The GBA has some bangers on it, but it probably has my least favorite aesthetic of any console. It somehow has a library that ages worse than anything else due to how many ports are on it that ruin the graphics with sprites that look like they got thrown in the washer, and music that's high on helium and trying to talk to you through a bathroom door.

I came into Darius R expecting something similar to those crappy ports, and I was half-right. It turns out the "R" in the title stands for Remix and not Rubbish, and I guess only the first stage from the arcade game was put in here. Not that it matters, because these stages were about as "that's nice I guess" as they come. I actually wouldn't be offended by it if it weren't for the odd bout of screen crunch and the camera being zoomed in like Sonic 2 GG. Which is just dandy because I love feeling like I have constant blind spots with enemies plotting to fire at me from off-screen. Like they had the effort to rearrange things, but not enough to actually redraw the sprites or anything. Fantastic. This would be like if you walked up to one of the three-screen cabinets and squished your face into the monitor like a blind molerat.

Some of the remixes are okay, and some of them sound like crap. Pretty standard considering my stance on GBA music normally. Hi Fantasy Zone music, what are you doing here? WEE WOO WEE WOO we comin' for you Darius R composer.

Actually disappointed that it wasn't worse like that trash version of R-Type III that sounded like an Atari game. Maybe if the ship was constantly yelling "WOOHOO! JUST WHAT I NEEDED!" every time I grabbed a power up I'd detest it more.

Could've been worse.

I'm not too sure what motivated me to try this game. I've never played a Darius game before so I must have just been very curious. I did three playthroughs of this game all on Normal difficulty.

This game is a decent shmup but it's got some issues. One being that the game doesn't seem as replayable as you might think it would be. It's got a lot of branching levels but a lot of them feel the same and you'll still be fighting the same bosses and enemies. There were only 3 zones I never went into and I feel like a lot of them blend together. The game is also too zoomed in due to the hardware meaning you can't see everything on screen which bothers me. The game's difficulty is also too easy once you get powered up at least on Normal.

While that's not to say there isn't fun to be had, I can't help but feel it does show it's issues the more you play around with it. It wants you to keep coming back to get a better score but I don't feel like I'd be bothered to do that.

The game's music is alright, I like the songs that come from Darius Gaiden at least according to an OST upload says they're from that game. One very odd thing about this game is it takes a boss theme from Fantasy Zone, a Sega Franchise. I had to check if the composer worked on any of the games out of curiosity but he didn't. So like what gives here? I also only heard it once and it was on my first run through the game. Also the siren before a boss comes is not good on my ears, me no like loud siren, I just finished Ace Attorney 1 so I was hoping to get out of loud noise territory.

I'm not really sure if it's worth playing nowadays, maybe I could give a better answer if I had played the other games. I do wonder why it stayed in Japan though. It's a game that could be good but just suffers due to some issues that keep it from being a game I would want to replay.