Would you be surprised if I told you this was one of the games I was thinking of playing before 2023 began? I wasn't really the biggest fan of Hellfire on the Mega Drive, I thought it was fine but had issues. I said I would do the PC Engine version sometime so here it is.

First I just wanna say I went to go look back what I even said for the Mega Drive review and wow I'm sorry guys but I actually feel bad for how awful that review was. I don't even remember doing it poorly but yeah hopefully this one turns out better.

This is a straight port in many ways of the original Hellfire, I did check to see just to make sure and yeah they are pretty much identical. You also still have that ability to choose what direction to shoot from 4 different choices. I still think this is pretty cool but I hate how doing diagonals lags the game when fully powered up.

However when you start the game you might be surprised to see there's a story here. The full title for this game is actually Hellfire S The Another Story which just reminds me of the Sailor Moon RPG on Super Famicom. That's right this game stars two female protagonists. I can't really say why they did this. Maybe they wanted to give a reason for it being on a CD? I would say it was just to give it more attention on shelves considering the two girls are on the cover of this version only because I feel like people have told me this has happened before with another game. It doesn't help the girl you play as is naked under her covers when the game begins.

I don't know if I have just gotten better at shmups but I feel like I had a more fun time with this one. I read some people's thoughts on this port and said the Arcade and Mega Drive ports are better but I have to disagree, I had more fun with this but not by too much. The difficulty is a little inconsistent with the bosses being mostly easy in this game while some enemy patterns can be a pain with how big your ship is. I do still agree with what I said before that this game gets too repetitive with enemy patterns.

You also can only go up to normal difficulty in this version of the game. If there is a way to get a hard mode then IDK how, it didn't unlock after beating on hard and there were no cheats listed on GameFAQs for this port. You can also set your speed here and I picked fast just incase I needed speed.

Now we need to talk about the ending. I honestly forgot the game ends on that one knight looking boss because it was so easy and then the cutscene shows this giant enemy base thing and I was like alright last stage let's go! But then the situation of the two looked dire and I was a little confused but then they go blazing speeds towards it and now it's time...then you get shown Kaoru's (the main character) ribbon floating in space. That's right, they died. This game ends with the two girls dying AND THEN CREDITS! What the hell? Why does the game end this way? Maybe if I knew the language I'd appreciate it more but like it just feels so random to me that it left me with confusion.

The game's OST is now full of redbook audio and it sounds nice but I've heard better on the console and I can't really say if I like it more then the Mega Drive OST, I'd have to listen to it again. The game looks decent but nothing too special, it seems to mostly look similar to the Arcade but I could see differences. I do wish the sound effects were better though. The voice acting for the cutscenes are also nice too, nothing bad here.

Overall it's about what you expect for a port of a game like this. It's not gonna blow you away but yet I still kind of like this game for some reason. Am I weird? I'm probably in the huge minority that prefers this over the Mega Drive version but maybe it's in due of a replay, who knows. It's still such an odd port to me just for the fact it has this story. If you didn't like Hellfire before then just stay away from this, it's not gonna change your mind.