Kishin Douji Zenki: Rettou Raiden (Super Famicom)

Kishin Douji Zenki: Rettou Raiden (“Demon God Child Zenki: Battle Thunder”) is the very model of a subgenre that was endemic to the Japanese Super Famicom: The quickie contract action-platformer capitalizing on a then popular manga license. Developed by CAProduction and published by Hudson Soft in 1995, Rettou Raiden was the first of five games based on the series. Kishin Douji Zenki was but one of the seemingly countless adolescent action sagas birthed in the pages of Weekly Shōnen Jump that burned white hot for a handful of years only to sink into pop culture oblivion forever after.

The narrative follows Chiaki Enno, plucky schoolgirl and descendant of an ancient Buddhist master who was able to command mighty demon gods in order to defend Japan from the Demon Goddess Karuma. When it falls on her to do the same centuries later, she revives the demon god Zenki. Initially, Zenki takes the form of a bratty child, though Chiaki can temporarily power him up into his ultimate adult form with the aid of a magic bracelet. Fairly standard good versus evil stuff, as far as I can tell, somewhat akin to Inuyasha in its character designs and dynamics.

As a game, Rettou Raiden is about as straightforward as they come. You get a total of ten side-scrolling stages with a boss fight at the end of each. You’re stuck playing as kid Zenki for three of them, which unfortunately just isn’t much fun. All you have to work with in pipsqueak mode is a stubby punch and a rather awkward jump kick. Meanwhile, the full-size Zenki gains a number of flashy special moves, including a charge punch, a Hadouken style fireball, a vertical whirlwind attack, and more. It can’t be an accident that you spend 70% of the run time as this more capable version of the character. I doubt the designers would have included a weaker one at all if Zenki’s transformations weren’t featured so prominently in the source material.

Levels look great, thanks to some exceptional background art. CAProduction had already proven their ability to deliver lush 16-bit visuals with Hagane: The Final Conflict the year before, and they’re in equally fine form here. That said, the stage design proper is serviceable at best. The closest we get to complexity is the need to backtrack on occasion to locate all of the stone monoliths that need to be destroyed to dispel the force field barring the way to the boss’ lair. Platforming sections are basic as a rule, though that’s likely a blessing in light of Zenki’s slow movement and slightly stiff handling. If only the lightning fast speed of Hagane’s titular hero could have influenced Rettou Raiden as well.

Although nothing about Rettou Raiden’s gameplay is exceptional, I at least can’t point to anything that outright offends me about it. It’s clearly the product of a skilled development team with sufficient pride in their work to maintain a degree of baseline competence throughout, even if they weren’t motivated to go out of their way to exceed the limits of their commission. It represents the Zenki brand faithfully and looks, sounds, and plays okay. It also doesn’t make any excessive demands of its audience. A sizable health bar, frequent extra life pickups, and unlimited continues result in a relatively painless playthrough for gamers of most skill levels. Is it the sort of game I’d add to my regular rotation and actively evangelize about? Nah. It does what it says on the tin, however, serving up a passable interactive rendition of a Japanese fantasy cartoon that’s been dead and buried for a quarter century now. Check it out if that’s your jam.

Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (PC Engine)

Who’s up for another ultra-rare sticker shock shooter? I already covered Magical Chase, the single priciest regular retail release for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16. The next logical choice would have to be Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (“Galaxy Policewoman Legend Sapphire”), the platform’s most expensive CD-ROM. How much dough are we talking? Well, an authentic copy of this 1995 Japanese exclusive will run you between U.S. $400 and $1000 as of this writing, depending on condition and completeness. Or you could do what I did and look into, let’s say, “alternative methods” of running CD games on your console. No judgement here!

Sapphire is one of the mere dozen titles built around the Arcade Card, the last and most advanced of the three system expansion cards produced for the PC Engine’s CD-ROM add-on. The Arcade Card’s added memory allowed developer CAProduction and publisher Hudson Soft to incorporate flashy pseudo-3D visual gimmicks on a scale never seen before on the aging machine. These aren’t the same polygonal 3D models next generation contemporaries like the PlayStation and Saturn used. Rather, the effect is cleverly faked through the use of sprites patterned on prerendered 3D assets. Similar techniques were used to give Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country and Sega’s Vectorman their signature looks. Assuming that Hudson Soft’s primary goal was to shock and amaze, they certainly nailed it. Getting something this busy running on what’s technically an 8-bit CPU from 1987 was quite the coup, and a hard rocking soundtrack by T’s Music (of Lords of Thunder fame) only adds to the sensory overload of it all.

