Hey there Sean. Nice to see you updating your blog with righteous fury during the past few weeks. Enjoyed every single one so far. I just wanted to email you a report that Konami still has no bloody idea how to make a decent Gradius game developed in-house with an extraordinary budget. The Gradius game I’m talking about is Otomedius, which is taking the perverted parts of the last Parodius game (Sexy Parodius), adding lots of things that would appeal to the stereotypical Japanese nerd (which would be random references to other Konami games, girl personifications of said Konami references, and art done by someone that would appeal to their demographic), and then trying to throw in a serious plot that’s probably going to be a reference to a plot that the Vic Viper and its wingmates had to solve in the original Gradius universe:
That video is the opening to the second game which was just released last week in Japan.
I’m pretty sure that most people wouldn’t care about this series, and rightfully so. First off, the art style of the game isn’t very broad in appeal, and would even scare people away from buying an Xbox 360 because of reasons you mentioned in an earlier blog post: the closer it is to X-Rated, the greater the stigma of the system, and the more potential customers you lose. What makes this even worse is the fact that the original arcade release of the first game had a touch screen, and while you’re selecting your pilot, you can touch their full-body portrait to elicit a response from them. To me, I’d find that pretty amusing since Konami wouldn’t allow the developers to allow the player to go any further than that, but to an outsider who hasn’t been exposed to this stuff for as long as I have, it’d be downright disturbing.
Now notice how I said, “Characters,” and not ships? That’s already another major flaw you pointed out in several of your blog posts where the developers care more about making characters at the cost of actually making an enjoyable video game. Seriously, it was pretty bad. There were initially six playable characters in the first game (two were added in the home port), each with their own powerups and special attacks, and you wouldn’t get much information about the character’s bio or whatever role they had in the game’s universe because that would totally ruin the arcade flow of the game if they just did a text dump or long dialog scene somewhere in the game’s session about either the character or the boss they’re about to face, so like with Metroid: Other M, you have to read up on the manga (there’s even a small manga insert that came with the home port) or go to the game’s official website for more information. Also, six characters is double the amount of ships that were available for R-Type Delta or Force Modules to use for R-Type III, which must been a real nightmare for Irem to make sure that all of the stages were properly balanced so the player might not end up in an impossible situation or up being nothing more than a complete cakewalk with a particular selection. If the developers of Otomedius were smart, they should’ve followed the design principles of those two R-Type games instead of following R-Type Final (which kind of threw the stage design balance out the window because the developers wanted to shove as many ships into the game as possible since their company said that that was to be their last game due to shmups not being a viable market anymore), but instead all we get are six characters with different powerups and special attacks, who can be leveled up the longer you use a particular character (the data’s saved on a card the arcade machine spits out for you, if you’re wondering how it saves that data), and at least two of these six characters are grossly overpowered compared to the rest because they have more effective weapons.
That’s not even all of the other half-baked ideas that the developers threw into the game: you can either choose a single-player mode where you can pick three out of four stages (there’s actually a Moai stage that’s part of the stage select, but whenever you would highlight that stage, the game would immediately skip over that because it wasn’t complete when the game was released. It was only available AFTER six months of the home port’s release as DLC), or you can instead compete against other players in a boss rush marathon to see who can clear their boss rush the fastest (of course, since there are certain characters who are more effective than others at this, of course the players who use these characters more would have an upper hand against those that didn’t). Both modes have really bizarre systems like a half-baked implementation of Ikaurga as each character also represented an element and could possibly deal zero damage to a particular enemy because the weapon they have (or what you gave them later on when you customize their weapon meter) was the wrong matchup, and the element of your character’s attacks would change depending on what colored gems you would keep picking up either on accident because there are huge hidden ones scattered throughout the single-player mode o from colliding right into them from dropped enemies as you were dodging bullets (ironically, picking up these gems a certain way can help boost your score). The only system I actually liked was a chaining system that, whenever you used your character’s special attack, any enemy destroyed by it would release powerup capsules (the same ones found in every Gradius game), and picking up these would replenish this ability slowly, but the fastest way to recharge it was by activating the last item in the powerup meter, which would refill 50% of a full charge of this special attack, so the optimal strategy for this system was to keep spamming it at the right time so you can not only power up your ship in the shortest amount of time possible ever in a Gradius game, you can keep using it over and over again. The power of your ship’s special attack also increased with the more options you had equipped, but your options would detach Life-Force style every time you executed this ability, so it was always a mad scramble to get your options back as fast as possible while dodging enemy bullets and making sure that you picked up enough power-up capsules to hit the 50% charge-up slot, then charging up the special ability again and firing it right when an enemy or bullet was about to hit you so you could use those few precious milliseconds of invincibility granted from firing off your special ability to good use.
