After completing Void Stranger (my personal GOTY 2023), I decided to give a previous System Erasure game a shot. I was impressed by Zero Ranger as much as their next game, I even enjoyed it even more in some aspects.

Maybe it is not an impressive game for someone who 1CC'ed every single Cave game, but I enjoyed every single segment in this shmup. It was a joy getting used to every single pattern and trying to push your limits. While being hard in the second half of the game, I had no feeling that the game was unfair. I will never forget the last 3 bosses, one of the most memorable gaming experiences.

Great visuals with some interesting artistic decisions and an amazing soundtrack. There are also some unexpected narrative segments, which spice up the experience even more and make it unique and memorable.

I have mixed feelings only about one thing - how they decided to add a challenge in the ending. Without spoiling that much, it made the progression to the end a bit too long. I understand their decision and respect it though. On the other hand, it is still great to replay that game after getting used to more and more patterns. A choice of two ships and several powerups add more to the replay value. I certainly want to try to do a 1cc run and get into other shmups more now.

Lovely game, can not praise it and geniuses from System Erasure enough. They became one of my favourite video game developers.

Just when you thought you finally beat the game, you realize it's just getting started.

It's got the soundtrack, the art style and satisfying gameplay. I couldn't ask for more from a shmup. Learning how to get through the levels and improving slightly every attempt to finally reach the end was incredibly rewarding.

Zero Complaints... hehe

I really enjoyed my time with ZeroRanger. I don’t quite have the lexicon built up to talk about Shmups (I haven’t played that many), but I feel pretty confident that ZeroRanger excels in comparison to most of its competition. The structure of the game gives a large focus to elements that often feel tacked on in these types of arcade-y games, namely the scoring and continue systems. It should be noted that it's not just that these elements are incorporated in a way that incentivizes players to engage with them, but they are also used in interesting narrative ways. It feels elegant in a way that most games' core design isn’t.

It's especially noteworthy that these changes are implemented so well because of how many games simply copy older games’ design. Lots of old games have systems built in place because they were common at the time. This isn't a shocking revelation, but a whole lot of design trends have become outdated. Yet at the same time, if you were to make a modern Shmup, you would be heavily criticized if you didn't include a score system, or a limited continue systems, etc. ZeroRanger sidesteps both of these grievances by being cleverly built to accommodate the best parts of arcade-y games, while still feeling modern with its approach by elevating each aspect.

My favorite part (to no one’s surprise) was the presentation. Such a bold color palette is used expertly to create vastly different atmospheres throughout the four levels. Really incredible stuff visually. But it's not just that it's well executed, it's that it's unique. A lot of games can have excellent visuals by most metrics, but they don’t tend to stand out in my mind the way that a Green and Orange color palette does. It’s bold, and it’s all the better for it.

The music is of course the highlight. Sky XXXX Days, The Sea Has Returned, It May Be Greenish, Despair, the list goes on. I couldn’t do justice talking about them here, just listen to them. A lot of the music hit especially close to home after playing Void Stranger, since the games share a lot of motifs.

I couldn’t recommend ZeroRanger enough. I tried not to touch on the spoiler stuff because you should play it for yourself. Between ZeroRanger and Void Stranger, System Erasure has solidified themselves as one of my favorite developers. I heavily anticipate whatever they release next.

I'm really not much of a shoot 'em up guy. Like people who aren't accustomed to a certain type of music and therefore think it's all the same since they can't hear the different nuances between songs, I feel like I play the same thing over and over again when I touch upon these games. That's obviously not really the case; games like Jamestown and UN Squadron are very different, but there is something about the very pure gameplay focus of these games where you're a tiny ship against a scrolling background, fighting other tiny ships in set patterns, getting similar power-ups and usually starting out with a finite amount of screen nukes that sort of makes most games feel a bit "been there, done that" to me and with that attitude I can't really see myself ever putting enough time into the genre to learn to appreciate its games' more subtle, individual charms. Guess I also just don't appreciate the gameplay loop as much as a good 2D platformer, another genre without much innovation.

