Part 2 of a series reviewing Takatsuna Senba's games at Taito.
In Senba's retrospective on Metal Black and Dino Rex's development, he's especially cruel talking about Rex. He goes as far to call it Kusoge - which frankly, it kinda is. But whilst his tone surrounding it's twin game, Metal Black, is less harsh, it's still tinged with a strong sense of dissapointment, lamenting a troubled development and failing to live up to Gun Frontier.
And at first thought, it's kinda hard to get. Metal Black is probably the game of which he and the team is most known for and definetly it's most influential. And when you come from it from Dino Rex and the experience of getting beaten up by a fat purple sauropod's janky disjoints, the opening of metal black in particular is just such a drastic leap in quality it's kinda hard to see how it's creator couldn't be proud of it.
Metal Black's first stage, like many of Taito's games in the 90s, is an absolute treat. It's depiction of a dead earth, with the sun hanging low behind a dozen parralax layers, a giant hermit crab using an aircraft carrier as it's shell, and an eldritch abomination at the end of it - it's still beautiful. And all along Born to be free, one of ZUNTATA's best ever tracks, plays. It's a wonderful, somber start to the game that hints towards the surreal voyage that Metal Black takes off towards for the rest of it's runtime.
After taking off from the dead earth, you go on to face moons which are eggs for aliens, bizzare dream landscapes, some truly bonkers alien designs, kaleidoscopic backgrounds, and eventually images of human war and digitized cats in the background of the final boss. When you combine this with Senba's styling - thick outlines on sprites, use of digitized sprites, deep backgrounds with heavy use of pseudo 3d sprite scaling - Metal Black really resembles little else, and is often absolutely gorgeous to look at. Taito's own Darius series - of which Metal Black was originally intended to be an entry before being deemed "too dark" - is about as close as you're going to get, but it's really not very close. MB's aesthetic is way less refined than something like darius gaiden, and has a lot of rough edges like it's weird UI and a lot of asset reuse, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
Special mention also has to go to the soundtrack by YasuhIsa Watanabe, also known as YACK. According to Senba, he told an unnamed member of Taito's sound team he didn't think they would be able to fullfill the vision he wanted whilst during development of Gun Frontier (which was done by a non-taito composer) - with the aim of "Lighting a fire under them" for Metal Black. It seemed to do the job.
Metal Black's soundtrack is absolutely incredible - it's probably YACK's best work and really hammers in the dark, somber edge to Metal Black. It also is fantastically timed to be in cue with events in stages and boss events, and despite the darker, slower nature of the music compared to say, Darius - still carries an intensity when it needs to.
So, this all sounds amazing. And MB sometimes is. Stages 1, 2 and 6 in particular are brilliant audiovisual feasts. But the problem is that MB is kinda not a good shmup, and to an extent fails to bring together all it's incredible visuals and effects into the great whole it could be.
MB's gameplay is just not great. The beam system it uses, where firing your super laser diminshes normal shot power, is actually pretty interesting and future games it inspired have done similar things well, but the game notably only has a forward directional attack in a game which has loads of enemies coming from behind. Without warning. Yeah.
The level design in general is just generally uninteresting and full of pretty cheap enemies and ways to die. There's also just too many of them. MB's about 40 minutes long, with 6 stages, which could have worked, but around stage 3-5 the game sort of levels out on how far it's surreal visuals and stuff goes until the finale turns it to 11, and the game lulls a lot in this period. Stage 5 could probably have been cut outright for my money, and none of them in this period offer anything particularly interesting gameplay wise. This section really hurts the feel of MB, where it really just feels like it's spinning it's wheels.
Also, the less said about the bonus stages the better. They kill the pacing and just kinda suck.
So I get why Senba isn't happy with this game somewhat. The gameplay sadly brings down the experience quite a bit and it plays a lot worse than Senba's earlier work, Gun Frontier. It's a messier experience and compared to Taito's other vibe-powered shmups - Gun Frontier, Darius Gaiden, Rayforce - stages dont flow into each other well, and it's hard to put a finger on what the story of the game even is.
Nontheless, I hope he becomes proud of it eventually. This fucking mess of a STG, made by 4-6 people over a 6 month period whilst juggling another game and Taito's management being dicks, remains rad as hell and a massive influence to STG developers 30 years later. Taito's darius series in particular took massive influence from it, and refined elements of it's bonkers imagery into more focused, polished experiences in Gaiden and G. Ex-Taito staff later formed G.Rev and did years of contract work to be able to fund a spiritual successor - Border Down.
I do think Gun Frontier is the better game of Senba's, and if the aim of Metal Black was to exceed it, I don't think it does. And whilst it's attract mode labels it as "Project Gun Frontier 2", it's really something very different - and something that's influence in the genre and beyond will always linger.
