-human, half-digital superhero helping to pioneer commercial online software distribution seems especially fitting.

You heard right: Our main character is literally part man and part code, conceived when his father, the genius scientist Dr. Yoshiyama, not only invented an artificial intelligence, but fell in love with it and found a way to physically enter his computer Tron style and…make love to it, I guess. And they say Donatello does machines! Anyway, the downside of this bizarre miracle is that all that time spent getting busy in the computer somehow corrupted Yoshiyama’s mind and he returned to the real world as the evil megalomaniac Dr. Waruyama. Pulseman must now use his unique ability to move freely between both realms to battle his own father’s world threatening cyberterrorist organization, the Galaxy Gang.

Once you get past the wild premise, Pulseman’s gameplay is relatively simple to grasp. To me, it handles like a cross between the early Sonic the Hedgehog outings and Konami’s Rocket Knight Adventures. There’s no real Mega Man influence on display, surprisingly, despite the name and technological theme. Pulseman can run, jump, and attack nearby foes with punches and kicks. Running continuously for a short distance or performing a quick dash with a double tap of the direction pad will infuse Pulseman with an electric charge. This charge can then be expended in one of two ways. The first option is a ranged electricity blast and the second, much more important one, is Pulseman’s signature move, the Volteccer (aka Volt Tackle). This launches Pulseman upward at a 45-degree angle, allowing him to pinball off walls and plow through most enemies and environmental hazards unharmed. Sonic’s spin dash meets Sparkster’s rocket pack, in other words.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Pulseman is a game about mastering the Volteccer. Using it to maneuver through stages proficiently is the key to overcoming almost every challenge that can’t be met with your basic jump and punch. This leads to a heavy focus on level design over combat, to the extent that many locations have a desolate vibe to them due to being all but bereft of enemies. Those few that do appear are usually no match for the invincible Volteccer. Pulseman’s seemingly modest three-hit health bar can go a long way against such sparse opposition.

The seven multi-part stages are a trip to behold, since Game Freak really leaned into the whole cyber world concept to deliver one psychedelic neon fever dream of a background after another. Although I can appreciate the unbridled creativity on display, it does occasionally veer into garish and even potentially hazardous territory. Seizure sufferers beware! Actual layouts are impressively varied and generally do a fine job of playing to Pulseman’s abilities, with one infuriating exception in the form of an underwater segment that’s effectively one big, stupid leap of faith down a spike-filled shaft. To hell with that bit. Boss fights are an unqualified highlight, thankfully, and somewhat make up for all the sparsely populated main areas. While I wouldn’t call them tough per se, they all look cool and have well-thought-out patterns that don’t repeat. Beating one is always satisfying.

This is an odd one for me. There’s certainly a lot to like in Pulseman. I found the sheer quirkiness of the plot and characters quite endearing. It controls well, and isn’t too difficult to get into. Five continue limit aside, I was still able to clear it my first attempt. It’s also undoubtedly one of the best looking Mega Drive releases overall, sporting great use of color, gorgeous pixel art, smooth animation, and all those mind-bending backgrounds. It doesn’t disappoint in the audio department, either, with proper voiced cut scene dialog and an energetic Junichi Masuda soundtrack that suits the high-tech superhero concept to a T. On the downside, so many of these levels come off as empty and there’s little to keep you engaged once you’ve gained a firm grasp of ricocheting around with the Volteccer. If anything, my playthrough felt a tad overlong at 60-90 minutes.

On balance, I do recommend Pulseman. It’s a quality platformer that warrants more in the way of a legacy than Volt Tackle’s status as a staple attack for Pikachu and his fellow electric Pokémon. If history had been slightly different, we might have gotten a sequel to iron out the few kinks in the core design and possibly give the lead a better shot at becoming an enduring part of the gaming landscape than he ever had as a late period Mega Drive star. You know, more of a pulse, man.

Rent A Hero (Mega Drive)

There’s no way I wasn’t going to get around to Rent A Hero eventually. A wacky Japan-exclusive action-adventure by Sega? That’s how you pitch me a game! Alas, there truly are no sure things in this world, and Rent A Hero stands as proof positive that a brilliant premise alone does not a brilliant product make. Before I delve into the tragic details, however, allow me to extend kudos to RedComet, NikcDC, and Paul Jensen for their excellent fan translation. They did an admirable job adapting mountains of what I imagine to be very culturally-specific comedy.

