It is hard to believe that this innovative and beautifully realized shooting gem came out in 1987. Gemini Wing, like many other shooting games from its era, focuses more on the simpler and more immediately accessible aspects of shooting. While I'm more of a danmaku guy, Gemini Wing has been a great reminder that these games don't need insane bullet patterns, nor scoring mechanics that makes me learn ridiculous strategies, to grab hold of me. Old-School shooters can be unique, fun and memorable in their own ways, and Gemini Wing is hands down the most overlooked/underrated shooter I know about from the 80s.

First of all, if there's one drawback to the danmaku genre, it's that the less abstract audiovisual feedback tends to take a backseat. Take for example Mushihimesama and Futari, while there's surely effort put into making some pretty backgrounds to help realize the game world, it's all drowned out by a sea of bullets anyway. Basically, danmaku games come with a price. Before danmaku was really a thing, devs were forced to put more attention into making the game look and feel appealing to a wider audience, through a detailed and expressive game world. Gemini Wing shines in this regard, it's truly a vibrant, colorful game with a lot of variety in the stages. I'm not really sure how to express what the progression feels like in this game, but the feeling, the emotion is all there. It really feels like an adventure. The soundtrack is also very good. I wouldn't call the atmosphere awe-inspiring, but it makes an impression.

Where a lot shooters from this era lose me, is the the pure fun factor and longevity. I love danmaku because I enjoy pushing my skills to their limits, forging elaborate strategies, dodging complex bullet sprays... Old school shooters tend to not give you all that much to do in the long run, there's some dodging and shooting in the stage, maybe a barely functional scoring system, and bosses that repeats one or two patterns. I'd rather spend my time on a game with a high skill ceiling. Gemini Wing, despite being from 1987, has scoring that isn't completely broken or boring, so in my book, it's a game that is worth playing for a long time, rather than just clear and move on. Thankfully it avoids the trap of loops unlike so many other shooters. Gemini Wing is also a vertical shooter with stage hazards which is somewhat unusual, but well done in this case. Only some of the stages have any hazards (stuff like walls or moving objects) but they never really feel like much of a chore, in fact, I think the final stage in particular is very well designed. It doesn't rely on hazards as much as, say, Image Fight.

Anyway, lets start from the top with the mechanics. Gemini Wing lets you use a peashooter, which is hardly very impressive, and which you cannot upgrade. In this sense, you need to pick out your targets with accuracy. On the other hand, the main ability is unique. There are specific foes in Gemini Wing that carry so-called "gunballs", which are basically single-use attacks (or point-bonuses/extends/speed-ups). There are several different gunballs, some more effective than others. These specific foes "hold" them, so they will have a trail of gunballs behind them. You can shoot these enemies to change the type of gunball they carry, probably inspired by the bell system from Twinbee. You can then choose to either steal the gunballs by picking up the trail (this could get tricky to pull off) or kill the enemy in which case the gunballs will scatter across the screen so you can grab them. When you grab a gunball, it trails behind you just like it did with your enemies, so then you simply use the gunballs in order.

The effectiveness of gunballs vary greatly, but the idea is that you must use them. There are gunballs that are only mildly effective, like the green rockets, or the purple wave. What you really want is the screen clearing beam or blue circle thingie... there's also a sword-like swinging fire thing that can be very strong in some places. The gunballs are blatantly imbalanced, but since you can put in the extra effort of trying to collect the specific gunballs you want, I think that is actually in the game's favor. Fighting with both peashooter and gunballs creates a fun dynamic gameplay where you're trying to defeat all that you can and stay alive, without running out of gunballs, since that may well spell doom for you.