In Senba's retrospective on Metal Black and Dino Rex's development, he's especially cruel talking about Rex. He goes as far to call it Kusoge - which frankly, it kinda is. But whilst his tone surrounding it's twin game, Metal Black, is less harsh, it's still tinged with a strong sense of dissapointment, lamenting a troubled development and failing to live up to Gun Frontier.
And at first thought, it's kinda hard to get. Metal Black is probably the game of which he and the team is most known for and definetly it's most influential. And when you come from it from Dino Rex and the experience of getting beaten up by a fat purple sauropod's janky disjoints, the opening of metal black in particular is just such a drastic leap in quality it's kinda hard to see how it's creator couldn't be proud of it.
Metal Black's first stage, like many of Taito's games in the 90s, is an absolute treat. It's depiction of a dead earth, with the sun hanging low behind a dozen parralax layers, a giant hermit crab using an aircraft carrier as it's shell, and an eldritch abomination at the end of it - it's still beautiful. And all along Born to be free, one of ZUNTATA's best ever tracks, plays. It's a wonderful, somber start to the game that hints towards the surreal voyage that Metal Black takes off towards for the rest of it's runtime.
After taking off from the dead earth, you go on to face moons which are eggs for aliens, bizzare dream landscapes, some truly bonkers alien designs, kaleidoscopic backgrounds, and eventually images of human war and digitized cats in the background of the final boss. When you combine this with Senba's styling - thick outlines on sprites, use of digitized sprites, deep backgrounds with heavy use of pseudo 3d sprite scaling - Metal Black really resembles little else, and is often absolutely gorgeous to look at. Taito's own Darius series - of which Metal Black was originally intended to be an entry before being deemed "too dark" - is about as close as you're going to get, but it's really not very close. MB's aesthetic is way less refined than something like darius gaiden, and has a lot of rough edges like it's weird UI and a lot of asset reuse, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
Special mention also has to go to the soundtrack by YasuhIsa Watanabe, also known as YACK. According to Senba, he told an unnamed member of Taito's sound team he didn't think they would be able to fullfill the vision he wanted whilst during development of Gun Frontier (which was done by a non-taito composer) - with the aim of "Lighting a fire under them" for Metal Black. It seemed to do the job.
Metal Black's soundtrack is absolutely incredible - it's probably YACK's best work and really hammers in the dark, somber edge to Metal Black. It also is fantastically timed to be in cue with events in stages and boss events, and despite the darker, slower nature of the music compared to say, Darius - still carries an intensity when it needs to.
So, this all sounds amazing. And MB sometimes is. Stages 1, 2 and 6 in particular are brilliant audiovisual feasts. But the problem is that MB is kinda not a good shmup, and to an extent fails to bring together all it's incredible visuals and effects into the great whole it could be.
MB's gameplay is just not great. The beam system it uses, where firing your super laser diminshes normal shot power, is actually pretty interesting and future games it inspired have done similar things well, but the game notably only has a forward directional attack in a game which has loads of enemies coming from behind. Without warning. Yeah.
The level design in general is just generally uninteresting and full of pretty cheap enemies and ways to die. There's also just too many of them. MB's about 40 minutes long, with 6 stages, which could have worked, but around stage 3-5 the game sort of levels out on how far it's surreal visuals and stuff goes until the finale turns it to 11, and the game lulls a lot in this period. Stage 5 could probably have been cut outright for my money, and none of them in this period offer anything particularly interesting gameplay wise. This section really hurts the feel of MB, where it really just feels like it's spinning it's wheels.
Also, the less said about the bonus stages the better. They kill the pacing and just kinda suck.
So I get why Senba isn't happy with this game somewhat. The gameplay sadly brings down the experience quite a bit and it plays a lot worse than Senba's earlier work, Gun Frontier. It's a messier experience and compared to Taito's other vibe-powered shmups - Gun Frontier, Darius Gaiden, Rayforce - stages dont flow into each other well, and it's hard to put a finger on what the story of the game even is.
Nontheless, I hope he becomes proud of it eventually. This fucking mess of a STG, made by 4-6 people over a 6 month period whilst juggling another game and Taito's management being dicks, remains rad as hell and a massive influence to STG developers 30 years later. Taito's darius series in particular took massive influence from it, and refined elements of it's bonkers imagery into more focused, polished experiences in Gaiden and G. Ex-Taito staff later formed G.Rev and did years of contract work to be able to fund a spiritual successor - Border Down.
I do think Gun Frontier is the better game of Senba's, and if the aim of Metal Black was to exceed it, I don't think it does. And whilst it's attract mode labels it as "Project Gun Frontier 2", it's really something very different - and something that's influence in the genre and beyond will always linger.