I've been wanting to play the Trouble Shooter series for years (or Battle Mania as the series is called in Japan.) due to it's overall premise. It's a bit of a parody of the shoot 'em up genre in some ways though it does try some mechanically interesting ideas with it.

You control two combat operatives called Madison and Crystal who have been hired to save a kidnapped prince. Both characters have jet packs and blasters as basic gear and in between each level can select between 4 special weapons for their packs. This power up is their super attack essentially, (like a bomb in other shoot 'em ups) that after use recharges to fire again like it's an 80's powerpack. There are a variety of choices from lightning waves, missile barrages and lasers. If you don't like one then you can change it on the next mission to find one you like most though I found some more useful than others but that did also vary by level.

The main weapons they carry don't change, Madison fires little blue balls whilst Crystal carries a blaster that rapid fires some kind of orange arc beams that seem really powerful. You can get a few basic power ups that strengthen their attack, (In Maddison's case expand her cone of fire) and some speed ups, health ups and slow downs as well as one option turret that flies along firing with you. Overall the upgrades are limited and will mostly come down to your choice of special weapon. So load outs and power ups are pretty limited but where Trouble Shooter is interesting is that Crystal is more like an invincible option that follows you rather than a playable character. Only Madison actually takes damage and with a push of a button you can have Crystal flip 180 to start firing backwards to cover the rear if needed or have them both face forward for a full frontal barrage.

It's a really neat little idea to have it as a flexible use mechanic and what got me so interested in the series in the first place but it's just so bizarrely underused as a mechanic. Some enemies come from behind occasionally and a couple of bosses move around making it useful but it just doesn't feel like the game is designed around it enough and the limited weapons and lack of equipable load outs for each character compound that further. The level designs occasionally use it like in the second level with buzz saws coming from both directions as you travel down an underground base shaft which I liked and one boss in particular utilised it more than the others. Speaking of levels the game has 6 short stages even for a shoot 'em up and there seems to be little variety between playthroughs and it's on the easy side.

Though I enjoyed playing this quite a bit I was hoping to like this game more than I did overall. On the presentation front it has some decent music Stage 5 theme especially stood out as action packed and upbeat when I played. I like the visuals with chunky colourful sprites, paralax scrolling, level settings and anime character portraits during scenes. The mechanics and story writing though leave it as a good overall experience but it could have been an amazing one. So a good game but with missing potential as a final verdict.

I hear the sequel takes the idea and amps it up to 11 so I look forward to trying that.

+ Nice visuals and music.
+ I like the cover art of two sci-fi aerobics instructors, haters be damned.
+ Two characters with left or right shooting options is neat...

-...but severely underutilised.

I might be getting old because every game that's short, sweet, has good music, and makes me laugh is a good one in my book.

What sets Trouble Shooter, or Battle Mania, apart from others is its comedic tone, which reminds me of old animes such as Dirty Pair or Excel Saga. Bosses are very silly but actually well designed, and every level feels unique in its own right.

The sprites are a bit too big for my liking; the music is fine, but the percussion instruments are a tad loud and won't let you hear the melody clearly. Stage 3 I also think could have been better handled since there's no way to know where you're supposed to go and I had a couple of cheap deaths: very trial and error. But other than that, I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I can't wait to play its sequel.

Dirty Pair is one of many highly influential 80s animes whose impact both in and out of Japan still reverberates through media today. Hell, you can find numerous references to the show in Star Trek: The Next Generation, of all things. I've always had some passing familiarity with it, though I wrote it off for many years as some skeevy fan service show. I finally got around to watching it in 2020, and while I can't deny there's definitely some of That Stuff in it, I was surprised by how much heart it had, and how it has some strikingly progressive things to say given the time and cultural climate of its release.

So, it's not much of a surprise to me that Trouble Shooter wears its own reverence for Dirty Pair so proudly. It is borderline litigious in how close it comes to just being Dirty Pair: The Game, and that's probably the best thing Trouble Shooter has going for it, because it is otherwise and extremely rote shoot-em-up.

You control Madison and Crystal, the Trouble Shooters - guns for hire that are tasked with rescuing a prince from the clutches of the evil Blackball. It's got a bit of a reverse damsel-in-distress thing going on that I'm into, and the writing is overall charming if a bit reigned in compared to Dirty Pair. The player has direct control over Madison and secondary control over Crystal, who follows your movements and can be flipped to fire to the front or back. You'll need to manage her firing direction quite a bit, and that's really the main mechanical gimmick of the game. Everything else is pretty straight forward. It's competent enough, but so unremarkable that there's virtually no reason to play this game when the Genesis has dozens of far more interesting shoot-em-ups, including (or so I've heard) its sequel.

I'll also say that I'm not a huge fan of how it feels to control Madison. You lack fine control over her movements, so you kind of need to expect that inputs on the d-pad or going to push you a bit further than you probably want to go. There's also a few segments where the screen will move and attempt to crush you against edges of the screen and geometry. I experienced a few deaths I would consider cheap because of this, but once you know where the screen is going to move to, you won't fall for the same trick twice. It is also a short game, and I occasionally found myself inclined to go back to the title screen upon getting a game over simply because it would not take long to get back to where I was, and I'd have the opportunity to get better equipped with health and weapons than if I simply ate a credit.

I hear Battle Mania is the one to play between the two of these, but was also cautioned that my opinion of Trouble Shooter would be impacted for the worse if I played that game first. I'm glad I followed that advice, because I don't think Trouble Shooter is particularly great in a vacuum.

Maybe was a bit too hard on this one previously. It stands on its own legs pretty nicely, the writing is fun, the music is (mostly) pretty good, and it's a substantial improvement over Whip Rush. But with how much the sequel, Battle Mania Daiginjou, improves on basically everything, though, the first game feels like yet another step leading up to it. This is probably because the sequel raises the bar really high in retrospect, but whatever the case it makes this one hard to talk about without mentioning the other.

I'll probably never stop shilling Battle Mania Daiginjou, but really you should check both of these out. Ideally this one first so the second doesn't spoil you.