As standard as it seems, Shienryu still manages to be fun and the challenge is as tolerant as it is evident.
I'll be perfectly honest with you all, I have absolutely no idea what the story is all about, but I get the feeling that it's all connected some how to the Natsume arcade game Daioh because it features similar bosses, enemies and level design to the point where Shienryu feels like a sequel.
Basically what's going down is that Earth is being invaded by some militant alien force that specializes in mech technology and either come from beyond or around Jupiter seeing how the final HQ is located along the latter. The game gets its name from a mysterious, all-powerful mech that the enemy aliens have developed which serves as the main target of the heroes.
There's also some disastrous looking dwarf planet involved, but the only evident plot element involves the player or players taking on the role of bland-looking, two-seater Earth-made space jets that look mysteriously like the space-jets from Raiden for some reason with player one taking on the red ship that houses two hot European anime chicks and player two taking the blue jet which houses two competent looking European anime dudes, the main pilot to the latter having a very strange looking chin, but the pilot designs male or female are certainly preferable to the standard prissy shoot em' up anime heroes who look about as battle-hardened as a lace table cover like in Steam Hearts, Ibara, DoDonPachi: Dai-ou-Jou and Shienryu Explosion (which I may never get a chance to play).
Game play wise, there isn't too much you can say about it that hasn't been said before. You pick up varieties of different weapons that can all be upgraded for more strength or in some cases more crowd-control effects. Each weapon you pick-up has its own bomb. You get to choose between three different weapons: the Vulcan which fires straight forward but spreads out as it's upgraded, the Missiles which consist of straight firing rockets and homing missiles and the Lightning gun which seeks enemies and anything it can blast. You also upgrade the strength and efficiency of each weapon with the help of red Ps which after collecting three helps increase the weapon's strength a la Fire Shark.
Each of those weapons have their own individual bombs with the Vulcan having the impressive, screen cleaning Scissor Laser as it spreads out before closing into one solid stream of light. The Missiles get the strongest bomb in the game that being one really big bomb that falls within the area of the player's jet thus possessing a short blast radius and the Lightning gun's bomb being a stream of laser shots that fire straight forward, but do little to the sides of the player's jet. Each bomb also cleans up enemy shots which can allow you to make a clean getaway.
Of course, most of these bombs and weapons save for the Scissor Bomb were all pretty much recycled from Daioh. That said, I'm surprised Shienryu didn't attempt the same combat innovation Daioh did, namely the fact that you had all three weapons at your disposal along with their appropriate bombs. All you needed to do was increase each weapon's strength and bomb count and seeing how the Saturn has six buttons to perform such a task it's strange to see Warashi didn't capitalize on this.
You can collect power-ups to increase your weapon strength and speed, but there are also power-ups that give you all of that rolled in one as well as extra armor for your jet that not only makes the jet look cooler, but it also allows you to take one hit before being reduced back to one-hit kill.
For the most part, the game feels pretty good with fair movement and like most vertical scrolling shooters you don't have to worry about colliding into backgrounds because you can't even if you try. The only collision you have to look out for are shots and those tiresome 'attack from the bottom of the screen' enemies.
The difficulty to Shineryu is set just about right: anyone can pick it up and play it through, but there are eight levels total so the player won't be too smug about beating it in one day and the AI have your standard shooter tactics such as flying on screen, shooting everything they have and flying back, the above rear-attack chumps as well as the tired old kamikazes, some of which are merely trying to assemble their attack formation.
There are plenty of mini-bosses to mix-it-up with, level six being almost nothing but mini-bosses to the point where you can't help but wonder how the boss of that level could be any worse.
I've been pretty silent about my severe hatred for ground force enemies in shooters, but they aren't as frustrating in vertical shooters as they are in horizontal ones (especially seeing how the ones in horizontal shooters get more unnatural forces working for them than the zombies in Resident Evil Outbreak) and Shienryu comes close to demonstrating this fact. It only comes close because half the time you end up dying in the game it will be partly because the ground forces in Shienryu are so in-numerous that you could fill half of the levels with them. But I guess this is balanced by the fact that the ground forces in Shineryu also have this policy of not shooting you when you're close to them as if you're going to fall on them like in Sengeki Striker or something.
If anything Shienryu is one of those games that makes use of the philosophy that vertical scrolling shooters are designed for reflexes and hand-eye coordination rather than testing your memory of enemy attack patterns and cheap, idiotic level designs. The bosses all have unique and sometimes intricate attack patterns that once you see them and even if you get creamed by them, you can't help but admit that they're impressive. Many of the boss' attacks vary from each other in that some of them force you to time your movement and others force you to destroy parts of the boss individually in order to survive.
Speaking of which, Shienryu uses a pretty good use of boss destruction in that none of the bosses have a particular core or weak-spot you have to destroy in order to stop them, you basically have to tear them apart until there's nothing left to fight back which is actually a fun and thrilling experience compared to the old 'shoot in one spot until they change color to show their pain and die' fashion.
What Shienryu lacks in default difficulty, it balances with the use of that traditionally idiotic checkpoint system in which every time you die on single player mode or simultaneously on 2 player, you have to restart at a certain point of the level. Now, while I detest the use of the classic checkpoint system in shoot em' ups for their obnoxious idea of lengthening game play by unnaturally punishing the player's lack of memory for minor details, I have to admit that vertical scrolling shooters that offer the checkpoint system have been a much different experience than most horizontal scrolling shooters and with just as much enjoyment attached.
For example in most horizontal shooters, the difficulty will dismiss the fact that you've been stripped of your upgrades postmortem and will toss everything it has at you the moment you restart at the checkpoint, while some games will actually take you back one extra checkpoint the moment you die as if you were piloting your fighter on a board game (probably most likely found in horizontal Toaplan shooters).
