Pick up Gradius V, shoot lots of stuff, and die a whole lot - 'cause it's better than you.
That title is Gradius V. And boy, will it ever eat you up.
Typical shmups have players navigating through an almost unmanageable amount of bullets, flying baddies, and environmental hazards as the screen automatically scrolls. Gradius V follows this convention, popularized by the first game in the series. As you are constantly only able to face in one direction, the object of Gradius V is as much avoidance and survival as it is shooting lots and lots of space thingies in their fuel tanks. The game structure is appropriately straightforward, then - start from point A, watch the screen start scrolling and pushing you forward, start shooting and dodging, then reach point B and kill an ugly boss. Oh, and don't die in the process.
The Gradius games have always been exercises in hectic, frantic gameplay. This panicky environment, however, has never come to life so brilliantly as it does in Gradius V. Thanks to developer Treasure's efforts in the visual department, almost right off the bat you'll feel thrust into a space-borne battlefield. The 2D perspective is complemented by stunningly detailed polygonal models for your ship and the numerous structures and environmental formations around you. With every texture colored so finely at an impressively high resolution, everything pops out of the screen more than ever before. Great particle effects and explosions are lovingly rendered with glowing lighting abound, and it's almost impossible not to want to just watch the visuals fly by until you realize that there are approximately 376 bullets heading your way. Don't forget the 20 drone ships that are coming at you. Or the shifting structures that could squoosh you should you wait in the same spot for too long.
Did I mention that this all goes at a silky smooth 60 frames per second?
Treasure didn't stop at the visuals, though. The developers, ever the picture of perfection, went out and recruited an old friend for the soundtrack. Composer Hitoshi Sakimoto tries out a decidedly different style, and if you've been used to his work on Radiant Silvergun, Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, you'll be surprised at how versatile this man is. Sakimoto eschews the extremely classical, orchestral fare for a more sci-fi, unearthly, fast-paced and beat heavy soundtrack. Yet, it still manages to remain grandiose with his use of heroic melodies and the occasional church bell. It's great music to gnash your teeth to as you die for the 79th time. The sound, then, succeeds in complementing the visuals to form a cohesive, sexy presentation. Let's forget about the fact that the game literally tells you, "You need some practice!" when you lose all of your lives before completing the second level. The nerve.
With so much to see and hear, it's hard to get that game brain focused on the task at hand: making your thumbs push the buttons that make your spaceship, the Vic Viper, destroy bad things. The controls are straightforward for the most part. You move your ship with the d-pad, fire with one button, and activate ship upgrades with another. That's it. Simple. Clean. But the actual gameplay system may be a bit daunting at first. Instead of actually picking up upgrades and having them activate on their own, you pick up "upgrade orbs". There's a little row of boxes adorning the bottom of your screen, with each box desribing a different upgrade. Pick up an upgrade orb, and the first box gets highlighted. Pick up another orb without activating, and the highlight moves on to the next box. The good stuff, as you might surmise, is at the end of the row. So you might be tempted to activate Speed-Up - the first upgrade - five times in order to make your ship ultra quick, but then you might not get enough orbs (or live long enough) to get to that tasty laser upgrade. Mmm. Lasers.
The set of upgrades you're presented with is flexible, with the game allowing you to choose an upgrade "kit" before you begin your mission. You can opt for different types of missiles (ground-seeking versus air-seeking) and bi-directional shots (front and back, or front and upward at an angle) for instance. What you choose also determins the behavior of your "option" upgrade. Long a staple of the Gradius series, the "option" (also known in some circles as the "multiple") serves as a tiny drone that flies by your side and mimics your actions. Sitting near the end of your upgrade row, you know this little bugger delivers the goods. With the ability to recruit a maximum of four of these critters, you'll soon become a flying tank with four times the firepower of just your barenaked ship.
The key to the option system, and in essence what makes this game different than past Gradiuses (Gradii?), is in how your options behave depending on your upgrade kit. Normally, they follow your movements faithfully. With the press of R1, however, they fall into a different formation and serve to attack in different ways. One upgrade kit has your options circling you like a protective shield. Another kit lets you actually directly control the aim of your options - an ability to be used carefully, to be sure, since when controlling your option aim you can't control your ship's movement. This versatility in option behavior will lend itself to even more playing styles when trying to take down this beast of a game.
You think I jest. This game can't "eat you up," can it? It doesn't cause you to die 79 times during your play experience, does it? It's... it's not really a BEAST, is it?
I don't jest, kid.
Gradius V will certainly eat you alive. If you have any experience with videogame self-flagellation - Ikaruga comes to mind - you'll know what to expect from this mythical beast. Multi-tiered bosses will cause you to utter, "No more sir, please have mercy." Once you die, you start from a checkpoint. You lose all of your upgrades. There's no game saving here - turn off your Playstation 2 during stage 3, and you start the next game from stage 1. The massive amount of projectiles on screen will have you dodging in between tiny spaces only virtual inches wide. The myriad different enemies - long, winding serpents, nagging gnat spaceships, hulking, mechanical structures - will have you on your toes, guessing how to avoid or destroy them. Environmental hazards? Hoo boy. Horizontal scrolling sometimes switches to vertical scrolling, and yet you still can only face forward. Walls start to move, flames blow your way, meteorites come cascading towards you with no mercy whatsoever, and the eerie, disgusting biological pink goo that stands in your way during a later stage regenerates only seconds after you shoot it dead. If you're caught in the middle when it comes back, your ship - to quote the web-vernacular - "teh explod".
See, I told you it'll eat you up.
The great thing about Treasure-developed games as hard as this, however, is that it truly is skill based. It's not cheap. Death is not certain. There's always, always a way out of a pattern of bullets or wave of lasers or wall of spaceships. It can be argued that any shmup with a true, screen-clearing smart-bomb option is one that has design flaws. Meaning, the only way out of some situations is to let loose that smart bomb to clear the screen of every single enemy. None of Treasure's best shooters have this - not Radiant Silvergun, not Ikaruga (before you cry "foul!", remember that you're limited to 12 guaranteed kills), and with publisher Konami, never ever in the Gradius series. It's a classic game design wherein if you're good enough, you will win, and you will have earned it. Smart bomb? Peh.
Treasure, however, realizes that not all gamers are ninja with super-sharp katana skills - yours truly included. So the development team has offered an olive branch to those skill-challenged. Extra continues are granted - one for each hour of gameplay you endure. Instead of dying and restarting at a checkpoint, you can change the respawning mode to let you revive on the spot when you die, with the opportunity to pick up any leftover options that are floating around from your previous demise. This definitely kills the "once you die the first time, you're pretty much screwed" aspect, and kills what makes the punishing difficulty of shmups so appealing - the journey to get damned good. But at least, it opens the game up to more people; it lets people know what a great title this is without necessarily alienating them.
A great title Gradius V is, indeed. Not everyone will understand or appreciate why a game must be so hard, but take a minute to think back to the days when achieving the HI-SCORE on that arcade machine was a badge of honor. Those were the days that piloting your ship through seven asteroids and coming out with nary a scratch was a sign of true videogame skill. Shaking Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde off of your back in Pac-Man made you the arcade equivalent of Allen Iverson's crossover. Gradius V is the latest in the scant few, recent shmups that brings this mood back from pasture. Forget about collecting bafmodads on Dinosaur Planet, sliding down curtains as you ease your way through the Sands of Time, or hitting Fight twelve times as you cruise through the latest, butt-easy RPG. Think you're a gamer with skills? Put that all to the side, and heed Konami and Treasure's call.
Pick up Gradius V, shoot lots of stuff, and die a whole lot - 'cause it's better than you.