Ikaruga was great, of course, but that's almost more of a puzzle game at times, and the 1CC took so long that it sort of burned away all goodwill I had for the genre for the foreseeable future. Until 2024, apparently. A close friend of mine has pestered me about playing ZeroRanger for years now and how amazing it is, so it was probably about time.

ZeroRanger is fine.

The color palette using only black, green, orange and white gives it a very striking look and generally makes the lighter projectiles stand out next to darker environments, while the soundtrack is about as good as it gets, striking a nice balance between the 8-bit aesthetic the game is going for, while also using more modern chiptune techniques (and a probably more audio channels as well.) When just looking and hearing ZeroRanger, it's close to a 5/5 experience to me, and it's so fascinating that it was made just by two finnish guys who like to make video games and, as far as I can tell, had never made a game like this before, and still knocks it out of the park so completely audiovisually. You see this and immediately think "yeah, this is exactly how a shmup (or STG, as the genre is apparently called by its more hardcore community) is supposed to look and sound", and yet it doesn't really look and sound like any others that I have played.

But still, ZeroRanger is just fine. Seeing someone else play it is fun, but going through it myself, I feel like I've done all of these things the game throws at me before. That's not even true because I haven't transformed my ship into a drill wielding mech in any other game, but that's basically just a power-up and not really as cool as it sounds (though I'm also kind of a mech hater so maybe don't take my word for it.) Most stages feel very familiar, the other power-ups as well. What is sort of novel is the story the game is trying to tell, but it's so obfuscated that it'd feel generous to even call it incomprehensible, and theming the game around buddhism and enlightenment is sort of cool, but I also feel like it's not really relevant until the true final stage, unlike Ikaruga where it's felt throughout the entire game. It has a second loop tied to the narrative as well which I guess some would find cool, but I didn't really find the game enjoyable enough to want to go through every stage again, but slightly harder.

That final point should, by the way, bring me to some fairly harsh complaints about the game suddenly having stakes at the absolute final boss after giving a very generous stage select for the rest of the game, but I honestly respect what developers System Erasure were going for, the cruelty of it, and how the game taught me here that true enlightenment is realizing that you can play a shmup however you want and tell its rules to fuck off.

ZeroRanger really delivers in both being a great entry point into the genre of shmups while also being a fantastic game in its own right. It's such a love letter to older shooters and mecha anime while also defining itself from the rest of the pack due to its presentation, moments and story. The music is fantastic and the visuals are clear, making the presentation only enhance it's gameplay and offering some great set pieces.

It's story and narrative has so much heart, full of sincerity. It's the kind of experience that can only be done via a video game, and it's just good elements get raised to be so much more than the sum of their parts. The less you know about the games structure and story the better, it's one of the best indie games ever made.

Extremamente interessante, comecei a jogar pelas incontáveis referências ao conteúdo mecha e afins, mas o jogo não se baseia só nisso nem de perto. O jogo é um trabalho de perseverança, e que te ensina a realmente lutar pra completar ele, os continues são uma grande fachada, onde o jogo repetidas vezes mostra como eles são um utensílio fantasma, e que se você quiser realmente buscar o verdadeiro final do jogo, terá que se desprender desse utensílio.
O jogo faz com que você, de certa forma, valorize cada espaço e ambiente dele mesmo, analisando cada pequena coisa, porque o jogo te incentiva, quase indiretamente à isso. Fazendo assim com que você tire extremo proveito do jogo mesmo sem perceber.
Confesso ter um pouco de dificuldade com Shoot 'em ups, sou simplesmente horrível nesse tipo de jogo, mas esse conseguiu me prender de uma forma absurda, onde erros não me deixavam extremamente frustrado, mas sim motivado. Esse jogo é um constante aprendizado, e você praticamente estuda ele a cada vez que você joga, te dando doses incansáveis de conteúdo constantemente, de alguma forma.
Se você nunca jogou um Shoot 'em up, e tem algum interesse em começar a experimentar coisas do gênero, creio que esse jogo possa ser uma boa parte de entrada.