[Excerpted from my review on Trigames.] Ikaruga, the "spiritual sequel" to Radiant Silvergun, is a vertically scrolling shooter with several gameplay elements that sound simple in words, but are astronomically difficult to master in practice. Everything in the game is based on light and dark "polarities". As far as your ship goes, it can switch almost instantaneously between light and dark with a press of the A button. Your weapon switches along with this. When you are light, it will fire white shots. When you are dark, it will fire black shots. As far as your enemies go, they only come in either white or black - as do their projectiles. This duality provides for the following quirks as your ship interacts with the enemy: - You absorb any enemy fire that is the same polarity as your ship. Obviously you are destroyed if you are hit by enemy fire that is of the opposite polarity. - Your fire will damage enemies no matter their polarity. However, if your ship is the opposite polarity than the enemy you are shooting, your fire will do twice the amount of damage as it would otherwise. - When destroying an enemy with fire that is the same polarity as the target, it will send back parting shots (a.k.a. "suicide bullets") which can be absorbed... or destroy you... just like any other projectile, depending on what your polarity is when it hits you. - The shots your ship absorbs fill up a special meter on the screen, composed of 12 individual boxes. By pressing R, your ship releases a set of lasers that home in on the nearest enemies. The number of lasers you release is dependent on how many boxes of the meter are full. - If you destroy three enemies of the same color in a row, you are awarded with bonus points and the opportunity to start a "chain." If the next three enemies you destroy of are the same color as each other, your bonus multiplies and you continue your chain. Sounds simple enough, and even may sound silly to some. But this allowed Treasure to throw in two important things to get keep our attention and makes us devise strategies for: amassing points, and simply surviving seemingly impossible scenarios. No one keeps much score today, but back in the day of Space Invaders points were bragging rights. In Pac-Man's case, points also netted you extra lives. In Ikaruga, where it's so easy to be blasted out of the water, amassing points both gives you extra lives AND lets you brag to you friends that you've faced lots of danger and lived to see tomorrow. Somewhere in each wave of enemy ships is a pattern that you can pick out. It's not obvious, but believe me, there is some way to time your fire such that you can pick off three like-colored enemies at a time. It comes through memorization of the stages. Chaining your way through half of the first stage alone is a 1,000,000 point difference from just haphazardly killing enemies. Coincidentally, points are also gained by absorbing shots, a practice known as bullet-eating. Remember how killing a like-colored enemy results in a shower of suicide bullets? Well, what if you went through as much of the game as you could, destroying like-colored enemies, and gobbling up the suicide bullets before they spread out too thin to collect them all? What if you went through trying to gobble anything of the same color? Not only would you be flying and shooting, but you'd be trying to follow every single thing on the screen, switching polarities when necessary, absorbing all the way... charging your meter AND bringing you higher scores. The idea of such a challenge makes me giddy. Watching people actually do it sends me off the edge. Then there's the speed, which only really comes into play during boss battles. A timer starts for each boss battle. Beat the thing before the timer hits 0, you get bonus points per second of time. Don't, and the boss... well... runs away. Of course you can, using polarity switching, find ways to decrease the amount of time it takes to kill 'em dead. It requires little fear of dying and fast thumbs to fill your meter up by grabbing bullets or absorbing laser shots, so you can release those homing lasers right in the boss' grill. I appreciated the fact that the boss runs away - when you suck as much as I do, knowing that simply outlasting the boss will allow you to live lets you see more of the game. All the excitement and thrills from bullet-eating enemies right in their faces is exponentially increased when you factor in how hard this game really is. I think some of the bullet formations that come after you are quite beautiful to look at; they're so intricate, they're like works of art on their own. Yes, this is how complicated staying alive gets. You're forced to weave and switch your way through mazes of bullets and lasers coming at your head. There are areas of the game which are absolutely impossible to pass through without employing a quick switch of polarities. White and black lasers intersect to form nets that you can't escape, or arcing bullets fly at you in one color while huge laser blasts shoot directly down in another color. Were it not for your ability to switch, these very same projectile patterns would have a 100% chance of killing you in other games not named Mars Matrix or Giga Wing. There is *always* a pattern or strategy for getting out alive. Sometimes you get lucky in games, but in Ikaruga, once you spot it you just need to practice it over... and over... and over again until your thumbs adjust to the shower of bullets coming for you. There is *always* a way, and once you find it, you will go into a Zen-like state where nothing can disturb you. It's these moments that make Ikaruga worth all the effort spent memorizing and practicing. Eventually you will unlock Free Play, as the game awards you one continue for every hour you spend with it. While I wanted the pressure of having limited continues in order to heighten my skills, I do appreciate that I got to see the game in its entirety quickly. The game is still as hard as ever regardless, and even if you have infinite continues it really doesn't feel right watching your ship explode continuously. No serious gamer would ever stand for that. Being able to enjoy