R-Type III
(Yes, this is the 13th birthday of the best game ever.) And yes, I consider Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu to be the best game ever. All other answers are wrong! However, there is one problem with the best game ever that cannot be ignored: every game I play after it will inevitably suck (to some degree). Case in point: R-Type III. OK, not really a definitive (or good) proof, but shut up, I need some sort of transition into the review, and I'm going with that.
As some of you may not know, R-Type was a very prominent (and somewhat overrated) shooter series back in the days when arcades still existed. Like every shooter out there, you take the role of a nameless spaceship fighting the Bydo Empire, an empire which has always had some weird obssession with making babies. I am not kidding; go play whatever R-Type game you can get your hands on.
If it's this one, listen up: there were a few changes from the original R-Type formula. Not many, though, but they're there. First, you get a choice of which pod-thing you get to shove on the front of your ship (or back). It still does what it always does, and I doubt that the choice makes much of a difference. Speaking of choice, there's a variety of weapons to choose from, but like the pod-thingy I just mentioned, they haven't changed much, if at all. I can't remember a single weapon that wasn't in a previous R-Type, and the ones that are still there behave exactly the same as they did before.
Not that the game is just a rehash of previous concepts; there are a few new additions to the formula, like how the charge shot behaves. I rarely used it in previous games, but here, it's more useful than ever. You have your standard charge shot, a super-shot that penetrates everything it touches, and most importantly, a shield. Oh god, how I love the shield. It kills enemies on contact and gives you an infinite amont of super-death-mega-shots (for a limited time). Say what you will about it, like it's cheap or that it makes the other beam useless, but this was what made the game fun for me, even if I spammed it for the final boss.
And it was the ONLY thing that made this game fun for me. Everything else was just....meh. Sure, R-Type III tries, but they really don't change any of the core values of the series like other games for other series have (Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, the usual crap). One of these changes was natural for all SNES games: meaningless use of Mode 7. Several of the levels in this game use it, but it doesn't go beyond the much advertised "scale and rotate", sometimes both at once! Holy crap! But in all honesty, the level design is actually pretty creative. There are some creative ideas in here that were only rivaled by Space MegaForce, like a rocket-powered level that rotates the walls constantly, or the final level, where you have to stay inside a circle that travels through walls and dimensions. Bosses are also creative, but not by much.
Yet in a weird way, the creativity in this game only half-works for reasons I've already stated. Irem, if you're gonna change a game like this, commit to the change, don't half ass it. There was potential here, but it was wasted, just like it is in a billion games I play. I guess that makes it generic, but I'm afraid of saying that due to how many times I've applied it to shooters in the past. Regardless, I'm calling this game slightly generic and giving it half the Half Assed Award......so the Quarter Ass Award.
You guys may not know this (OK, you don't), but I love old school NES chiptunes. So you can imagine how I felt when I stumbled across this custom NES song (that has that weird "belongs on the GBC" feel to it).
Samurai Ghost
(At least I think that's what the title is supposed to be.) Honestly, it's hard to tell what this game is called, given the horribly fractured Engrish that permeates through this game's nooks and crannies. I can't even use my ultra-patented "start with protagonist and story" method of reviewing, since the game rapes the English language hard enough to make Shakespeare weep a single gilded tear. However, I have managed to make up a story of my own: you're a vampire (not an actual vampire; just the guys who dress like they live in 18th century England and wear white make-up) sent on a quest to set Japan on fire. You somehow accomplish this by walking to the right and swatting your sword at whatever happens to get in your way.
....Well, I guess I just summed up all you need to know about the gameplay. BUT I MUST GO ON!!! As I just said, you run through each level swatting at things with your sword. There are 3 power-ups you can get, but I never figured out what two of them do. The third one makes your sword ultra-powerful, but the only one that's worth it is the screw-attack ripoff. The other ones require you to swing your sword, thus exposing you to the flaws of combat. See, your character has to be quite specific with both where and when he hits the enemy. If you screw this up somehow, you get hit.
Now there are several reasons why this is a problem, like the slightly (slightly) slow swing time or the high amount of enemies in the game, the latter being the biggest problem. It seems that for every one enemy you kill, another one appears to take his place, and while you're working on that one, two more will come and take HIS place. It just makes the game move slowly and fails to cover up the crap level design. Wait, I shouldn't call it level design, since that implies they actually made levels, and I doubt that was the case for half of them. Half seem to be straight lines, and the other half is just a random assortment of platforms. Both of them are annoying in their own special ways, as the linear levels exacerbate the enemy problem and the platform levels feature PLATFORMS THAT HURT YOU IF YOU JUMP ON THEM THE WRONG WAY.
Oops, forgot about the third level that comes after certain boss battles: the bonus level. In these levels, Vishnu appears from behind the clouds and, elated that you have stomached the game this far, throws down a bunch of orbs (translation: coins). This would certainly mean something if the orbs had some sort of purpose, but I didn't notice any. You'd think that 100 nets you a free life, but it caps eternally at 99. Weird, confusing, moving on: I mentioned boss battles earlier, so I might as well go into detail about them. All of them fall into two categories: "easily explotiable patterns" or "slash the shit out of them." The weird thing is that quite a few of them somehow manage to combine BOTH these aspects into a generally unpleasing package. Hell, the final boss takes this to a previously unseen peak, tripling the pain with three forms that each use these methods.
The only thing I liked about this game was the half-decent sword swingy animation (although that creates one of the problems I mentioned before) and this one short musical piece at the beginning of each level. Other than that, I can hardly recommend it. There's a reason I take recommendations for old school games from my fellow gamers, but because of games like Samurai Ghost and Cyborg Justice, I'm starting to slowly forget that reason. So I give it the Neku Sakuraba Award for Refusing to Trust Anyone Around You. Hell, that's how I ended up pl-*gets pushed aside by bodyguard, blog ends*
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