Rent A Hero functions primarily as a send-up of costumed superheroes as they’re depicted in live-action Japanese tokusatsu (“special effects”) shows such as Kamen Rider and Super Sentai (aka Power Rangers). The twist is that the silent protagonist is an ordinary suburban teenager who gets roped into renting his high-tech combat suit on a month-to-month basis. Miss a payment, and it’ll be repossessed! There’s some sly social commentary centered on the notion that capitalism is capable of turning the most noble and romantic of aspirations into yet another subsistence grind. Who’s to say that wouldn’t be as true of comic book heroics as it is of, oh, I don’t know…video game design?

This tongue-in-cheek tone is by far Rent A Hero’s greatest asset. It primarily takes the form of kooky NPC dialog that wouldn’t be out of place in Nintendo’s Mother/Earthbound series. Many of Aero City’s residents, crooks and law-abiding citizens alike, have some form of strange obsession or neurosis on full display and there’s no shortage of chuckles to be had at their expense. Enjoy it while you can, because the remainder of the laughs are all on you.

I cannot overstate just how dreadful this gameplay is. The beat-’em-up style side-view combat interludes are stiff, choppy, and plagued by hit detection so random that I could almost believe it was based on virtual dice rolls at times. Enemy variety is next to nonexistent, too, so I hope you don’t mind constantly pummeling the same five dim mooks. A steady stream of interesting new abilities for your suit might have made this whole process a smidge less monotonous. No such luck, though, as your character controls essentially the same throughout.

When you’re not busy fighting, you’re marching back and forth between the same small set of visually drab urban locations, listening to the 16-bit equivalent of elevator music as you hunt down whichever NPC you’re supposed to speak to in order to advance to the next phase of your current mission. You walk, you talk, you engage in some profoundly unsatisfying fisticuffs, then you go home and check your computer for instructions on where to walk next. That’s the game. That, and changing out your batteries.

Yes, your hero suit runs off common alkaline batteries. This one mildly amusing gag (and that’s being generous) quickly devolves into pure annoyance. Simply moving around drains power at an unreasonable rate. Actually using any of your special ranged attacks in combat will deplete it to the tune of 10% or more per shot. Of course, your limited inventory will only allow you to carry a handful of spare batteries at a time, forcing you to work constant impromptu shopping trips into your already dull routine. Whoever thought this was a worthy idea can go lick a nine-volt.

It’s tedious, it’s ugly, and it drags on way too long for its own good. Yet as disappointing as I found Rent A Hero to be, Sega seems to carry quite the torch for it. It got a full 3-D remake on Dreamcast and X-Box (Rent A Hero No.1), the main character appeared as a selectable combatant in Fighters Megamix for the Saturn, and there was even brief talk of a feature film adaptation circa 2016. That’s more love than a lot of the company’s fan favorite properties like Streets of Rage got over that same period!

Bottom line: If you’re in the mood for a weird old Sega game where you wander around a city performing mundane errands and awkwardly punching the occasional gangster, play Shenmue.

Twinkle Tale (Mega Drive)

Twinkle, twinkle, little game,
Too bad your cost is a shame!

Much of the world recalls Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis console as a massive success. One of the few exceptions is the machine’s own home turf, Japan, where is was vastly outsold by both the Super Famicom and PC Engine. A lingering side-effect of this domestic underperformance is the sky-high prices some of the more popular Japanese Mega Drive exclusives command decades later. Such a one is my subject today, the 1992 run-and-gun shooter Twinkle Tale. With original copies currently selling for $400 and up, this is yet another case where I’m content to thank heaven for flash cartridges.

Twinkle Tale is the product of ZAP Corporation, a relatively minor outfit that dealt primarily with the MSX and other Japanese home computer platforms. Their only work to see release here in North America was the decidedly average TurboGrafx-16 spaceship shooter Dead Moon. Twinkle Tale ended up being ZAP’s swan song. That’s unfortunate, as it’s an overall solid take on the genre. Fans of better-known titles like Mercs, Shock Troopers, and Pocky & Rocky will find much to appreciate here.

Set in the enchanted world of Alpherion, Twinkle Tales stars the apprentice wizard Saria. One day, her master Olof sends her on an errand to the fortune teller Raza. Upon Saria’s arrival, Raza delivers the alarming news that a fellow magician by the name of Gadou has raised an army of monsters and is already in the process of using it to abduct Olof and the rest of the masters in hopes of harnessing their combined power to summon an unstoppable demon from hell. This leaves the inexperienced Saria as Alpherion’s last hope. Fortunately, Raza gifts her three powerful pieces of magic jewelry to serve as weapons against Gadou’s minions.

She’ll need all that firepower and more. The nine stages ahead are no joke. They teem with opponents large and small, as well as falling rocks, flame geysers, and other environmental hazards. Avoiding all this nastiness and fighting back effectively requires you to manage Saria’s zippy movement, her three main weapons, and a limited inventory of screen-wide “super bomb” spell attacks simultaneously. Even with a health bar that gradually expands from three hits at the start to a full eight by journey’s end, it’s not easy. Continues are also limited, but at least the game is pretty generous when it comes to doling out extra lives.

