Welcome back to End Boss Month. After taking a look at one of the most treasured (in a manner of speaking) villains of the Final Fantasy series, it's time to take a look at a boss that comes to use courtesy of Treasure.

Top-down shooters have come a long way since the days of Space Invaders. From early iterations like Galaga to the maddening bullet hell of Mushihime-sama Futari, these games have always presented challenges based on the concepts of memorization, pattern recognition, and avoiding wave after wave of bullets and foes that all want to kill you. And then, there’s Ikaruga.

Ikaruga stands out from most every other game in the genre that came before it because of one simple addition; a polarity shifting mechanic that asks the player to absorb bullets of the same polarity to build up energy for powerful attacks and to navigate through insidious obstacle courses constantly flowing with black and white bullets, energy bolts, and lasers. The game goes on for five full stages, the fifth concluding with what in any other game would have been a fantastic final boss; one that constantly flips polarity, hitting your ship, the Ikaruga, with a constant barrage of alternating black and white energy blasts that need to be sent back at it.

Before I go any further, here’s something to note. Believe it or not, Ikaruga actually does have a storyline. (Which Atari pulled out of the GameCube version. Those asshats. Am I bitter? What makes you ask that?) In it, the game’s villain, Tenro Horai, unearthed an object of limitless power, the Ubusunagami Okinokai (in English, “The Power of the Gods”) and used it to engage in world conquest. The player character, Shinra, the pilot of the Ikaruga, is determined to bring Horai down, even if it kills him.

So here we are at the end of the game. The huge yin-yang ball of death is toast. Horai is defeated, the world is saved, hey, maybe you even got a good grade on the stage, right? Well, no. Because right after the grade is presented, the game keeps going.

The Ubusunagami Okinokai itself goes into full-on attack mode. Also, your guns no longer work. You can’t fire. All you can hope to do is dodge and absorb everything that it throws at you for the next sixty seconds. It’s a minor change, yet one that goes against the mechanic at the very core of the genre. For a full minute, you have no Shoot button.

And then, at the very end, the Ikaruga’s cannon’s finally fire with such a powerful surge that it destroys itself a split-second before the beams destroy the Ubusunagami Okinokai. Shinra goes down, but he takes the giant god crystal with him.

Here, watch a master of the game at work through stage five:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is true bullet hell. The product of evolution, iteration and innovation on a genre that began with Space Invaders back in the 1970s that seems to rarely get the recognition it deserves. Even doing something just a little different can lead to big changes.

That final 60 seconds is probably the longest minute I've ever experienced. It's pretty exhilarating to pull off, but it's also rather soul destroying when you lose your final life as the clock ticks over to zero. Good write up!

I remember buying this for the Gamecube a long time ago. I considered it a miracle that I got to the third world before I got slammed into a wall by the giant lasers.

FUCK that thing.

And FUCK me for buying this game TWICE.

@DocHaus said:

I remember buying this for the Gamecube a long time ago. I considered it a miracle that I got to the third world before I got slammed into a wall by the giant lasers.

The only reason I even got to the end of the game was because the GameCube version gradually increased the number of continues it gave you as you played it more and more until finally giving you infinite by default.

I'm at the point where whenever I hear the name Ikaruga my eyes just glaze over. I killed myself playing that game, and it's behind me now. Leave me alone!!!