something so seemingly frustrating wouldn't have been possible without Treasure's ability to craft such elegant play control. It also didn't hurt that, around the core gameplay, Treasure left its trademark on the aesthetic areas of this game. That, of course, is just icing on an already delicious cake that was baked all for me. There really isn't an extreme amount to say about the play control in this game because it's quite simply almost perfect. There is no lagging in the controls, no slowdown during intense gameplay), and the control setup is so simple that you aren't really concerned with a lot of buttons or special commands. In Radiant Silvergun, my only niggling complaint is that the ship moved a wee bit too slow for some sections. In Ikaruga, your ship moves at a brisker clip. Switching polarities is almost instantaneous, such that while you can't switch "through" a stream of bullets, you can still wait until almost the last second and make a well-timed switch without having to worry about a delay. Treasure has crafted a game where you didn't have to concern yourself with control or abilities so that you could concentrate more on how to deal with the situations in gameplay on a functional level rather than a technical level. I won't tell you that Ikaruga beats out a beast like Splinter Cell or Resident Evil, but Ikaruga looks very, very good. As mentioned before, performance never slows down, no matter how many things are on screen at once. The only time I've ever seen slowdown is during a boss enemy's death explosion, in 2-player mode, and then again the boss explosions *always* slow down, possibly for dramatic effect. Color-wise the game isn't very varied as far as the ships are concerned. After all, they're all black and white. But they're still designed very artistically to look damned cool. The patterns of bullets coming at you are also simply very pretty to look at, as I stated above. With all that's going on with the ships and projectiles though, you're still flying over a very fast- and smooth-scrolling land- or city-scape far below with a fair amount of detail. The music has also grown on me immensely. The producer of the game, Hiroshi Iuchi, decided to compose all of it himself, and similar to Hitoshi Sakimoto's work on Radiant Silvergun, almost every track save for two has some variation of the main theme heard in Chapter 1. Yet each track stands on its own, adapting to a different mood while managing to still fit the environment of an heroic pilot going up against a horde of enemies who show no remorse. The elegance of Ikaruga's design extends into the game's "backstory" - which is unexpected for a shooter. They went all out for Radiant silvergun's story, exposing it to the player before, during and after gameplay with a bevy of FMVs and in-stage voice acting. It's much less obvious in Ikaruga, and for those who own the Gamecube version only or don't read any Japanese there is practically no storyline to follow except that which is found in the instruction manual. The Dreamcast version has a few lines of text at the outset of every chapter, none of which I can understand but they are said to give some insight in regards to the trials that Shinra faces. Unfortunate for us non-Japanese-reading gamers. With any and all knowledge from this uber-scarce backstory in the back of your mind, it makes the defeat of the last boss -- and the resulting "ending" -- more rewarding and a bit more deep. It's really something to admire, that all these pieces of this game -- even the almost non-existent "story" -- fit together so well to form such a well crafted product. Even though I'm against praising a game simply for its story, I can't deny that Ikaruga was even more of a pleasure to experience with this knowledge in tow. And yet not all is perfect with Ikaruga. Almost all, but not all. Ikaruga is incredibly short. It's five chapters long, and as an auto-scrolling game, should take no longer than half an hour to complete even if you let the timer run out on every single boss encounter. It's also, as I've stressed unrelentingly before, VERY VERY hard. Rewind to the top of my review. This game might just simply NOT be for you. You'll get mad at the bullets. You'll get mad at the bosses. You'll get mad at messing up chains. You'll get mad at the seemingly unfair situations they put you in. Well, let me be honest: I don't really give a flying flargh that the game is 5 stages. The second "flaw" is perhaps the very reason why the first "flaw" is employed. If it's so hard, shouldn't you be glad that the game is over in half an hour? And if the game is too short for you, then why are you complaining about its high challenge? Would you be able to memorize and play through ten more chapters of that? Not me, the feeble-brained. Ikaruga is originally an arcade game, thus it is meant to be played and appreciated as such. It is very, very dense and intense. It will take you half an hour of virtual time from Chapter One to the end, but in REAL time, it'll probably take you ten to twelve hours if you're a so-so gamer to ever see the very last boss fight. It takes hours and hours of learning, skill and patience. Furthermore, the draw of many shmups -- arcade games -- is that it requires your persistent effort. Thus, more often than not I would consider fair but punishing difficulty a huge plus for a shmup. That's what they're there for. TO TEST YOUR SKILL. Just imagine that Ikaruga is sent from Treasure to make you a better, more aware, more dextrous videogame player. And have fun while doing it too. That, my finely feathered friends, is why Ikaruga is so hard yet so great. Obviously take this as you will. Perhaps you're already put off from Ikaruga because it's too simple, old school, hard, or any combination of the three. But I urge you, as a gamer, to give it a fair shake. Sit down with it for an hour, even if you're not a shooter fan. If it doesn't grow on you, then it's just not for you and that's perfectly fine. But Ikaruga certainly deserves every gamer's chance, just like its spiritual prequel deserved the grand attention that it never got.
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