Apart from just not getting hit, the key to success is choosing the right weapon to take on a given enemy type or formation. Saria’s arsenal consists of three tried-and-true shooter archetypes: A strong, narrow straight shot, a slightly weaker spread shot, and a homing shot that deals the lowest damage of all. Each can be enhanced a total of twice with power-up icons, although every hit from an enemy will then lower the current weapon’s power level a step, to a minimum of one. It’s a simple system that still allows for fair amount of strategy. For example, there’s the classic dilemma of whether to save a level three weapon for a boss battle or to risk using it to fend off lesser enemies on the way to said boss.

With its cartoon fantasy aesthetic and frantic overhead view action, Twinkle Tale is frequently likened to Natsume’s Pocky & Rocky. While superficially apt, this comparison ultimately does Twinkle Tale no favors. It suffers from a couple of significant drawbacks that prevent it from reaching the same heights as its Super Nintendo rival. For starters, it’s a single-player only experience. As any arcade veteran will tell you, run-and-guns like this are akin to beat-’em-ups and tournament fighters in that they tend to feel incomplete without a buddy battling away by your side. The lack of such a feature here is therefore baffling.

I also would have appreciated more depth to Saria’s moveset. Pocky & Rocky allowed for projectile deflecting melee swipes and evasive slides in addition to the basic running, shooting, and bombing. These sorts of extra maneuvers make for a more interesting playthrough by enabling the designers to include enemy patterns and attacks that wouldn’t be fair if the player’s defensive options were restricted to standard eight-way movement. Their omission is understandable in light of the Mega Drive’s default three-button controller, however.

These limitations don’t ruin Twinkle Tale by any stretch of the imagination, even if they do keep it out of the running for the title of best 16-bit run-and-gun. It looks and sounds wonderful, with the pulse-pounding FM synth music being a particular highlight. Saria controls well and mastering her three weapons is great fun. So long as don’t mind having to go it alone and can avoid paying a fortune for the privilege, the challenge of delivering Alpherion from evil should prove quite the welcome one.

Zero Wing (Mega Drive)

Dancing space raisins? Can’t say I expected that.

Welcome to my first ever re-review! My initial published take on meme-famous shooter Zero Wing appeared on the defunct Classicgaming.net all the way back in March of 2001. Holy hell, does that make me ancient. Just think: This Mega Drive edition of the game wasn’t even ten years old at that time. People born the day my original review of it went up are eligible to vote now. Jesus.

My decision to examine Zero Wing in depth back then was based on the fact that “all your base” references were rampant online, yet discussion of its origin and merits as a video game were much harder to come by. Sliding my middle-aged angst over to the back burner for the time being, I see no reason why I can’t chart a similar course this time around. Jokes about its botched translation may be as outdated as Flash animation, but it’s not like the game itself become any more of a household name over the years.

This lack of familiarity with the game proper makes sense from a North American perspective. While the 1989 arcade original did show up here courtesy of manufacturer Williams, it was hardly a common sight in the wild. There were no home versions available, either. That mangled English intro scene that took the world by storm last decade? Exclusive to the 1992 European Mega Drive release. Zero Wing is the brainchild of the late lamented Toaplan, who forged themselves a solid reputation on the backs of many popular overhead shoot-’em-ups of the ’80s and ’90s (Tiger Heli, Fire Shark, Truxton, Batsugun, etc). It’s one of only two side-scrolling shooters the studio ever produced, the other being Hellfire from that same year.

At least its laughing stock of an opening makes Zero Wing’s plot better known than most. The year is 2101 and a United Nations space vessel is suddenly attacked (“Somebody set up us the bomb”) by the alien overlord CATS, who appears on the ship’s view screen and gloats that he’s seized control of all the U.N.’s bases in his bid to conquer Earth (“All your base are belong to us”). Fortunately, a lone ZIG fighter makes it out of the doomed ship in the nick of time and promptly heads off to put an end to CATS. “Move ‘ZIG’. For great justice.” And yes, both CATS and ZIG are rendered that way in the official material. Are they supposed to be acronyms or something? Beats me.

In keeping with genre convention, all movement for great justice is of the left-to-right variety and split up between eight stages, each with its own end boss. There’s nothing too special here conceptually. You get a couple of space-themed areas, an H.R. Giger-inspired fleshy one, and a lot of abstract techno-fortresses that honestly start to blend together after a while. The scrolling itself is definitely on the slow side and this, in conjunction with the cramped layouts and moving stage elements, makes comparison with a certain seminal Irem shooter inevitable. Yes, Zero Wing very much resembles an “R-Type lite” with a couple key differences.