This much can't be said about Shienryu's checkpoint system because the checkpoint system manages to set checkpoints close enough together so that even if you end up surviving for a single minute, you'll end up at the next check-point which means you won't have to wade through those long brutal segments that no matter how many baddies you destroy end up killing you seconds before you reached the next checkpoint once and get set back to start all over again (something I found irritating about the Taito Legends 2 version of Gun Frontier).
Thankfully, the checkpoint system is used in moderation meaning it is only in effect for the levels and not for the boss fights, which means that you won't have to start from the previous checkpoint after dying at the boss, you just continue on. Of course, there is only one moment in which the checkpoint system is used for level and boss, but it's forgivable because there's only one checkpoint to go back to.
Also, much like a few vertical scrolling shooters that use the checkpoint system, the presence of the second player squelches the checkpoint system entirely... unless of course you both die simultaneously.
Two player mode is rather fun and quite interesting in that there are extra scores and bonuses that either player can score on by hitting targets the other player intended on hitting.
But like most vertical scrolling shooters released for home consoles that allow simultaneous multiplayer action, the 2 player action is broken down a bit by the fact that the game forces players into pool continues. While I can agree with a game trying to extend difficulty by limiting the amount of continues, I have to admit that the method is detrimental to the 2 player option because by splitting the maximum of single player continues, both players only have 2 continues total. Even with two people against the game it's hard to deny that the experience isn't fun for the common new-coming player who isn't used to the game.
The sound is pretty good: the player's shots aren't too bad and the enemy shots that are audible sound fair enough to hear constantly as well as the explosions. If anything, some of the boss explosions though sound a bit scratchy especially when the explosions try to boom with an after-shock sort of sound. The sound does have its saving graces like the fourth level boss' introduction and the sounds of seventh level boss' weight shifting and gears grinding, but otherwise the sound is simply good; not perfect, but not unbearable.
The music is actually very well composed. The soundtrack to Shienryu is similar to Hellfire in that the pace of the music is a little slow at times; the pace stays slow and easy during 75% of the boss fights and the level music never really picks up except on most of the even numbered levels, but the tones, rhythm and beat makes up for the pace completely. The genre of the music in-itself is hard to define as it uses multiple genres to convey the game's multiple settings. Occasionally it will go into a rock composition with heavy drum beats and guitar strums while other times it will use sort of easy, house/dance beats.
I personally think the music is at its best when it combines one of the genres with its standard something-bit synthesizers with the more definable genre aspects, particularly the rock because the combination is unexpectedly sweet. Regardless, the composition of the songs manage to suck you into the game's action no matter how slow it's being played and if you're a nostalgia freak with a place in your heart for shoot em' up soundtracks (like myself), then you'll find it hard to resist letting the level music get stuck in your head.
Shienryu is a near perfect arcade port of the original in that there are very little changes or conversion problems. If anything, the screen seems to have this weird, wavy texture over most of the screen that makes it look like the area is taking place somewhere unbearably hot, but it's easy to overlook seeing how it never hinders the action. Graphic-wise, Shienryu has an intricate touch-up on most of the graphics as clouds and laser beams have picture perfect transparencies and every enemy that gets shot down falls to the ground, explodes, rips up the terrain it fell on and its shrapnel flies out and causes clouds of dirt to rise upon impact. The first level boss in particular features the same detail to graphics as when you look close enough at its feet, you'll see it kicking up dust every time it makes contact with the ground.
Of course, the detail in graphics don't change much beyond that as the shrapnel of your enemies never change in impact detail like when the shrapnel lands in a forested background and when you blast enemies in space, their parts fly downward as if they died in an area of low gravity rather than just spreading out everywhere. All in all though, the graphics are going to come pretty close to wowing you here and it certainly puts the US Playstation release - Gekioh Shooting King - to shame especially when you compare boss fights.
One thing I like about Shienryu is its art style is complemented by its graphical detail. As I said in the SoukyouGurentai review, most vertical scrolling shooters tend to lack the artistic direction of horizontal shooters even when such direction is present, but there certain backgrounds and moments during boss fights that had so much detail put into them it's hard not to drop your jaw the first time you see them. If anything, Warashi apparently believes in saving the best for last as all the REALLY cool boss segments and background only come in during the last two levels with bits and pieces appearing a few levels before hand, but it's still a welcome visual attribute that's certainly worth noting and it's enough to warrant Shienryu to stand out amongst the many clones it represents.
So with all of this in mind you can see why a meek, sophomoric game player wannabe reviewer such as myself can appreciate Shienryu. I know a lot of people reading this will probably end up getting Gekioh Shooting King, just about the only known Western port of Shienryu, but I recommend the original over-it. The action and basic designs are both still present and Gekioh may proffer more modes of play some of which are classically hilarious, but Gekioh lacks the visuals and sound that makes Shienryu stand out as wonderfully as it does. It's also embarrassing to note that Gekioh, released on the Playstation, LACKS the evident transparencies that the Saturn original of Shienryu flaunts!
I throughly recommend Shienryu if anyone has the appropriate Saturn and/or peripherals to play it because as standard as it seems, it still manages to be fun and the challenge is as tolerant as it is evident. Sure it's reminiscent of other vertical shooters like Daioh, Radien and Truxton to the point where it feels like a rip-off, but even rip-off shooters can be enjoyable and Shienryu's no exception. It's easy to see why the game got overlooked for so long, but its still worth looking under the dirt encrusted tombs of the shooting genre to find the little buried treasure that is Shienryu so get it if you get the chance to dig.