Jaleco had this amusing tendency to repeatedly put out incredibly middling efforts during genre renaissances of the time like for shmups and beatemups. Here's one of them, an inoffensive but bland shmup. I actually couldn't get the music working on Snes9x for some reason and had to switch over to bsnes for basically the first time.

Weapons aren't too great here. You're given a selection of like eight or so but you're only going to want to stick to a couple. I used Vulcan for the whole game because it was treating me the best, up until the final boss where I got completely obliterated. He's this turtle looking monster thing and he is incredibly miserable, way way too difficult to dodge his attacks and has tons of health. The only real strategy, as I've later learned, is to go into the stage with the Atomic weapon and throw your options right in his fucking face until he dies. Atomic worked poorly for me prior but I will admit I didn't really think of doing this. I didn't exactly assume this game would have enough depth to actually require strategies.

Even as one of the earliest shmups for the console, dating October 1991 in Japan and January 1992 in North America, there was still better options to choose from even in that launch window, such as Gradius III or Darius Twin. Even HyperZone has a little more novelty to it, and in that game you can just go in circles and nothing will hit you. Thanks, Jaleco. I think in about a couple days' time I'll forget everything about this except the annoying turtle creature.

Reviewed on Jan 24, 2023


1 Comment


4 months ago

Ended up replaying this and enjoyed myself better but it's still unremarkable. I learned weapons have like certain rankings and such listed (dunno how I missed it at first, vulcan is low tier for example) and it made picking and choosing a lot clearer in the long run. Ended up using "Explode" for most of the run this time. Final boss still has really tough attacks but he shouldn't take too long to die as long as you send your options directly at him. Didn't really have enough else to add to constitute a new review.