One plus for many will be Zero Wing’s lesser difficulty. Skillful movement and some degree of memorization are still required to do well, but the progression is far less rigid overall than the fearsome R-Type’s, with fewer instances of needing to be in the exact right place at the exact right time or else. The designers are also pretty generous with the continues. They’re unlimited on the default setting and the hardest mode available still allows for a hefty fifteen. That’s 48 lives, not counting any extras you manage to rack up by scoring well. Downright cushy!

On the downside, there really isn’t that much to sink your teeth into here. Horizontal shooters have a reputation for being slower and more technical than their vertically-scrolling cousins, which traditionally favor fast, no-frills action with a looser flow. Zero Wing somewhat awkwardly combines the measured pace and finicky maneuvering of a horizontal shooter with the simplistic mechanics of a vertical one. You get a choice of three basic weapons (spread shot, straight laser, homing), a couple of firepower multiplying drones, and not much else. There’s no power-up menu to juggle as in Gradius, no charge shot to manage or Force pod to direct around the screen as in R-Type, not even an inventory of specialized weapons to cycle though on the fly as in Thunder Force or Zero Wing’s own sister game Hellfire. Zero Wing does sport one unique gameplay feature in the form of your ZIG’s short range tractor beam, which can grab onto smaller enemies and suspend them helplessly in front of your craft, where they can then double as shields or extra projectiles as needed. It’s a cute touch and fun to use. I hesitate to call it deep, however.

At its heart, this is a prime example of a “me, too” title that comes off rather shallow next to the true greats that inspired it. It looks alright and the music genuinely cooks, but its own pacing betrays it by giving you all the time in the world to notice the lack of meat on its bones. The loss of the two-player simultaneous option from the arcade is a bummer, too. Once you get past that glorious train wreck of an opening sequence, Zero Wing becomes a contender for the plainest space shooting exercise available on Sega’s 16-bit platform. That’s not to say it’s objectionable, mind you. It’s just not the sort of first water gem that sinks its hooks into players and makes new shooter fans of them on the spot. Toaplan was clearly operating outside their comfort zone here and the result is best enjoyed as a light palate cleanser between other, more substantial works in the same vein.

Anyway, time for me to sit here feeling old and wistful some more. The CATS in the cradle and the silver spoon….

Tōgi Ō: King Colossus (Mega Drive)

Whoa, what’s this? A 16-bit action RPG? From Sega, no less? How have I never heard about this one until just recently? Probably because 1992’s Tōgi Ō: King Colossus (literally, and rather redundantly, “Fighting King: King Colossus”) is a text-heavy Japan-exclusive release. Not even the 2006 English fan translation by M.I.J.E.T., professional as it is, seems to have been able to drum up much awareness of it in the West. It’s our loss. King Colossus is good fun while it lasts, with the caveat that its strict linear progression and single-minded action focus may leave some fans of the genre wanting more.

A major selling point for King Colossus in Japan was its director, manga artist Makoto Ogino. He’s best known for his long-running Kujaku Ō (“Peacock King”) series. Dude’s all about the kings, I guess. Kujaku Ō has received multiple video game adaptations of its own over the years, some of which (SpellCaster, Mystic Defender) would see release outside Japan. Do you actually need to know anything about Kujaku Ō to understand King Colossus? No. The latter seems to have been a wholly original, self-contained project. I’m just dropping some trivia here for my fellow oddballs who enjoy following these little creative breadcrumb trails.

King Colossus casts the player as a strapping orphan lad (with no specific default name) who’s apparently been raised in a shack in the middle of the woods by a grumpy old hermit. A routine errand to retrieve a sword owned by said hermit from a nearby blacksmith brings our sheltered protagonist into conflict with the cult of the Dark God Gryuud, whose twisted servants have seized control of the land and are ruling it with the proverbial iron fist. Anyone remotely acquainted with basic fantasy clichés can see where this is going. Could it be that our hero has a special destiny related to his shrouded origins? One that makes him the only man capable of sorting out this whole Gryuud situation? The game doesn’t go out of its way to show fans of the genre anything they haven’t seen before and the broad strokes narrative feel perfunctory at best. One point in King Colossus’ favor, at least for me, is that its world has a gritty pulp swords and sorcery edge to it. We get dark gods, human sacrifice, pit fighting, and plenty of other trappings that would be right at home in a classic Conan yarn. You won’t find any cutesy monsters or wacky anime hijinks here.

