Truxton II's japanese title, Tatsujin Oh, literally translates as "Expert King", following the original game's mere "Expert/Master". It's a statement of intent and one that the game absolutely lives up to. T-oh is an unrelenting, brutal game that takes all the tropes of it's era of STG and turns them up to 11.
T-oh esssentially boils down to an endurance test of the hardest shit Toaplan has to offer. A 1-All (this game loops infinitely like a lot of Toaplan's catalogue) will likely take an hour, which is about 2-3 times the length of the average Cave game some of the very same staff would go on to make, and from the off it throws some pretty tough challenges at the player which only get more and more obscene as the game descends into some true masocore hell in it's latter half. Oh, and it's a checkpoint-based STG, so when you inevitably die you get kicked back 20 seconds of gameplay with your powerups stripped.
Fortunately, perhaps the one lenient bone in T-oh's body is that it has relatively fair checkpoint design, and the first weapon power up picked up is by far the most impactful anyway. And whilst I actually like a checkpoint STG from the approach of "you can't just resource dump your way through all this", it also worsens T-oh's biggest, and really only massive issue.
Because the pacing in this game is already terrible. Stages are absurdly long, and it really whows. Stage 1 is 8 minutes long for some reason and is the main culprit here, as large stretches of it are pretty easy only to be punctuated with a miniboss every 2 minutes. Toaplan's games usually have long stages, for sure, but stage 1 of T-oh is twice the length of stage 1 in Kyukyoku Tiger and it just drags.
And the thing is, whilst T-oh definetly has an issue of some pathetically easy waves and a there being a few too many seconds of dead air between encounters, it isn't that pervaisive, and whilst the game is still too long, there's still a really, really great 40-50 minute STG in the hour, which is fine on the whole. The issue is more in it's presentation, in that it's stages go on for so damn long and that they have nothing to punctuate them. Cutting the stages in half and having more of them, having the great music change occasionally instead of looping over and over, having a moment of catharsis and joy after beating a boss, something to give the game a bit more strucuture and flow than just the endless, slow scroll that it has.
And that's the thing that gets me about T-oh. If you take all the great STG content in this and simply serve it better, it'd probably be one of the best arcade games of it's era. Probably a bit too hard for my blood, but a proper challenge with some great formations and bosses, combined with a fantastic soundtrack.
As it is, it's good, but that pacing is a huge killer. And unless you're really hankering for it's extreme level of difficulty, there's just better options available from its era.
I will say, I can definetly see myself really enjoying this when i retire. It's a good podcast game and it has a very good reputation with among Gen X in Japan, so hey, what do I know.
T-oh esssentially boils down to an endurance test of the hardest shit Toaplan has to offer. A 1-All (this game loops infinitely like a lot of Toaplan's catalogue) will likely take an hour, which is about 2-3 times the length of the average Cave game some of the very same staff would go on to make, and from the off it throws some pretty tough challenges at the player which only get more and more obscene as the game descends into some true masocore hell in it's latter half. Oh, and it's a checkpoint-based STG, so when you inevitably die you get kicked back 20 seconds of gameplay with your powerups stripped.
Fortunately, perhaps the one lenient bone in T-oh's body is that it has relatively fair checkpoint design, and the first weapon power up picked up is by far the most impactful anyway. And whilst I actually like a checkpoint STG from the approach of "you can't just resource dump your way through all this", it also worsens T-oh's biggest, and really only massive issue.
Because the pacing in this game is already terrible. Stages are absurdly long, and it really whows. Stage 1 is 8 minutes long for some reason and is the main culprit here, as large stretches of it are pretty easy only to be punctuated with a miniboss every 2 minutes. Toaplan's games usually have long stages, for sure, but stage 1 of T-oh is twice the length of stage 1 in Kyukyoku Tiger and it just drags.
And the thing is, whilst T-oh definetly has an issue of some pathetically easy waves and a there being a few too many seconds of dead air between encounters, it isn't that pervaisive, and whilst the game is still too long, there's still a really, really great 40-50 minute STG in the hour, which is fine on the whole. The issue is more in it's presentation, in that it's stages go on for so damn long and that they have nothing to punctuate them. Cutting the stages in half and having more of them, having the great music change occasionally instead of looping over and over, having a moment of catharsis and joy after beating a boss, something to give the game a bit more strucuture and flow than just the endless, slow scroll that it has.
And that's the thing that gets me about T-oh. If you take all the great STG content in this and simply serve it better, it'd probably be one of the best arcade games of it's era. Probably a bit too hard for my blood, but a proper challenge with some great formations and bosses, combined with a fantastic soundtrack.
As it is, it's good, but that pacing is a huge killer. And unless you're really hankering for it's extreme level of difficulty, there's just better options available from its era.
I will say, I can definetly see myself really enjoying this when i retire. It's a good podcast game and it has a very good reputation with among Gen X in Japan, so hey, what do I know.