I’m not even going into what they did wrong with the home port of this game. Suffice to say that they had a mode where you can have up to three players on the screen at the same time destroying everything, but it was implemented in the stupidest way possible: In order to to get it to work, you needed to connect three Xbox systems together (via LAN or Live) instead of using one system for all three players.
Now, the reason why I decided to talk to you at all about this is that the second game, Otomedius Excellent, is planned to be released in the United States, which does have a better chance, if ever so slightly because most shmup developers in Japan refuse to release their games over here. The game mechanics seem more focused (those wacky elements and abstract gem score system were removed), but once again, priority was given to production values first over everything else. The majority of the development comes from the characters and their very short interaction with the bosses, some of which are related to the protagonists in way I wouldn’t know just from playing it because they don’t explain much, and the game’s manual has no information about the boss characters (nor does it come with a manga like the first game), so I probably (and ironically) have to go to the game’s website to read up about it. On the game side of things, level design is actually more bland than the previous one, which shocked me. You know how in a standard Gradius game there’s always R-Type moments where everything’s closing in on you but you need to arrange your options in way to clear out a path of enemies so you can squeeze through a narrow corridor of walls and bullets to reach a temporary breather spot on the screen? Rarely happens here, unless you start playing the game on the 5th loop (beaten the game 4 times in a row). In a way, it kind of reminds me of Thunder Force 5, but unlike Otomedius Excellent, the bosses were actually cool to fight. Yeah, I really don’t know how they were able to make the bosses they pulled from the Gradius Universe even less challenging here than the games they originated from, but they sure did. Overall, the challenge was very, very, very, very, very easy compared to the first game. It was so easy that on my first try I picked hardest difficulty (Expert) using the Vic Viper (compared to the other ships’ starting weapons, it pretty much sucks) and only died once because I totally didn’t know one of the bosses charges at you right after you destroy its core. The final boss’ first form seems to suffer from lack of playtesting because it literally has dead zones you can exploit with the right ship, or you can hide there until the encounter timed itself out if you really wanted to.
The programming isn’t really that optimized either; at random intervals, the game would slow down, moreso when the Lord British (the orange ship in Life Force) fires four Cyclone Lasers at almost any point in a given stage. Considering that they also allowed three player co-op on the same system this time (and the only real reason I bought this game), it concerns me if the game can even reach the standard 60 frames per second almost every Japanese-developed shmup aims for even when there’s a moderate amount of action going on. I’m remotely hoping Konami will do something about these problems in due time, usually in the form of screwing their customers by having them pay for major content and updates that should’ve been there to begin with (I like how Konami advertised this game has 11 stages and three of them are DLC).
It’s quite a sad state of affairs, really. What worries me is that I have more hope whenever Konami gives another respectable company the green light to develop a videogame from one of their existing properties, like what they did with the latest Contra game on the HD twins. I really thought it was going to bomb, but after downloading a trial copy of the game which began to beat the crap out of me in the first stage (an amazing feat since this version uses the life bar system from the Japanese version of the Sega Genesis Contra), I knew I got my money’s worth if I bought it. And that version of Contra was around 1-4th the price I paid for Otomedius Excellent.
So to sum it up: Konami really had a good chance to revive their shmup line with Otomedius, but it seems like every attempt to do so results in them putting their efforts into the wrong things that make a good shmup enjoyable, instead using it as a gateway for people to buy into Konami’s other licensed merchandise (they’ve already released figures of the characters and the respective craft they pilot for this game a long, long time ago for example). What’s sad is they have direct access to all of their backlog of shmups so all they need to do is take all of the good mechanics from their old games and slap it onto this and add the art style they chose for this game for its coat of paint. And they can’t even get that done competently.
Oh well. Time to find a working Playstation that can run my copy of Gradius Gaiden.
Holy moly! That trailer is insane! That is definitely an example of extreme ‘Japanese elements’.
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