If the storytelling favors style over substance, the gameplay goes to even greater extremes by remorselessly paring away every shred of the standard overhead action RPG formula that isn’t beating up on bad guys and leveling up. There’s no overworld to explore, no towns, no currency to collect or shops to spend it in, and the gear you’ll acquire is limited to weapons, armor, stat-boosting magic jewelry, and healing herbs. King Colossus teases you with glimpses of a world map on occasion, but this is more akin to the stylized level diagrams that appear between stages in Castlevania or Ghosts ‘n Goblins than a real navigation tool. Instead of gathering clues and forging your own path, you’ll be ushered directly from dungeon to dungeon with none of that pesky thinking required.

The dungeons themselves don’t offer much in the way of puzzles and are primarily “hack your way to the boss” affairs with a side of basic platforming. At least the combat itself is fairly well-realized. You’re able to bring the pain with an assortment of swords, spears, axes, chains, crossbows, and magic staves. Each weapon type has its own distinct feel and is quite useful against the enemy horde, with one glaring exception: Swords. The swords are bloody awful in this game. They have virtually no reach, which makes getting close enough to land a hit with one a significant, yet completely unnecessary risk. This flaw would be easier to overlook if the game’s plot didn’t make such a big deal out of one specific magic sword with a special connection to the main character’s backstory. You go on a quest to get it, another quest to power it up, and you’re still likely to let it sit in your inventory unused. If I wanted to be a real highfalutin’ game critic for once, I could totally call ludonarrative dissonance on this one. In the interest of not asphyxiating on my own farts, however, I’ll stick with declaring it a missed opportunity.

There’s a small selection of magic at your command, too; five spells in all. You have a couple of direct damage dealers, an energy shield, a utilitarian warp back to the start of the current dungeon, and, most importantly, Time Stop. Time Stop makes for an auto-win against pretty much anything, allowing you to pile hit after hit on the defenseless opposition. It even works on bosses! Take it from me: Whenever you’re given access to a time stopping power that works in boss fights (Kick Master, Astyanax), you save all your magic points for that if you know what’s good for you. Strangely, you have access to all five of your powers from the very start of the game. While you do earn more magic points as you level-up, making it possible to cast spells more frequently, you’ll never learn an entirely new one. Instead, your character growth is purely numeric, which is another missed opportunity in my book. Fighting your way through dungeons feels about the same at level twenty as it does at level one.

Those last four paragraphs may read like one huge extended windup before I finally come down hard on King Colossus and tell you that it’s just not worth your time. Hardly! Sure, the story is trite and the RPG gameplay has been simplified to the utmost. Thankfully, though, the core hack and slash dungeon delving still makes for a decent enough ride on its own and the game’s brisk pacing suits it well. After all, the obvious upside to never having to wonder where to go or what to do next is that you’re effectively guaranteed to always be making steady progress. You can even save at any time, a rare luxury in a console game of the era. Basically, King Colossus knows exactly what it wants to be and doesn’t overstay its welcome. As previously stated, it also earns major bonus points for managing to look and sound every bit the part of a grim saga from the pen of Robert E. Howard himself. The soundtrack in particular strikes just the right balance of eldritch mystery and pulse-pounding danger, proving (as did Golden Axe, Alisia Dragoon, and Gauntlet IV) that the Mega Drive sound chip could be as effective a delivery vehicle for blood and thunder fantasy anthems as it was for the heavy metal of M.U.S.H.A. or the techno of Streets of Rage 2.

So King Colossus earns a moderate recommendation. It won’t exactly strain your brain, but it is a game that knows what’s best in life: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their pixels!

Alien Soldier (Mega Drive)

Hmm. Ninety-two deaths. I might need just a little more practice with this one.

Can you believe it’s taken me this long to dive into a Treasure game? This celebrated development house was founded in 1992 by a group of frustrated former Konami employees tired of spending their time working on endless samey sequels to long-running franchises like Castlevania and Contra. Led by Masato Maegawa, they set out reinvent themselves as gaming auteurs with a focus on original scenarios and innovative, frequently idiosyncratic mechanics. The newly-minted Treasure made good on these aspirations right out of the gate with their 1993 debut release, the acclaimed Mega Drive/Genesis run-and-gun Gunstar Heroes. Numerous quirky hits like platformer Dynamite Headdy and spaceship shooter Ikaruga would follow in the years to come, cementing Treasure’s reputation as a veritable wellspring of cult classic action titles.

By 1994, Sega’s Mega Drive/Genesis platform was on its last legs as a hot commercial prospect. The 32-bit Saturn and PlayStation would both be on the market by year’s end and the development community at large was shifting its focus accordingly. Treasure designer Hideyuki Suganami realized that this was his last chance to craft the ultimate Mega Drive run-and-gun game of his dreams. His goal was to push the system’s Motorola 68000 processor to its limits with massive sprites, blazing fast action, and bombastic pyrotechnics. The end result was 1995’s Alien Soldier, and the game’s goofy title screen tag line perfectly encapsulates Suganami’s design philosophy: “Visualshock! Speedshock! Soundshock! Now is the time to the 68000 heart on fire!”