Moving on from gunballs, the idea behind scoring is not immediately obvious. More was found out about the inner workings in Gemini Wing during a Shmups Forum tournament in 2014. Of course, Japan must've been aware of this since the 80s, but there's very much a divide between east and west in the shooting game scene, so strategies for obscure games like this are often completely undocumented and thus unknown to anyone that wasn't part of the eastern arcade scene. There's more to it but to put it briefy, there's a "queue" for the enemies which actually spans the entire game. Think of it like a caravan shooter (those 2-5 minute mode games) where you kill enemies quickly to spawn even more enemies. Gemini Wing works sort of like that except it spans the whole game, so a newcomer would spawn enemies in stage 2, that a score player will spawn in stage 1. This puts a lot of pressure to constantly get the best gunballs and kill everything efficiently.

Enemies also come in a wide variety which is yet another reason why this game is so fun. The way the enemies behave is more about how their movement works rather than how they shoot their bullets, and the game pretty much never gives you a pause. Foes are plentiful and will just keep on swarming the screen, which is very satisfying given the game system.

I enjoy Gemini Wing a ton, but bosses are a little lacking. This is normal for the old-school style, the bosses are more there to make an "impression" than to provide a really challenging and fun fight. The final boss, however, is not just lacking, but it is one of the worst bosses in any shooting game, and the reason why I was a little hesitant to give Gemini Wing such a high rating. The final boss will never time out, covers almost the entire screen, and you have to wait for it to spawn random eggs to kill, with random gunballs in them. You cannot damage the boss with your peashooter without actually moving behind it (more on that later) and most gunballs are completely ineffective. The boss follows a very, very slow and tedious movement pattern that means you're given sparse opportunities to do any damage in any way. At first, I used a "safe" strategy, but I remember failing to take out the boss in as long as 15 minutes the first time I reached it in an early 1cc attempt. The only effective way to take this boss out that I know of is to do a kamikaze attack during a specific point in the pattern, where you go into its weak point (tip of its tail) which actually doesn't have a hitbox, and is the only place where you can shoot it with the peashooter. Then autofire pointblank. It'll die pretty quickly from this, but there's a high risk that you'll die first, since the eggs spawn here at random times. There are gunballs you can use to speed up the process and slightly reduce the luck aspect, but you get a bigger clear bonus the more gunballs you carry! If you're serious about this game and you die here, then kiss a high score goodbye because both lives and gunballs in stock are precious for the clear bonus. If you die, you will have to painstakingly wait and collect gunballs for minutes on end until you can attempt the kill again, unless you don't care about score, in which case you could just stock up a few specifically effective gunballs. The patterns while waiting aren't terribly hard, but not trivial either, so there's some pressure there.

Despite the awful boss fight at the end, Gemini Wing is a truly remarkable game that deserves more attention. If you have any interest at all in STG then go play this in MAME.

I've only seen a couple of episodes of the anime, so I should really get around to watching the source material. As far as Sailor Moon beat em ups go, this is considered to be the best one. Beat em ups are a very fun genre to dabble in when it comes to 1ccs, they're not like the great shmups which you can pour hundreds or thousands of hours into... a good, even a great beat em up seems to wear out its welcome much sooner and a 1cc seems to often be a fairly natural stopping point. The scoring system in Sailor Moon (or most beat em ups) might not be my cup of tea. Or at the very least, It doesn't stand out to me compared to other things. So I see little incentive to master the game to that level, currently. It's a fun game to play, up until you're too good at it. That's how beat em ups are.

So, this is a game that in many ways follows the fundamentals I've familiarized myself with from games like Final Fight. I enjoy this familiarity in beat em ups, where it feels like my skill transfers over between titles. The controls feels great and are easy to get the hang of. You can choose between 5 of the girls from the series: Sailor Moon, Sailor Jupiter, Sailor Mercury, Sailor Venus, Sailor Mars. I wish I could get more into the differences between these girls, but to be quite frank, they're all quite similar. The more important differences seem to be subtle enough that I can't quite wrap my head around them without a lot of experience. I will say that each girl feels good to play in her own way though and that the most important thing to distinguish the girls to me has been the main combo and how easy this is to use against enemies. I had the best result with Sailor Jupiter as her main combo seems to be almost unbreakable by most enemies. The other character I played more of is Sailor Mercury and either I got better at the game immediately after switching to Jupiter or Mercury's main combo is simply worse at hitting things consistently.

