Nowadays, if you ask a casual gamer about shooters, they’ll talk about games such as GoldenEye, Doom, or TimeSplitters 2. If you asked an arcade gamer about them, that person would probably talk about many great classics such as Galaga or Raiden. During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that’s what shooters were. They were usually about a lone survivor trying to escape the galaxy with his ship that has unlimited firepower but being stalked by loads of armies trying to blast him out of the air. With this era’s 3D graphics, classic shooters just happened to vanish from the face of the earth. That is until Ikaruga was re-made for the Nintendo GameCube. Ikaruga was first released in arcades (other than North America’s) 20 years ago. It was re-made on the Sega Dreamcast last year, and it had an unexpected groovy welcome. Treasure (known for such games as Mischief Makers) decided to re-make it again on the GameCube, and the company totally upgraded the classic. Ikaruga’s plot is nothing different from all the other classic arcade shooters, it’s just practically one of more ‘suspense’. Several years ago in the small island nation of Horai, one of the most powerful men in the nation, Tenro Horai discovered the Power of the Gods. He and his followers used that power to terrorize the world and to be their own gods to the people. Meanwhile, a freedom federation called Tenkaku emerged to challenge the Horai. Using fighter planes called Hitekkai, they fought with the hope of freeing the world from the Horai’s conquests, but all their efforts were in vain. They lost battle after battle, and their whole race was nearly wiped out. Miraculously, a young man survived. His name is Shinra. Refusing to accept defeat, Shinra set off again for Horai only to b shot down and landing in a remote village called Ikaruga, inhabited by a groups of aged people who had been sent to exile there by Horai’s conquests. The village leader and people nursed Shinra back to heath. Shinra was determined to conquer the Horai. With that, the villagers entrusted him with a fighter plane that they had built themselves, the Ikaruga. So you’re Shinra, the lone survivor of a ravaged people. You must battle fiercely, move swiftly and act rationally in a new war of frighteningly intense firepower and hypnotic beauty. You have someone named Kagari to help you. He was once a great Horai assassin with tremendous strength and power. That power proved to dangerous for the Horai people, and they banished him from Horai. He fights to get revenge. It’s up to those two men to stop the Horai’s conquests and once again bring peace into the world of Ikaruga and the rest of the universe. The point of Ikaruga is also simple. Destroy as many enemy ships as you can and complete the chapter. There are only 5 chapters in the game. As simple as it may seem, it’s not. There are 2 kinds of firepower in the game, light and dark. Your ship possesses both strengths but may only use one at a time. If you shoot a ship of an opposing color to yours, it’ll do double the damage of blasting the ship of the same color. It comes at a price though; if you’re hit by an opposing color, you die. When enemy ships and yourself are the same color, your ship will absorb the energy beams being shot at you, and that’s a good thing. It’ll allow you to use the ship’s special ability to shoot from all sides, the only alternative to your rapid firepower. At the end of the world, you face a boss. Destroy it, and it’s off to the next world. Strategy and skill are needed to be a master at Ikaruga. You won’t beat the game for a while, or at least not during your first 10 sittings. When destroying a ship, it’ll be replaced with light beams of the ship’s color that you can absorb for your special missile. You’ll have to be cautious though, since destroying a ship of an opposite color is easy since the damage is doubled, but you’ll have to switch colors as soon as possible. Being hit once leads to death, so you’ll have to catch your reflexes. Also, crashing into anything at all will lead to fatal results. You don’t want to take any chances, but taking chances is what makes Ikaruga so much more fun than your traditional arcade shooter. Ikaruga is also a game that’ll let your ship roam freely around the screen. You can use the left analog stick or D-Pad to make your ship move anywhere on the screen. It won’t make the level end any faster, so this is best used as a dodging technique. Another effective way to earn a high score is to use chain combos. Chains are created when you kill 3 enemies of the same color at once. It’s very tricky, but the points rewarded for chains are massive, so you’ll want to pull off a combo every chance you get. You can get a password after achieving a very high score, and that password can be used on Ikaruga’s Official Site for other people to see and compete with. It’s just one of those things that’ll make you play Ikaruga over and over again. From what you’ve heard so far, Ikaruga’s idea is pretty simple. That means the control scheme is simple as well. From what I’ve said earlier, you can roam around the screen using the left analog stick or the D-Pad. Pressing the A button will change your ship’s power, and rapidly tapping the B button will cause your ship to spit out all the lasers. Having that trigger button held will cause an unlimited barrage of firepower to be spewed across the screen. Pressing the Start button on the 2nd Controller will cause another ship exactly like yours to pop out for awesome cooperative play. If you don’t like the controls or you find them too uncomfortable to your liking, you can always change them in the ‘Options’ menu. So you don’t want to go it alone against the big bad space aliens? Call a friend, and with the fee of one credit, you’ll have a partner to help you out on your journey. This can be both a good and a bad thing. The good thing is the teamwork, one can be black, and one can be white. Or another good thing would be blocking shots to your teammate. Unfortunately, both ships can bump into each other. It won’t cause any damage, but if you have to go through a narrow passage, you’ll find yourself fighting to squirm your way through that area causing you or your teammate to crash and die. To improve your strategy and have more skill in the game, you’ll have to remember each and every event that happens throughout each level. This can be easily done in ‘Conquest’ mode since you have the opportunity to practice any area of a level so you can be ready to tackle any enemy that comes your way. Another thing that makes Ikaruga unlike any of its predecessors is the option to choose from Vertical Play, or Horizontal Play. Any gamer who has his or her likings can adjust to what they want from the game; whether the ship goes from bottom to top, or left to right. Ikaruga’s visuals and sound are great and prove that the game has been polished quite nicely after these last 20 years. The backgrounds are beautiful and everything is in 3D. The black-and-red lasers, and the blue-and-white lasers are truly dazzling. The soundtrack is flawless and is a great compliment to the sounds of lasers flying across the screen. Ikaruga is already a good game, but the sound and graphics just make the game great. Fans of space shooters definitely owe it to themselves to play Ikaruga, a game that tests and challenges their true skill with the genre. It’s one of the few Dreamcast ports that weren’t sloppily remade. Anyone who appreciates a great game should be able to recognize Ikaruga for its challenge, design, and elegance. So if you’re a gamer that likes a challenge, go pick up Ikaruga. It supports Progressive Scan and it only takes up 4 blocks on your memory card. Not to mention that this game is only $39.99. The game is also quite hard to find. So run, don’t walk.
Ikaruga comes from the same team as the ill-fated Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn, which some have claimed to be “the greatest shooter of all time”. With that kind of heritage, it should be expected to have some impressi... Read Full Review
Chances are, you fall into one of two categories. Either you imported the Dreamcast release of Ikaruga last year and are already hopelessly addicted, or you’ve never heard of it before. For those of you who fit into the ... Read Full Review