Sounds badass, right? If you were a North American Genesis fan back in the day, you may be wondering why you never heard about this one. It’s probably because Alien Soldier wasn’t given a standard cartridge release here and was only available to play via the Sega Channel, a subscription-based game download service that didn’t exactly set the world on fire, leading to its unceremonious cancellation in 1998. This exclusivity  was apparently taken so seriously that Treasure added a region check function to the game’s code. Try to boot up an imported Japanese or European copy in your North American console and all you’ll be greeted with is a terse error message. ProTip: Use Game Genie code REBT-A6XN, REBT-A6XR, RECA-A60R to spoof your way past the region check in the Japanese NTSC version. You’re welcome.

In Alien Soldier, you play as Epsilon-Eagle, a hella fierce cyborg bird man who’s out to…do something. I think. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t really make heads or tails of this game’s story. It’s supposedly set in the distant year 2015 on a planet called either A-Earth or Sierra, depending on whether you’re playing the Japanese or European release. There are these artificially created mutants with superpowers and the ability to exist as parasites within human and machine hosts. Some of these creatures unite to form a terrorist organization called Scarlet and devote themselves to the extermination of regular humans. The leader of Scarlet is Epsilon-Eagle, until he’s deposed in a violent coup led by another mutant named Xi-Tiger. During this conflict, Epsilon-Eagle is wounded and flees into “the time-space continuum” to preserve himself, leaving the even more ruthless Xi-Tiger in charge of Scarlet. This process also splits Epsilon-Eagle into two separate beings somehow, one good and one evil. The good half of Epsilon-Eagle hides itself inside the body of an unnamed boy being used as a test subject in a laboratory where children with exceptional abilities are experimented on. Xi-Tiger tracks Epsilon-Eagle down and ends up killing one of the boy’s friends in the process. This causes the boy to fly into a rage and morph himself into the form of Epsilon-Eagle in order to get revenge on Xi-Tiger and Scarlet. Got all that? Basically, add a splash of X-Men and a dash of Akira to a heaping helping of good old-fashioned mad gibberish and you have Alien Soldier.

Though obviously not a proper sequel to Gunstar Heroes by any stretch of the imagination, Alien Soldier does share some significant gameplay elements with it. A few of the weapons function similarly, players are able to toggle between two different control setups (one allows for firing while moving and the other offers eight-way stationary fire), and one particularly goofy enemy from Gunstar shows up for a rematch here. The creative influence of Gunstar’s memorable transforming robot boss Seven Force is also strongly felt in what I found to be Alien Soldier’s most lengthy and difficult segment.

What truly sets Alien Soldier apart from Gunstar Heroes (and most other action games) is its unconventional structure. What we have here is an extended “boss rush” pitting Epsilon-Eagle against more than thirty of the largest and most intimidating freaks ever seen in a 16-bit game virtually back-to-back. There are brief interludes between many of the boss encounters where the player can swat down some easy cannon fodder enemies in order to replenish Epsilon-Eagle’s health reserves and possibly nab a weapon upgrade or two, but these rarely last more than a minute or so and it’s a huge stretch to liken them to the fully fleshed-out stages you’d blast your way through in a Contra game. They’re more akin to breathers or palate cleansers, really. This format, coupled with the game’s overall gonzo sci-fi theme, suggests to me a much flashier take on Capcom’s misunderstood NES gem Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight.

Taking down each boss is a remarkably technical business, far from the mindless shoot and dodge affair you might expect. At the outset, the player must choose the starting equipment for Epsilon-Eagle. Only a maximum of four of the game’s six guns and be carried at any one time and each has its own balance of speed, power, range, and ammo capacity. Beyond that, some enemies are weak, resistant, or completely immune to one or more of your weapons. There’s no one ideal loadout with which to take on the whole game, so tough choices must be made. It’s a smartly designed system. My only complaint stems from the way weapon switching is handled. Opening the menu doesn’t pause the action, meaning that Epsilon-Eagle is always stuck standing in place for a minimum of a second or two every time he needs to switch guns. It’s obnoxious at best and fatal at worst in the midst of a pitched battle.