This is typical arcade beat em up fare on the surface. You have your main combo, you can run, you can jump attack (forwards or backwards), running jump attack, running attack, grab, punch up to 3 times in grabs, throw backwards or forwards in a grab (up to 2 punches first), and the standard desperation move that uses up health if it hits things. You can also collect up to 5 crystals which you can use to damage everything on the screen after a beautiful cutscene. More crystals = more damage & fancier cutscene. Each girl gets her own crystal cutscenes and damage type from the crystals; purely cosmetic. One thing that this game doesn't have that is present in Final Fight and many games influenced by it is a throw for a combo finisher. You only get one combo finisher in this game. While I felt a bit naked without this ability at first, as I got better at the game I realized the intricate balance revolves around having to grab things manually. The game was intentionally designed for you to only be able to throw enemies by grabbing them first. It's something you have to learn to do confidently to play well. It would also be nice if the game had a Haggar-type character for a different playstyle but hey, what we've got is fun as it is.

As it turns out, the game is quite hard. It may even seem unfair at first. The main thing regarding the controls you need to understand is the way your main attacks stun enemies. Your main combo consists of 5 hits (unique for each girl). In order to play well, you really want to familiarize yourself with the exact feel of each individual hit for the girl you are using. Each hit is pivotal in its own way. The first hit is the one that initially stuns the enemies, you can use this one hit, if you are close enough to an enemy, to right afterwards walk up to them and grab them so you can throw them where they need to be. The 3rd or 4th (depending on character and playstyle) hit should often be cancelled instead of finishing the combo with your 5th hit. This is because of the long stun duration of each hit; if you cancel your 3rd or 4th hit, quickly turn around and rehit the enemy before the stun wears off, you can infinite the enemy. This can be used against almost every single thing in the game! It might not look fun. It might look cheap, it might even look dumb, but it is without a doubt the way the game was intentionally designed. If you finish your combo, the 5th hit will knock the enemies forward into the ground. While this is sometimes a good thing, it can also be a bad thing; for example, it wastes time. I'll get more into that. Another example: It pushes the enemies away from you if you want to attack them again. You have to move forward, perhaps this will spawn more enemies you do not want to spawn and fight until you are finished with your current group. Bosses especially should be abused as much as possible because it is the only sensible and fair way to fight them. Use your infinite as much as you can. Try to group enemies up by using your beat em up fundamentals and throwing them into a big group, and try to keep as many as you can in an infinite. Any that break free needs to be reacted to and taken care of in some way. A good player will make this game look more like a relatively simple matter of basics and memorization while a bad player will make it look completely impossible. Unlike many other beat em ups it tends to be difficult to use vertical space to grab enemies in this game, without stunning them first. Many are too erratic and fast and many have counters.

What's this about wasting time? Why would that be so bad? Can't you play arcade beat em ups relatively slowly and carefully? Yes, normally, that would be the case. But Sailor Moon is not a normal game. This game has a timer that wants you to die, fast. On some stages, notably stage 5 and 8, the timer is so strict that even if you speedrun the stage you might run out of time and die (use your crystals in order to avoid this fate). You do not want to die in this game, because you only start with 1 extra life and there are NO extends. If you die 2 times, it's game over.

