M.U.S.H.A. (Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor), known in Japan as Musha Aleste: Full Metal Fighter Ellinor, is a stylish, if somewhat standard, shooting them up video game for the Sega Genesis (I played on the Nintendo Switch Online Genesis application). Like Compile's earlier games Blazing Lazers and Gun Nac, the enemy sprite and level designs are pretty impressive; I was really taken aback by Stage IV, where you battle over storm clouds, and as lightning strikes the screen goes white except for the silhouette of your ship and enemies. It's really cool. I'm a sucker for the mecha theme, and really like the robot designs. One of the enemies looks like an off-brand Zaku when they take their stance to point their gun at you; always loved killing those guys.

The final level is kind of a pain, expecting pixel perfect dodges in a constrained space, which had not yet been asked of the player. The way there is pretty breezy though. There's an options system where you can control how your drones behave, and the usual upgrade system that gets more powerful as you pick up more of the same color, but I played through most of the game without realizing which button fired your upgrade weapon, and the drones setting is never necessary to fiddle with. There are upgrades that float around which drop cards, and when you pick up three cards you get another drone added to your bank. I liked that addition; deciding when to shoot the icon to drop the cards reminded me of the Bells from Twinbee.

Altogether a pretty decent time; need to check out the other Aleste games.