Having now duly established Sapphire as one of the best looking and sounding PC Engine games ever made, how does it fare as a shooter? Eh. Okay, I guess. Decent enough. It has most of the vertical shooting fundamentals down, but the combination of frustratingly slow ship speeds and a limited campaign ensures that it ultimately can’t hold a candle to such true greats as Blazing Lazers, Seirei Senshi Spriggan, Nexzr, and the Star Soldier series.

In terms of story, Sapphire is about a quartet of hotshot space cops from the year 2092 (Charlotte, Helena, Jasmine, and the titular Sapphire) traveling through time to prevent terrorists from doing nefarious things in the past. This explains why you can be blasting through a Blade Runner-esque futuristic cityscape one minute and a medieval castle the next. Each of the four playable heroes has her own unique ship and complement of three upgradeable special weapons. This provides some much-needed replay value and permits two players to partake in the action side-by-side. That latter feature is a major plus, as two-player simultaneous shooting was surprisingly rare on the PC Engine.

Welcome as the multiple characters are, they could have been better implemented. The main issue is that Helene and Jasmine’s ships were made achingly slow-moving as a way to balance out their more damaging weapons. In theory, this could work. In practice, it leaves them almost wholly unable to dodge enemy fire reactively, leading to a heavy emphasis on the rote memorization of patterns. Frankly, I found it obnoxious. Even Sapphire, who’s supposed to be the default, well-rounded choice, is pretty dang pokey by genre standards. Of course, there are no speed boost power-ups available to offset this. Our last pilot, Charlotte, pays a heavy price for her role as the fast girl: Her puny weapons barely tickle the opposition. In essence, you never do get that iconic experience of controlling a swift, deadly weapon of mass destruction. One way or another, you’re hobbled.

The unavoidable choice of offense or defense naturally leads to a fairly difficult playthrough. In fact, Sapphire would probably be considered too challenging for its own good if it didn’t consist of a paltry five average-length levels. Once you’ve died enough to learn all the enemy waves by heart, you’ll be able to tear through it in twenty minutes flat. The overall impression is of a woefully short game saddled with some harsh mechanics in a misguided effort to pad out the total play time. A little extra content and fine-tuning could have gone a long way toward making this feel less like a glorified tech demo.

Bottom line: While I still don’t know what a video game worth $400+ would look like, this sure ain’t it. Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire is undoubtedly a wonder to behold for any PC Engine fan. If you have an economical way of booting it up just to marvel for a bit, I recommend you do so. Don’t expect that jaw-dropping first impression to last if you opt to stick it out to the end, however. Once you come back down to earth for a closer look, this sapphire is really more of a blue zircon.

Hagane: The Final Conflict (Super Nintendo)

Famed satirist Jonathan Swift once observed, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it….” In the realm of classic gaming, I can think of no clearer example of this maxim in action than Hagane: The Final Conflict for the Super Nintendo. Around a decade ago now, a obscurely-sourced story began circulating online that this unassuming 1994 action-platformer was actually a rare Blockbuster Video rental exclusive title. Prices for Hagane cartridges rocketed from the $20 -$40 range to $500 and up.

You’ve likely already guessed where I’m going with this. That’s right: There’s no proof whatsoever that Hagane was ever associated with Blockbuster Video. What’s more, popular YouTuber SNESdrunk has presented plenty of evidence that it was, in fact, a normal retail release. Blockbuster exclusive games like ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut for the Nintendo 64 were a real thing. At this point in time, however, we can state with all confidence that Hagane was not one of them.

I’m not certain whether the Blockbuster myth originated as an innocent mistake or a despicable attempt to manipulate the secondary market, but I do know that ten years and counting of wide dissemination is likely to prevent those prices from correcting themselves anytime soon. The damage is done. It’s a shame, because the sticker shock tends to overshadow a quality ninja action game that’s often cited as the Super Nintendo’s answer to Sega’s Shinobi series.