Due to the strict timer and familiar moveset (with a twist), the way you end up playing the game is to try to get through everything quickly and efficiently. Every second you spend trying to manage the enemies without actually damaging them could lead to a timeout... at least on the nastiest timed levels. Personally I find this to be generally fun. It feels good to handle enemies efficiently in this game with the infinite and all the other tools at your disposal. This is not only because of the timer and the ease of control of the playable girls, but also because of the enemy design. The enemies in this game are great and are some of the most fun enemies to fight in any beat em up. When I began playing the other week or so, I was absolutely delighted by how aggressively and quickly all the enemies in Sailor Moon attempt to maneuver around you to mess with you. They're constantly trying to go behind you, to move away from you, to scatter around the screen. In beat em ups you really want to try to group the enemies up to fight them effectively, and Sailor Moon is a game that offers great enemy AI to make this challenging and fun. You've got the ninjas, which are some of the most fun enemies ever IMO. They can do so many different things and they are dangerous. Trying to deal with 3 ninjas all at once in stage 6 is so much fun! Then there's the tennis guys with their legendary grab range. And then you've got those annoying Onibabas with their bullshit horn dashes. And their bullshit offscreen garbage! Actually, that kinda sucks, the offscreen garbage... that's an Onibaba specialty; staying offscreen and refusing to come out so that you waste time. Anyway, bottom line is the enemies are great in this game and they come in many different combinations. The only enemy that is really specific to one stage that has mostly that enemy is the masked men in stage 5. Those are actually pretty vicious and are great at sneaking in punches while you try to combo, which is why i pay close attention to what they're up to so i can try to stun one before he sneaks a hit on me if I'm fighting another masked dude at the same time. Then I pick up the sneaky fuck and throw him into my previous target!

The bosses in the game are a bit more difficult to compliment. Bosses in beat em ups tend to be a bit lame. It's a weakness of the genre and Sailor Moon is no exception. For the most part, they are pretty much impossible to fight without a sound plan which consists of some form of repeated abuse, usually a delicate infinite. Infinites on other enemies are simpler to pull off but infinites on bosses are delicate. Most bosses are "invulnerable" if they feel like being (if they start punching you, you should not attempt to hit them. Move away and try again or desperation.)
Bosses which need to be infinited are weird and do require a bit of practice to understand how to infinite this specific boss. Garoben should be infinited by being almost entirely inside of her horizontal position, while carefully approaching outside of her range vertically. Obviously to any players of arcade beat em ups, understanding and using vertical space properly is key, since vertical and horizontal space have different functions.
Kyulene is a little similar, but you can stay farther away from her horizontally. She's also a bit unique in that the infinite works differently if shes flying or on the ground. Zoisite can be abused by throwing her around over and over and never letting her get away when she gets up from the ground, either by running towards her or throwing her into a wall and then going backwards. Basically, every boss has its own little trick, which is sometimes quite hard (Twin Kyulene, Kunzite & Zoisite) and sometimes... laughably simple (Queen Beryl, the final boss).

Scoring is a bit awkward, although I wouldn't say it's bad per se. It does seem to suit the game and It's the logical step to go for if you just want more Sailor Moon in your life, right? You get points "per attack" on targets. What I mean is you don't actually gain any score for attacking multiple enemies at once. For a game with such strict timers and in a genre where enemy herding is important, It's pretty interesting of the game to want you to fight enemies 1 by 1 for optimal score. Obviously the timer won't actually let you do this all game. With swift yet delicate button presses you can actually stunlock an enemy both to your left and your right simultaneously. Furthermore, throwing an enemy gives great score, but also takes a lot of time (the enemy needs to come back before it can be attacked again) and does more damage. Obviously then, it's optimal to throw enemies when they have only 1 hit remaining anyway, for maximum score.
The other ways of gaining more score I've noted includes collecting crystals when you already have the maximum number of 5. There is seemingly luck involved here as not all crystal drops are consistent (some can be food items). Stage 5 and 8 are the stages that are incredibly rough on time without using crystals. Luckily though, you can use your crystals on the stage 8 midboss (which is essentially the true last boss) as there are no more crystals to be collected afterwards for more points anyway. So Stage 5 would be the hardest one to get through without running out of time when it comes to no-crystal use score play.
The last thing I've noted, which is very significant, is that some multiphase bosses (Any where Tuxedo Mask doesn't interrupt the fight) can be infinited even when they've already taken enough damage to be sent to the next phase. Their HP will get stuck and you can simply keep hitting them for more points. The trigger point for being sent to the next phase is being sent to the floor or for the stunlock to end. Finishing your combo, interrupting your combo, or getting timed out will all end the infinite. Stage 3 and 7 are the places where you can get a lot of score from this. Killing off a life on purpose can gain a lot of extra score by using up an entirely new timer for a lengthy infinite. All in all, a strong player focusing on score can get about twice as much points than a basic 1cc by using these techniques. Sailor Venus seems to be the girl to use for score due to her speedy 3 hit infinites, I think.

