Despite its seemingly mediocre release, Darius Twin still manages to pull off the old fashioned Darius fun.
For the horror games, those would include the first three Resident Evil games, the first three Silent Hill games and the only TWO actual Clock Tower games (i.e.: any one that doesn't put you in the shoes of extremely slow short haired girls in green mini-skirt school girl outfits). For the Car-Combat games that would have to be the Twisted Metal series. For the shoot em' ups they would have to include the Gradius series, the R-Type series and at the top of this list is the Darius series.
I know it's strange to praise a somewhat samey series like Darius, but over the years that the series actually existed the games always possessed this strangely charming magnetism a fun-loving shooter like myself just can't avoid. Not that the Darius series has had an easy time making itself known over the years: the series' appearance on the Super Nintendo was probably the weakest time its ever known forgiving the fact that the series has always had a dodgy experience with home console releases and Taito has YET to release the very first darius on any system other than the PC Engine.
But it's all forgivable because the Darius series has always been a fun one and the series' first SNES release, Darius Twin, reflects just that. Despite its seemingly mediocre release, Darius Twin still manages to pull off the old fashioned Darius fun.
Plot wise, nothing has changed too much: the game takes place after Darius 2 in that Proco and Tiat return to planet Olga after responding to Belser's false SOS message and it's once again up to them and whoever the Hell pilots the green Silver Hawk space fighter to save planets Olga and Darius from Galactic Militant Green-Peace humanoids piloting enormous fish-ships.
The game play hasn't changed much either in that you get permission to shoot everything that moves and get to pick up different pick-up items to increase your fire-power and enable yourself a shield. The only real gimmick this time around is that you get a choice between one player or two player game play at the title screen which sort of eliminates the two player cheat I used to beat Darius II and Gaiden with on the Saturn whenever my player one ships ran out of continues.
The power ups have certainly increased in variety and power in that your ground bombs upgrade to lasers that shoot in the ship's blind spots and you still get the opportunity to fire both bombs and main shots at the same time. I suppose the biggest gripe this time around is the simple fact that players are now allowed to keep their shot upgrades next to their shield upgrades, so every time you die in the game you still keep whatever shot and bomb upgrades you had previously.
I use 'gripe' mostly because, even from a cheap-o like myself, letting the player keep their upgrades sounds a little detrimental to the game's challenge, but in actuality what detriment to the challenge there is is insignificant because even on Easy mode players will have a hard time getting all the way to the end because this is a Taito game: their belief in challenging the player is to increase the default difficulty from tough as nails to ensure replay value to blisteringly tough and unforgiving as volcanic rock to the point of wanting to chuck the game back into the bowels of Hell where it came from and Twin falls in the former as does its other Darius relatives (save for Super Nova), but at times the toughness tends to linger a bit.
For the first four levels, the game's difficulty will linger over easy difficulty before hitting normal for the last two levels whereupon the hard difficulty jumps at you like a face hugger during the final level that makes the previous two boss fights look simple.
The end level bosses feature the proud tradition of Darius giant marine life designs some of which certainly serve to show off the Super Nintendo's graphical capabilities like a highly detailed squid and sea horse, but the difficulty of each boss makes all the bosses from Darius II look like Tyrants. A good 75% of the Darius bosses feature excruciatingly simple attack formations and bullet patterns that are so easy to time that encountering the bosses feels less of a battle and more of a skirmish. It's like playing the Mega Man games with the direct path on whose weakness works on who being brightly lit over each boss in the boss selection screen.
Despite this, there are some boss encounters that certainly stand out like in the second level where King Fossil makes an unsurprising, but new return with familiar monstrosities like Red Octopus coming back in spades. Plus at the top of this is a wonderfully charming tribute to Darius I taking place in the next-to-last level complete with the old epic final boss battle theme song.
Speaking of which, the soundtrack is once again composed by those melodic geniuses Zuntata who help to excuse the game's simplistic nature and buggy design choices with an array of greatly composed tunes that, the moment you hear them, sound like the tales of a happy and facetious childhood. It's interesting to note though that the music sounds somewhat reminiscent of Mega Man X, meaning that Zuntata uses the same sound cards to create the motivational electronic rock goodness that you can't help but head thrash to on occasion. So despite sounding somewhat unoriginal, the music rarely falls short of sounding bland or monotonous which at times feels like the game's better attributes.
The sounds have actually been recycled from Darius II/Sagaia in that the ground bombs, lasers, explosions all sound the same as they did in the last game with little to no new sounds in the slightest. Of course if you're like me and am so familiar with Darius' aesthetics then a sequel having the same exact sounds might not bother you too much, but as much of a Darius lover as I am, it's still hard to deny that recycling sounds from previous games seems kind of lazy (see my Silent Hill game reviews).
What the game lacks however is the classic Darius replay value and level variety. In the Darius games, you always get to choose whichever level you go to and in most cases you always ended up exploring different areas and in some cases encountering different bosses. While you do get multiple levels to choose from and multiple endings, the latter endings are determined solely by only one path you take and are only different from each other visually and 90% of the levels are all just doubled variations of their counter parts among the level tier (hence the Twin title, I suppose).
I've always been curious about the galaxy that the Earth-like planet Darius resides in as well as all of the other planets in it and revealing the entire galaxy in Twin almost feels a little futile. Most of the planets have absurd names like Padi or the laughably named Rear (which I'm hoping is Engrish for Lear, which would be kinda cool to go around naming celestial bodies after Shakespeare characters) and just about the silliest of them all belonging to a gas planet called Narukini which actually sounds deliciously kinky because if you think about it, it sounds like a mix between Sushi and a woman's bikini... I'm gonna need a cold shower after this review.
I'm not too sure if this is the weakest game in the series or not, though. Compared to the series' two Saturn releases and single releases on the TG16, Genesis and Playstation, both the games, Twin and Force/Super Nova pale in comparison. The graphics and presentation differ extremely from Twin and Super Nova, but what Twin sacrifices in graphics, artistic direction and presentation, it leaves room for the familiar Darius staples of high stakes action, wiggy level design and thus leaves more room for fun.
Super Nova was one of those games that it feels like Taito made solely to demonstrate what the Darius series could do graphically for the many skeptics out there, but by doing so they allowed it to feel less and less like a Darius game that it was hard not to kick it back into the ninth level of Hell where it belongs. Which is not to say EITHER one of the two are bad games, none of them are, they're just the not as good as their predecessors and those that came after it.
To reach a solid conclusion, I have to admit that Darius Twin is a very weak addition to the series with level designs feeling tacked on at the last minute and the game proffering little innovation as possible, but you could do much worse than buying it: the game's age old musical charm and epic battles, endless waves of kamikaze encounters and excitement are always close by to suck you into the game's action with an occasional sense of challenge and if you're looking for a good multiplayer side shooter that entices two player action (unlike 90% of the shooters released on the SNES), then Darius Twin will be a worthy budget title to your collection.
Now if you don't mind, I need to get on the wire to Frederick's of Hollywood about that Sushi-bikini.