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I'm not sure I've ever played any sequels to Gradius despite loving its central mechanics.
Gradius II is for insane people. I've played maybe 50 shmups in the past few weeks. Some I've beaten, some I didn't, but I think this might be the hardest of them all.
It doesn't deviate much from the original game, just has new enemies, levels, and bosses, but the difficulty has been turned up significantly. Starting from high-speed maze that has a ton of dead ends and continuing into insane gauntlets of bosses and enemies, I'm not sure how anyone's supposed to beat this game without memorizing its last three stages to the point of TAS.
That said, it's still a very impressive game that I've enjoyed, but I had to put a few more checkpoints than I usually would.
Gradius II is for insane people. I've played maybe 50 shmups in the past few weeks. Some I've beaten, some I didn't, but I think this might be the hardest of them all.
It doesn't deviate much from the original game, just has new enemies, levels, and bosses, but the difficulty has been turned up significantly. Starting from high-speed maze that has a ton of dead ends and continuing into insane gauntlets of bosses and enemies, I'm not sure how anyone's supposed to beat this game without memorizing its last three stages to the point of TAS.
That said, it's still a very impressive game that I've enjoyed, but I had to put a few more checkpoints than I usually would.
It's Gradius again, it's cool! Smoother than SNES III, even if that game has more visually-distinct stage design.
So instead lemme talk about Gradius Syndrome! Gradius Syndrome is so fucking lame.
I don't mind beating a game in 1 life, but Gradius is too long and too memo-heavy to justify it. I get that it got popular with the hardcore JP scene and it prides itself on that, but also, it's fucking lame. Things like the speed section with its collapsing doors feel outright malicious.
Of course I didn't play this on 1 life - I savestated it. And I will say, Gradius is at least one of the few shmups that I think retains its game essence even when save-scumming it. The high-functional focus, careful positioning of options, and surprises build a game where making a savestate is a bit of a risk. Besides the beginning of each level, it can be hard to find an opportunity for a 100% safe save location. Takes some timing. You could say these praises about any other shmup I guess, but, Gradius just feels right to save-scum through. It's Neat.
So instead lemme talk about Gradius Syndrome! Gradius Syndrome is so fucking lame.
I don't mind beating a game in 1 life, but Gradius is too long and too memo-heavy to justify it. I get that it got popular with the hardcore JP scene and it prides itself on that, but also, it's fucking lame. Things like the speed section with its collapsing doors feel outright malicious.
Of course I didn't play this on 1 life - I savestated it. And I will say, Gradius is at least one of the few shmups that I think retains its game essence even when save-scumming it. The high-functional focus, careful positioning of options, and surprises build a game where making a savestate is a bit of a risk. Besides the beginning of each level, it can be hard to find an opportunity for a 100% safe save location. Takes some timing. You could say these praises about any other shmup I guess, but, Gradius just feels right to save-scum through. It's Neat.
Gradius 1 was a good game but it was nothing that wowed me personally. Maybe I'm just hard to please but I was looking forward to the sequels. This one was on the CD instead and it's pretty good and an improvement from last time. I really like some of the stages here but by the end it does go down a bit in quality. I really don't like the stage that goes super fast, it feels like a very cheap thing to do to the player. The final boss is also lame like really really lame. But if you can look past some of that stuff, this is still a really fun shmup for the console. Wish there wasn't a lot of slowdown at times though.