So, in terms of pure gameplay, I recommend Sailor Moon. I recommend it but only to people that genuinely enjoy this genre for what it is. It's pure beat em up fun. It offers a fun challenge. If you think it's too hard, I still recommend 2 player mode. 2 Players makes the game far easier. As far as I could tell, the game didn't add any enemies or anything like that. So you can split the enemies in half for each player! In fact, right after having No-death cleared this game with a friend, I still needed to use a couple of continues to finish the game on my own. That goes to show how much easier it gets with 2 players.

Now, having talked extensively about playing the game, I wish I was able to talk more about playing the game from the point of view of a fan of the anime... Perhaps another reviewer could fill in on that aspect more. I understand that enemies and bosses in the game are taken from the anime and I assume that fans of the anime will be delighted by the presentation here. Still, I want to stress, that as someone who didn't watch Sailor Moon, I was delighted by the art design regardless. The sprites and levels look beautiful. The most gorgeous thing in the game has got to be the Kyulene boss cutscene (when she flies up to the tower). That's unbelievably gorgeous stuff. It all makes sense really, when it turned out that Joker Jun is the Graphic Designer. That's the guy behind the beautiful art of ESP Ra De and Air Gallet, with their legendary final boss visuals. Using the crystals gives you crisp and good looking cutscenes that I believe are taken straight from the show. If you like the show and you have no interest in getting good at this game, it might still interest you to just check it out and marvel at it. The soundtrack is a little odd, there are some catchy tunes but also some more esoteric tracks that may not be to everyone's tastes. I enjoy it, however. Of course, it must be mentioned, that the game doesn't just look great visually on a technical level, but that I also like it for personal reasons. The girls are very cute. The enemies are precisely to my taste as well. Kyulene is a beautiful boss to be honest, and Bakene looks seriously hilarious when you infinite him, as it freezes on one of like two funny looking frames. Great personality in this game, really!

Overall, I'd call this one of the more solid arcade beat em ups I've played. I enjoyed it enough to 1cc it with Sailor Jupiter and I may just 1cc with more girls. I heard it was supposed to be one of the hardest beat em ups but I'm not sure I'd go that far. It's a bit milder than I thought based on its reputation. Still hard, though, it's just that a lot of the difficulty stems from the initial confusion of how to even handle the game. Once you plan things out properly and understand on a base level how to react to various situations, it's doable! And even if you're bad like I was initially, it's always a fun time! That's most important thing, isn't it? Why improve at a game if you don't enjoy the process? This is a great game to pick up and play and try to improve in, without any long term commitment.

A great Sailor Moon game, check it out in MAME!

