Something interesting about Thunder Force II is the horizontal shmup segments are shit, and those are basically what Thunder Force is all about. They're mainly bad because of the level layouts, not really the enemies. I don't know how they fucked that up, but it really feels like shit to navigate around and you would definitely see what I mean upon trying it yourself. Bosses are also big damage sponges and can get really annoying and tedious.
Something else interesting about Thunder Force II, though, is it seems to be the only one of the series (addendum: besides the silly ass William Tell ass first game) with overhead segments. They're quite interesting and definitely better, but still pretty flawed. They're very freeform, but oftentimes it's quite hard to tell where to go or where you have and haven't been. Also, in the first level you start off in some sort of enclosure and I initially thought you just had to kill a certain amount of enemies, so I sat around in there for like 10 minutes before realizing you can shoot a part of the wall to open it. That probably was just me being real stupid, but I think an arrow or something pointing at it would've helped better.
Once I got the hang of the top down segments I enjoyed those much more than the horizontal ones, but ultimately this still wasn't that great of a time. Interesting, but with 4 (and presumably 3, but let's find out) generally doing a lot better it remains little more than a curiosity.
Something else interesting about Thunder Force II, though, is it seems to be the only one of the series (addendum: besides the silly ass William Tell ass first game) with overhead segments. They're quite interesting and definitely better, but still pretty flawed. They're very freeform, but oftentimes it's quite hard to tell where to go or where you have and haven't been. Also, in the first level you start off in some sort of enclosure and I initially thought you just had to kill a certain amount of enemies, so I sat around in there for like 10 minutes before realizing you can shoot a part of the wall to open it. That probably was just me being real stupid, but I think an arrow or something pointing at it would've helped better.
Once I got the hang of the top down segments I enjoyed those much more than the horizontal ones, but ultimately this still wasn't that great of a time. Interesting, but with 4 (and presumably 3, but let's find out) generally doing a lot better it remains little more than a curiosity.
6 Comments
I thought I was the only person in the world who liked the overhead stages in II.
You should look up gameplay of the first TF just to get humored by the William Tell Overture getting spammed all throughout it.
You should look up gameplay of the first TF just to get humored by the William Tell Overture getting spammed all throughout it.
Yeah +1 about the first level being stupid and confusing. I had to look up how to beat it.
Holy shit vee this is so fucking funny
It never fails to entertain, it was such a weird start to this series lol.
no joke until i learned about the door i would clear the stage by suiciding through the walls
MagneticBurn
1 year ago
and tf1 was all overhead stages, 2 was half-overhead/half-shmup, and 3-onwards is all shmup