Epsilon-Eagle’s movement options are also notably complex. He can run and jump, of course, as well as swap between the free and fixed weapon firing schemes mentioned above at will, halt his jumps at any point to hover in place for as long as desired, reverse his gravity and run along the ceiling (a la Irem’s Metal Storm), transform enemy projectiles into health pickups with a melee attack called the Counter Force, and perform an invincible dash maneuver known as the Zero Teleport. Because both Epsilon-Eagle and his foes are so large, skillful use of the Counter Force and Zero Teleport in particular are vital for effective evasion. Oh, and don’t forget that the Zero Teleport also doubles as a fiery super attack that can wreck many bosses in an instant, but only as long as Epsilon-Eagle is at maximum health.

It’s a lot to get a handle on and Alien Soldier doesn’t go out of its way to ease the player in, starting out intense and only getting crazier as it rolls on. The saving grace here is the lower of the game’s two difficulty settings, which allows for unlimited continues and passwords for every stage. Newcomers are able to practice all they want here before they consider challenging the “Superhard” setting, where continues are strictly limited and there are no passwords.

Is it ultimately worth the time to learn the ins and outs of Alien Soldier’s intricate take on run-and-gun combat? Hell, yes! Between the huge character sprites, beautiful backgrounds, pulse-pounding soundtrack, and buttery smooth combat, it really is a technical marvel on the humble Mega Drive. While controlling its oddball avian protagonist effectively takes practice, the sense of accomplishment attainable by executing a flawless series of parries and teleports to annihilate a once-imposing boss monster without suffering so much as a scratch in return really does justify the effort.

Alien Soldier’s one glaring flaw in my eyes is simply that its plot is simultaneously over and under-written to ludicrous extremes. The rambling opening text crawl devotes an eternity to detailing a near-incomprehensible conflict between Epsilon-Eagle and Xi-Tiger, only to then have Xi-Tiger bite the dust in level nine and Epsilon-Eagle proceed to keep on kicking the asses of assorted crazy robots and monsters across sixteen additional stages with the player having no clue about the whys and wherefores of it all. This may seem like an odd thing to focus on when I’ve personally deployed so many variants on the “Nobody plays actions games for the story” excuse over the years. Bear in mind, however, that this line is usually used to hand-wave away simplistic or clichéd storytelling. “Rescue the princess,” “halt the alien invasion,” that sort of deal. These setups may be boring in and of themselves, but they at least get the job done. Here, the chaotic stew of half-baked and non-existent plotting just makes it next to impossible to cultivate any true understanding of what your chicken-headed hero is supposed to be doing or why after the one-third mark.

Still, I’ll concede that this likely won’t trouble you for long. You’ll be too busy wondering exactly two things: What sort of demented monstrosity the game can possibly throw at you next and what tactics you’ll need to kill said monstrosity. Puking insect man? Sure. Big-nosed phallus monster shooting wasps out of its butt? Okay. Werewolf cowboy on a robo-horse? Why not? Alien Soldier is far too focused on its slick, savage journey to spare much thought for the destination. Approach it with that same mindset and you’re in for some of the most stimulating hardcore action gameplay ever devised.

Now, would you mind passing me the Tums? My 68000 heart is killing me.

Monster World IV (Mega Drive)

Too real, genie. Too real.

Back in February, I played through the fifth game in Westone’s Wonder Boy series: Wonder Boy in Monster World. Regrettably, I was none too impressed by that game’s flat presentation, unexceptional level design, and achingly slow combat. Among the options I presented in passing for a more satisfying action-adventure experience on the Genesis/Mega Drive was WBiMW’s Japan-exclusive sequel, Monster World IV. I’ve since acquired a lovely English-translated reproduction copy of this superior sequel, so I figure this a fine opportunity to give it the detailed treatment it deserves.

Monster World IV is the sixth and final game in the series, though it forgoes the Wonder Boy name completely, owing to its new protagonist, the green-haired Asha. A simple switch to Wonder Girl in order to maintain brand recognition seems like the obvious way to go. I suppose marketing departments work in mysterious ways.

One day, Asha hears voices on the wind fortelling doom for Monster World. Being the hero type, she promptly takes up her sword, bids her family farewell, and sets out from her remote village to help however she can. Arriving at a monster infested tower in the wilderness, she defeats its guardians and discovers a magic lamp housing a sarcastic genie who swiftly whisks her away to the bustling capital city of Rapadagna. Here the true nature of the threat to Monster World is slowly revealed.

