Dirty Pair is one of many highly influential 80s animes whose impact both in and out of Japan still reverberates through media today. Hell, you can find numerous references to the show in Star Trek: The Next Generation, of all things. I've always had some passing familiarity with it, though I wrote it off for many years as some skeevy fan service show. I finally got around to watching it in 2020, and while I can't deny there's definitely some of That Stuff in it, I was surprised by how much heart it had, and how it has some strikingly progressive things to say given the time and cultural climate of its release.

So, it's not much of a surprise to me that Trouble Shooter wears its own reverence for Dirty Pair so proudly. It is borderline litigious in how close it comes to just being Dirty Pair: The Game, and that's probably the best thing Trouble Shooter has going for it, because it is otherwise and extremely rote shoot-em-up.

You control Madison and Crystal, the Trouble Shooters - guns for hire that are tasked with rescuing a prince from the clutches of the evil Blackball. It's got a bit of a reverse damsel-in-distress thing going on that I'm into, and the writing is overall charming if a bit reigned in compared to Dirty Pair. The player has direct control over Madison and secondary control over Crystal, who follows your movements and can be flipped to fire to the front or back. You'll need to manage her firing direction quite a bit, and that's really the main mechanical gimmick of the game. Everything else is pretty straight forward. It's competent enough, but so unremarkable that there's virtually no reason to play this game when the Genesis has dozens of far more interesting shoot-em-ups, including (or so I've heard) its sequel.

I'll also say that I'm not a huge fan of how it feels to control Madison. You lack fine control over her movements, so you kind of need to expect that inputs on the d-pad or going to push you a bit further than you probably want to go. There's also a few segments where the screen will move and attempt to crush you against edges of the screen and geometry. I experienced a few deaths I would consider cheap because of this, but once you know where the screen is going to move to, you won't fall for the same trick twice. It is also a short game, and I occasionally found myself inclined to go back to the title screen upon getting a game over simply because it would not take long to get back to where I was, and I'd have the opportunity to get better equipped with health and weapons than if I simply ate a credit.

I hear Battle Mania is the one to play between the two of these, but was also cautioned that my opinion of Trouble Shooter would be impacted for the worse if I played that game first. I'm glad I followed that advice, because I don't think Trouble Shooter is particularly great in a vacuum.