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.
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.