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Review:

12th September 2002:
Ikaruga
It may be import-only, but this title's well worth purchasing if your Dreamcast's beginning to gather dust.
Posted by Marc Hull - Dreamcast - Japanese Import

Treasure is one of the few games developers that still puts gameplay before graphics, and their refusal to shift with the times has earnt them a lot of respect in their home country, Japan. While the PlayStation and Saturn were busy showing off their fancy 3D games, Treasure stuck to producing 2D scrolling shooters, and instead used the extra power to cram more enemies onto the screen, bigger boss encounters and more bullets flying all over the place, providing plenty of tense moments. There aren't many games out there that can match the sheer feeling of surviving an 100+ enemy onslaught, where not only do tiny dots of firepower fill the screen but massive laser beams sweep across from edge to edge with little remorse. However, the liklihood is that you've never heard of the company, and there's even less of a chance that you've played the shooters that they're most famed for. This is because their games are hardly ever released outside Japan, so unless you get your consoles modified and import the game you have to go without. To make matters worse, some of their best efforts are released on home consoles after the platform has 'died', such a Radiant Silvergun, a highly acclaimed shooter, which saw Japanese shop shelves several months after the Saturn had been buried over here.

Ikaruga is the company's latest product, and in true Treasure style it's being released over a year after the Dreamcast ceased production. As you'd expect, the game is a scrolling shooter, but like all of their other games it contains a brilliant spark of innovation too. The spaceship you control has two different forms; dark and light, which can be easily swicthed between by tapping a button. When in the light form, you have a white shield and fire white bullets, while the black form makes you fire black bullets and surrounds you with a black shield. Enemies also come in light or dark flavours, and fire similarly coloured bullets at you. The idea is that the shields will absorb bullets of their colour, so while in the light form, your ship will absorb all white bullets instead of being destroyed by them. Similarly, if an enemy is hit by a bullet of opposite colour to its own, it will sustain greater damage, so a white enemy will be destroyed more quickly by black bullets as opposed to white ones.

Generally, while playing Ikaruga the screen will quickly fill up with masses of bullets, and it's up to you to choose which colour you absorb and which are harmful. Usually, it's a simple case of seeing which is the predominant colour and picking that as your shield, but later on in the game you'll be required to switch between the two incredibly quickly, and concentrate more on what's going on around your ship as opposed to what you're meant to be firing at. Another layer of complexity is added by the charged attack, which will wipe out several on-screen enemies at once. This is an essential survival tool later on, but its power depends on how many bullets you've managed to absorb, so sometimes it's best not to destroy enemies immediately, but let them fire at you and absorb their bullets to charge your attack bar.

While Treasure games put gameplay before graphics, there's no reason why you can't have both, as Ikaruga testifies. Although the gameplay takes place on an entirely 2D level, allowing you to only move horizontally and vertically, not 'into' or 'out of' the playfield, the developers have given the title's scrolling backgrounds the true next-gen treatment. Whole cities, fleshed out in full 3D, will scream past in the background as you fly over them, and everything is full of detail, making the game look superb. All the enemies, including some of the massive bosses you'll encounter, are 3D models and are used to great effect. The game's only major problem stem from its roots as an arcade title. Originally, the game's screen was orientated vertically so that you could see a larger distance ahead of your ship as it travelled up the screen, but this doesn't fit the proportions of a standard TV set. The home game contains many modes to overcome this, with the default simply providing borders at either side to force the resolution, but this makes the actual viewing space quite small. The alternative is to rotate everything by 90 degrees, so that the ship travels from left to right, and this allows the screen to be filled. With a larger viewing space, this is the better mode for seeing the game's nice graphics, but all the on-screen text is displayed vertically rather than horizontally, making it difficult to read.

For sound, the game has some excellent effects when you or enemy ships fire at one another, and it's great to hear a boss churning out hundreds of bullets (although not so great for your ship). The background music is also pretty good, and matches the on-screen action in certain places. However, the area in which Ikaruga most lacks is its length, since like all arcade conversions the game was originally designed for just occasional play. Fortunately, the game is not only very difficult, with one hit losing you a life, but also incredibly addictive, so you'll definitely keep coming back for more, however impossible the levels may seem. The game also contains a two-player cooperative mode, allowing you and a friend to battle through a particularly difficult section together. However, there are few additions to the game over the arcade version, with no extra levels or ability to save your progress after completing a stage, so once you die it's back to the beginning again.

Overall, Ikaruga may be a short game from start to finish, but it will take you hundreds of attempts to get all the way to the end. The important thing is that you'll keep playing it to do those hundred attempts, and will probably want more after that. It may well be a vintage genre, but Ikaruga will provide the sort of fun that a lot of modern titles dream of.

Marc Hull

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Review Summary:

Ikaruga is a fast-paced scrolling shooter with both great graphics and gameplay. Its difficulty and low level-count may put off some, but for many this is well worth importing and dusting off your Dreamcast for.

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