As in previous series entries, the focus here is firmly on side-scrolling dungeon exploration and amassing the ever-larger reserves of gold needed to upgrade your hero’s arms and armor along the way. That said, I’m happy to report Monster World IV brings with it significant play control enhancements that make this process much more fun. Like Shion in the previous game, Asha can jump, climb ropes, swing her weapon, and block incoming attacks with her shield. New to this installment, she can also dash and execute upward and downward sword thrusts similar to the ones seen in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. These additions alone result in platforming and combat that’s faster and more strategic than ever before by series standards.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s also Asha’s pepelogoo to consider. Pepe who now? Well, it turns out pet pepelogoos are are all the rage in Rapadagna. Asha encounters hers not long after arriving in the city and the two are inseparable after that. These insanely adorable rabbit/cat hybrid critters fly through the air by flapping their ears and are basically Pokémon before Pokémon was a thing. They may not look it, but they’re also the Swiss Army knife of dungeon exploration. Asha relies on hers to double jump, glide, flip switches, sniff out secret doors, act as an improvised platform, and much more.

Between Asha and her newfound friend, there’s so much to master that you’ll likely barely notice the magic system from Wonder Boy in Monster World wasn’t carried forward. Really, it’s no great loss. You still have your magic lamp to return you to town instantly when you’re low on health in a dungeon and the remainder of the offensive spells from the last game are less necessary due to you having more attack options available by default this time around.

In other good news, the dungeons in Monster World IV have been reworked with an eye toward enhancing both their length and complexity. Some of the longer ones can easily require an hour or more to complete and proper puzzles (most of which revolve around creative pepelogoo use) play a much bigger role than before. This is a dramatic improvement over the short, simple dungeons of WBiMW, which derived most of their challege simply from being packed to the gills with tough enemies and high damage traps.

Of course, I have to mention Monster World IV’s stupendous graphics. These are some of the lushest backgrounds and best-animated sprites ever to grace Sega’s 16-bit machine. This might be the most Super Nintendo looking Mega Drive game I’ve ever encountered, if that makes any sense. The use of color is so sublime that the results seem almost too vivid for the hardware. There’s even one spellbinding sequence that appears to make use of a Mode 7 type background scaling effect! I’m guessing it’s actually accomplished via sprite scaling, similar to the pseudo-3D objects in classic Sega arcade games like Space Harrier, but it still took me by surprise. Great stuff.

There’s some equally great art direction informing all this technical wizardry, too. Monster World IV makes use of a whimsical Arabian Nights fantasy setting, replete with flashing scimitars, flying carpets, and the aforementioned genie of the lamp. In this way, it recalls Culture Brain’s The Magic of Scheherazade and anticipates WayForward’s Shantae. While it’s a fairly standard hero’s journey tale at heart (albeit one with some genuinely amusing dialogue throughout and a nice twist toward the end), I appreciate the effort made to give it a unique visual identity when compared to the rest of the series.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, there’s a lot to love about this one and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in Asha’s pointy-toed shoes. There are a few caveats worth mentioning, however. Nothing dealbreaking, at least not for me, but certainly worth being aware of up front.

For one thing, I found the music by Jin Watanabe to be a uniquely frustrating case. The quality of the audio itself is impeccable. These are some of the best sounding instruments I’ve ever heard on the console. Again, they’re practically Super Nintendo caliber. Unfortunately, all this production is wasted on some very limited compositions. The choice was made to have most of the game’s music tracks be based on variations of the main theme. I’m not against musical leitmotif as such. Used judiciously, it can link two scenes together emotionally in a manner both subtle and powerful. Look (or rather listen) no further than Quintet’s Terranigma for proof of that. Here, though, It just comes off like the composer was too rushed or indifferent to come up with more melodies. That’s a shame. It’s not bad, mind you. They just could have done so much more with this pristine FM synth quality.

On the gameplay side, Monster World IV is just about as linear and streamlined as an adventure game can get before it ceases to be an adventure game entirely and falls instead under the action-platformer umbrella. There’s only one town, Rapadagna, and it contains the entrances to all of the game’s dungeons in one central hub room. Furthermore, you must visit each of these dungeons in a proscribed sequence and each becomes permanently inaccessible after you defeat its boss. In short, there’s no sequence breaking, no side questing, and no backtracking. The only difference between this and setup and, say, Super Mario Bros. is merely that you have the option to stroll through town between stages to hit up the shops for some new equipment or see if any NPC dialogue has changed. Still, as stated in rapturous detail above, Asha’s adventure is so well-designed and executed you probably won’t mind that it takes place entirely on rails. Probably.

For my money, Monster World IV is Westone’s masterpiece. It’s far and away the high point of the series, handily surpassing even the excellent Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. Non-Japanese gamers got the short end of the stick yet again when we were denied this one back in 1994. If you’re not a physical media die hard like me, an official English language version is available as a download for the PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360. At least it is at the time of this writing. Online game distribution being as fickle as it it, there may again come a time when the good old fan translation is the only game in town. In the grand scheme of things, that’s one of the best things about classic gaming: When the big publishers let you down, the fan community swoops in to save your butt like a true blue pepelogoo.