On the surface, Hacha Mecha Fighter is a cutesy animal-themed horizontal shooting game for kids. You're a cute sea otter who can barely fit in his plane, shooting cute bullets (dead-eyed fishes at the highest power level!) at other cute animals (that sometimes reside in planes or tanks). In reality, it's one of the most disgustingly evil, nasty and sadistic (for your patience) shooting games ever released in arcades. Developed by NMK, it is a game where the visuals are at odds with what is truly going on. It may seem easy and (I guess) fair at first, but as you progress, the cracks will begin to show and you will begin to question your own sanity for playing such a game. You are slow, your hitbox is enormous, and enemies fire fast and HUGE bullets that sometimes cannot actually be avoided. Indeed, Hacha Mecha is one of the rare cases of genuine resource-em-ups, where bomb planning is everything, as parts of the games were not intended to be done without bombs. Well, I'm all for high difficulty, I love that and that's a big reason why I play shmups in the first place. But this game gets it all wrong. In truth, throughout most of the game, not that much is really going on. Then suddenly a difficulty spike happens and you have to bomb. Then you play some more out of sheer formality, and then another forced bomb, etc. That's what playing this game is like. Well, sometimes you're not necessarily forced to bomb (It's mostly stage 6 in loop 1). What's even more idiotic is the scoring system. While you can get a lot of points just playing for survival and without using this mechanic, it has to be mentioned that the scoring system is one of the dumbest of all time. You get points by going to the right edge of the screen, and holding right towards it. Yes, the right edge of the screen, you know, where new enemies are spawning from most of the time. Obviously there isn't all that much time during stage portions to really use this mechanic, so what happens is that score players may use the entire boss timers, which last seemingly forever, to hug the right and score points. Doing this is usually a matter of sheer formality and not something you really get killed over with some practice. It tests your patience and stretches your run length. It sure takes forever (something like 5 minutes is the norm for a boss to time out). Plus, midbosses can also be milked dry, sometimes by using a glitch to lock them into place for a few mins. If you want to play a super hard game where you are mostly bored out of your mind, then this is the game to play.

While I'm on the topic of stupid shit, how about the bosses themselves from a survival design perspective, without the scoring system. They're still mostly awful. Starting from stage 4, they have ridiculous amounts of HP. All the while repeating the same pattern for near-infinity. Also, the bosses will often move towards the left so that you cant shoot them. Then you need to dodge the same patterns on the right side. All a pointless time waster. Heck, the bosses are recycled. The 5th boss is an upgraded, recycled version of the 2nd boss, the 6th boss is the same as the 4th (and has the same "monkey train" as the stage 3 boss) and the stage 7 boss is recycled from the stage 1 boss. The same midbosses also occur on multiple stages. Backgrounds, music, enemies, everything you can think of gets recycled in the game. The worst has got to the be the looping. The game loops, which isn't uncommon in arcade games, but the loops in this game aren't normal. The 2nd loop Has FOUR TIMES the health as loop 1, on everything. This is despite the health getting quite outragerous in the second half of loop 1. This makes loop 2 IMPOSSIBLE by conventional means as, as soon as you get to stage 4, you will get into situations where not even bombing constantly will save you as enemies simply will never die and will stay on the screen as a gigantic hitbox spawning more gigantic hitboxes. Supposedly, the only way to complete loops of Hacha Mecha, is to abuse a glitch nobody knows about outside of Japan. There are some secrets in Japan to make multi-looping possible, and the WR is a counterstop. Me and some others have searched and searched, and found some interesting and promising glitches, but in the end we found no way to use these glitches to make the loops possible.

As much as I'm damning the game, I do want to stress that I have a soft spot for it. Objectively, the game stinks; but it is a very cute game. It has pleasant aesthetics, and the bullets are fast and are sometimes fun to dodge (when you are doing portions you are not supposed to bomb). Stage 7 is a genuinely great stage and I wish more of the game was like that, most of the stage is obscenely difficult but still doable without using bombs. I mean, this is a mostly bad game, and it's not really worth taking all that seriously, but I just can't bring myself to completely dislike it because I feel like it's missing the point. The game was most definitely not made with any serious intent or even common sense for that matter. You have to let go of your common sense to play the game, and play it on its own terms. If you wanna try out a silly game and not get too deeply into it, you might wanna look into this one, briefly. But playing it for 1cc or (hell no) scoring by milking the bosses dry just isn't really enjoyable.
I've been close to a 1cc several times (with several stage 7 game overs; stage 8 is a free win) but ultimately I didn't have fun so I gave up pretty fast, and I mostly just feel regret over even trying in the first place, because the more I learned the more I knew it wasn't fun. Stage 6 is the real shitter because it requires a lot of bombs. So if you want to 1cc, you pretty much need to no-miss to stage 6. Even just dying once before stage 6 is a huge problem for a 1cc run. So, don't try to 1cc and don't score, and you might at least have some fleeting fondness for this kusoge.