The final conflict of the title is between two secretive ninja clans. The Fuma are mystical warriors charged with safeguarding the Holy Grail. Their foils are the evil Koma, who dream of using the Grail’s limitless power to destroy the world. A treacherous attack by the Koma results in them stealing the Grail, but they make the fateful mistake of leaving one Fuma clan warrior alive. This gravely-wounded ninja, Hagane (“steel”), has his brain transplanted into a cyborg body in order to seek revenge on the Koma and recover the Grail before it’s too late. Ninja RoboCop questing for the Holy Grail? God bless video games.

Hagane’s mission comprises nineteen  individual stages spread out over five chapters. These are primarily straightforward “run, jump, and fight your way to the exit” affairs that incorporate a satisfying blend of platforming and combat challenges, along with a handful of auto-scrolling sections for variety. Each chapter also has an end boss and at least one mini-boss. None of the individual stages here are exceptionally large or involved, but there’s enough of them that the journey as a whole feels neither too long nor too short.

Like Treasure’s Alien Soldier, which I reviewed just last week, this is another game where the title hero has an incredibly wide selection of moves and attacks at his disposal. Too many, to be honest. Hagane has four main weapons that he can cycle between at any time: A sword, shuriken, bombs, and a chain. Any ninja game connoisseurs reading this probably recognize this as the same array of weapons wielded by Tsukikage, the protagonist of Irem’s Ninja Spirit. I can only assume that someone on the development team was a fan of Irem’s effort. Hagane also comes equipped with a limited-use super bomb attack reminiscent of the one seen in Contra III that damages everything on-screen and is generally best saved for bosses.

That’s not all, though! The ever-versatile metal ninja can also lash out with jump kicks and ground slides, cling to ceilings, bounce off walls, execute a strange sort of rolling double jump that covers wide distances horizontally, and pull off a variety of charged-up power attacks in conjunction with both back and forward flips. Hey, at least they didn’t let that six-button controller go to waste, eh?

Step one here is to get a feel for which of these moves you’ll need to use constantly and which you can safely ignore. The sword and shuriken ended up being my go-to weapons (with bombs a distant third) and the double jump spin proved to be the most vital platforming tool by far. The chain, jump kick, slide, super flip attacks, and the rest all turned out to be either highly situational or completely unnecessary.

Mastering a small selection of your most efficient moves as quickly as possible goes a long way toward curbing the game’s formidable difficulty. Hagane has a reputation for being one of the most challenging SNES action games. While there are many that I would personally rank higher in that regard, it’s certainly no easier than the average Shinobi or Ninja Gaiden title. The biggest hurdle by far is Hagane’s unimpressive health bar. For a guy made of metal, you’d expect him to able to withstand more than three hits by default. Healing items and the occasional health bar extension help somewhat, but you still can’t count on being able to make many mistakes. You are given unlimited continues at least, although running out of lives and using one starts you back at the beginning of the chapter rather than the exact stage you died on.

Despite a somewhat over-engineered control scheme, Hagane largely succeeds in delivering the sort of fast-paced precision action-platforming experience its target audience craves. It weds level design and enemy placement that would be right at home in any of the 16-bit Shinobi games with the weapon system from Ninja Spirit, movement that recalls Capcom’s Strider, and an extra bit of flair all its own, as in the stage where Hagane must escape a crashing airship as it spins around him courtesy of the console’s iconic Mode 7 background rotation effect.

All this solid gameplay is further bolstered by some very strong art design. Every detail of the medieval Japanese cyberpunk future on display here is compelling, from the twin pistons carved into the shapes of Buddhas that are shown to power Hagane himself in the opening cut scene to the largest of the boss enemies with their hulking robot frames topped by elaborate Noh theater style masks. It’s basically the same aesthetic that made the classic Genesis shooter MUSHA so memorable, just on a more intimate scale. The soundtrack, unfortunately, can’t really keep pace. It takes the expected route of combining samples suggestive of classical Japanese instruments with more conventional video game action beats, but the tracks themselves don’t really bring it. They’re often far too restrained for the madness erupting across the screen at any given moment. I don’t think it’s bad music by any means, merely underwhelming.

Hagane is absurdly, senselessly overpriced. It also presents as a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the bits and pieces of great ninja games past. It’s got it where it counts, though, and that makes me wish that developer CAProduction had tried their hands at a sequel. I suppose they’ve been too busy slaving away on every Mario Party game ever. It’s tough to argue with a sure thing like that.

Anyway, play Hagane. Just don’t pay $500 or more for the privilege. You’re smarter than that.