I'm Give Up Your Appellation's Technical Monkey

Superlative horizontal scrolling shooter, unfortunately let down by the SNES's technical limitations. The developers had the sheer cheek to call it a feature, that they were merely emulating the arcade, but there's no escaping the crippling slowdown, particularly evident on the Bubble Zone and Cell levels. In spite of this, Konami did the game a service. The controls are perfect, the soundtrack stellar, and there's tons of variety in the levels and enemies to keep you coming back for another go.

There's also a SA-1 enhanced patch by Brazilian coding genius Vitor Vilela which adds the vital oomph the game was lacking, so by all means check that out.

Back when I started playing the Gradius games both out of interest and for this website, I originally dreaded each installment that I decided to take on. Given how ruthless each game in the series is, and given how much of a rude awakening I had when I decided to play through the original game, can you really blame me initially? But, now that I have reached this point, I actually find myself being extremely excited to jump back into this series once again. Especially in this case, considering that Gradius II was, undeniably, the best game in the series so far, providing the best arcade action that the series could muster at that point, along with just enough additions to make it that much more satisfying to conquer. So it was clear that, when it came to the main titles at least, the main focus was going to be on making a more tight and satisfying experience for each installment, while also making sure to ramp up the difficulty that much more, just to make sure you don’t forget what you are playing. That all could be clearly seen upon playing Gradius III.

Unlike with Gradius II, I decided to stick with the SNES version of the game for two specific reasons. One, it was the first version of the game that we ever got here in America, so I figured it would only be appropriate to play the game as we originally got it, and two, when this game was released originally in arcades in Japan, the game was apparently much harder then the previous games, to the point where Konami had to pull the game from the arcades shortly after. Think about that for a second. A Gradius game that KONAMI thought was too hard. That is honestly pretty scary considering how hard the previous games already were. So, I played through the SNES version of the game, and I am glad that I did, because this may just be the best game in the series so far. Yeah, I know I said that about Gradius II, but this game just feels like a much more tight, fun, and well put together experience, and with the features in this version, it is more accessible to players than ever before…….. while still making sure to kick your ass most of the time.

The graphics are… basically on par with the other arcade Gradius games like Gradius II, but it still looks pretty good, so I am completely ok with it, the music is quite possibly the best in the entire series so far, having plenty of incredible tracks that had me pumped up to take down any fucker that came my way, while also providing the exact quality I expect from SNES soundtracks from Konami, the control is as I hoped it would be, allowing you enough versatility with your basic movement that only gets better as you keep upgrading yourself, and it all feels great to control, and the gameplay does feel the best that it has ever been so far………. but it is also still exactly what you would expect from a Gradius game.

The game plays pretty much identically for the most part to Gradius II, or any other Gradius beforehand, where you take control of the Vic Viper, take on a set of ten extremely difficult stages, shoot down as many enemies as you can feasibly take on while making sure to avoid all of their fire as best as you can, gather plenty of powerups to upgrade yourself and take out many of the enemies on screen to give yourself an edge up on the threats that you will face, and take on plenty of difficult, yet exciting bosses throughout the game, challenging your skills to an immense degree. Anyone who has played any of the games in this series knows this song and dance, you live, you die, you feel that sense of agony wash over your entire body, and then you keep at it, but is there anything that new that makes this game much more unique then the previous title? Well… no, not too many new features have been added, but the features that are added do still make this a very enjoyable experience.

The biggest new feature to this game would be with the Edit Mode, which is added alongside the Type Select option. Now, instead of choosing one of five sets of upgrades that you could take with you into the stages, you are now able to create your own loadout of upgrades to venture forth with, and there is a lot of different options to choose from, allowing for many different ways of approaching the challenges ahead. There are also specific upgrades that can only be found within Edit Mode or outside of it, which does encourage you to try out many different layouts as you go through the game and inevitably die over and over again. In addition to all this, for the SNES version of the game, there is now a difficulty option screen, and honestly, THANK GOD FOR THAT. Look, I know Gradius is supposed to be extremely difficult through and through, but considering what I had to go through five and half previous games, I will gladly take any assistance I can.

That being said though, the amount of assistance you get from this game isn’t much. The game is still extremely difficult, and will require you to play at your best ability to even get close to beating it whatsoever, so if you are hoping that the difficulty is still retained for this installment, you better believe it is. Even when it came to Easy mode in the SNES version, it was still pretty hard at plenty of points, and it didn’t get any better whenever I jumped up to the other difficulties. And speaking of which, this game also does that bullshit thing Konami loves to do by placing the good ending behind the harder difficulties… and by that, I mean they place the actual ending behind the harder difficulties, whereas in Easy mode, the game just… ends. Then again, the ending is about what you would expect from a Gradius game, so nothing more needs to be said about it.

In terms of actual problems about the game itself, there isn’t really much I could say in relation to that. If you have played Gradius before, you know what to expect when it comes to difficulty, and the locked ending isn’t really that much of an issue this time around, so really, it doesn’t have too much dragging it down. Unless, of course, you are playing the SNES version, which has slowdown EVERYWHERE. Since there is usually a lot going on in this game, it chugs along every step of the way, and while the slowdown does help in plenty of instances, there are also times where it can also be a bit of a nuisance. Thankfully though, there is a hack of this game that exists only to completely fix the slowdown issues, so if you wanted to play through the SNES version without any of that, there ya go. Go nuts with it.

Overall, despite the slowdown issues and how not too much is changed with the formula in this installment, I still found myself having a blast with Gradius III, and out of all of the titles in this series that I have played so far, I guarantee that I will be coming back to this one the most out of them all. Sure, the other titles have their merits, but this one just managed to give me the most enjoyment and satisfaction out of all of them so far. I definitely recommend it for fans of the Gradius series, or even for those who wanna try to jump into it, because it is definitely one of the best places to do so. Aw man, I’m so pumped up after that review, it makes me wanna get to the next title in the series right now! So tell me, when does Gradius IV come out?.................... a whole TEN years later, huh? And before that, there are the Game Boy games that I have to go through, huh?...... ok, that’s… that’s fine. I’m definitely not sad at all…

Game #386

Arcade Gradius 3 might be the hardest game I have ever played that is still good and isn't a TAS only game.

Even the second stage is already more difficult than pretty much any stage in Gradius 1 & 2. My best runs already ended in Stage 3 and I can only imagine how tense it must be to get to the final stage and beat the game. It is also about twice as long as the previous two games and has alot of super unfair sections. (Cube Rush being the most infamous one)

The SNES Version is a much much easier game that is much more balanced and actually beatable with a little amount of skill. It has some different stages too.

While this game is just as great as Gofer no Yabou, This game is HARD. AS. HELL. I don't know what they were going in their mind when making this game. This game might be the best in terms of soundtrack, how many stages there are, and the graphics, but oh my gosh, this game, you need to have good experience with not just Gradius, but Bullet Hell games in general. People say that the SNES one is better but also worse cause of the lag, but in this game, YOU NEED THE LAG.

After the Cell stage, it's just pure torture. I won't even go into further detail on how bad after that stage is.

But I managed to beat it regardless. This game.. Oh man.....