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Gradius V, for two reasons. Firstly, on release the general opinion was that this was the rebirth of the scrolling shoot 'em up, a genre which had been stagnating for over a decade. Just shows how desperate people were to throw unwarranted plaudits at it - even a cursory glance outside of the mainstream would have shown this to be bollocks of the highest order. Secondly, it's simply not very good.
The difficulty curve isn't a difficulty curve. It's an impossibility curve. I always like to feel as though I could have avoided that last death, had my reactions been a fraction of a second quicker, but in GV reactions don't come into it. It's all about learning by rote. All of it.
There's no balance. Die in certain places and you might as well reset and start over from hte beginning because you'll be so powered down as to be useless. It's an odd side-effect of Treasure trying to make the game fairer than previous series entries by turning off checkpoints and bringing you back to life at the exact point at which you died - great in theory, but a complete failure in practice, because having checkpoint restarts allows the designer to decide when and where a player comes back and judge the appearance of powerups accordingly. The solution here is a fudge.
Then there's the 'tiny hit box' thing. It's been a common feature of shmups in the last ten years or so to make the vulnerable part of the player craft absolutely minute, bump enemy bullet patterns up to ridiculous, screen-filling levels and ask the player to navigate their way through. Most shooters that do this all have one thing in common: they scroll vertically. It's a style of gameplay that works well in those cases, because the top-down view of the player craft means that it appears to be perfectly symmetrical. You know where the hit box (the vulnerable part) is instinctively - it's slap-bang right in the middle.
And you can't do that in a horizontally-scrolling shooter. The point of view removes that symmetry and that natural, instinctive awareness of your dimensions. And so it proves to be the case here - in GV, you're never entirely sure of where your hit box is, never certain if you've judged it correctly or if you should jink a couple of pixels right, or left, or up, or down. Or to any point inbetween.
The other problem with the use of a small hit box is that there's basically no need for it here. It's just included because Treasure wanted to follow the trend (which they might have helped popularise, I suppose, with Radiant Silvergun. Where most shmups that take the same route make their enemy bullet patterns into hypnotic swirls, double helixes (helii?) and waves (often overlaying them all), here all you've got is chaos. And not organised chaos. Just a jumble of bullets with no rhythm to them.
Which is something else that's wrong with GV: the bullets. Specifically, the virtually invisible ones. Metallic, dull, 'realistic' bursts of shrapnel that become obscured behind explosions of foreground objects. When they *are* visble, they're often far too easy to lose track of while your concentration is focused on the bright blue of laser or ring shots.
It gets most of its praise from people who think that just because it's difficult, it must be brilliant. It isn't. It's a muddled hybrid of the old and new schools of shmupping that doesn't know where its heart lies. It also gets praise because of its parentage. Well, you know what? Ikaruga's nothing like all it's cracked up to be, either.
I realised how bad it is when I started playing the Parodius games again (and began digging out the versions that I'd not played previously). You know something's wrong when a series that is set up as an official parody of another is many times more enjoyable than its inspiration. |
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