These days, the term old school gamer gets tossed around more than the Brooklyn Brawler did during the "hey day" of his illustrious career. Kids today consider themselves to be old school and a classic gamer because the started out playing games with Final Fantasy VII. Though that is a great game mind you, starting out playing video games with Final Fantasy VII in no way qualifies you to be old school. Not that there is a pre determined checklist one must complete in order to be deemed worthy of such a title, but still. Old school gamers remember the day when arcades were the hottest things around, they remember putting quarters on the top of the machine in order to announce to the rest of the arcade that they were next. Old school gamers would rather play hours upon hours of a good old fashioned side scrolling shooter than any new fangled, over hyped game with Lara Croft in it. They remember games such as Axelay, Thunderforce III and Lords of Thunder. Visions of Aeroblasters still haunt their nightmares.
Sadly though, the present day gamer has never known such joys and I dare say has gone soft. Shooters of the old school variety are rarely released anymore because they simply don't sell and make a lot of money, and if a project is not a viable money maker for a publisher, they will not take a risk on it only to lose money.
Enter the Developer Treasure, a company whose track record is known for not exactly following the unwritten code of all there is to games is profit. Over the years, they have released some less than best seller status games and they are not afraid to take such a risk. Enter also Infogrames (now known as Atari). They decided to take a risk with Treasure and publish Ikaruga for the Nintendo Gamecube, and old school gamers around the world are glad they did.
The Story
For those familar with the shooter genre, you will no doubt remember a game called Radiant Silvergun for the Sega Dreamcast. Ikaruga is it's bastard child or unofficial sequel, if you will. Ikargua is a forced vertical shooter, meaning the player is virtually "on rails", meaning you travel down a predetermined path, shooting stuff! Old school fun to be sure!
There is no real story in Ikargua other than what is detailed in one page of the instruction manual. Basically, in a nutshell, it goes something like this. A powerful leader of a nation discovered the Power of the Gods one fine day. This energy emanated from an object he dug up from deep within the earth and gave him powers of unimaginable strength. Soon after, he and his followers, who called them selves the "Divine Ones" began to conquer other nations one by one. They considered themselves "The Chosen People" and carried out their conquests in "the name of peace".
Meanwhile, a freedom federation called Tenkaku emerged to challenge these people. Using fighter planes called Hitekkai, they fought with the hope of freeing the world from their conquests, but all their efforts were in vain. They lost battle after battle and were eventually almost completely wiped out. Miraculously, however, one young man survived. His name, Shinra.
Shinra sets out to wage another battle against the conquerors. He was shot down and crashed in a remote village called Ikaruga, inhabited by a group of aged people who had been sent into exile there by the conquerors.
Kazamori, the village leader, and the other inhabitants pulled Shinra from the wreckage of his plane and nursed him back to health. Shinra regained his strength and announced that he was determined to continue the battle against the conquerors. The villagers entrusted him with a fighter plane that they had built themselves, called the Ikaruga....hence the story begins.
The story in Ikaruga is not the main selling point of this game, it is not even mentioned in the actual game itself, just the manual. But a little back story is always nice to have in, just not really necessary. The main selling point is the game play, and Ikaruga is chock full of game play goodness.
Game Play
Ikaruga is a vertical shooter. At it's core it is a fairly simple concept, but the more you play the game, the more evident it becomes that major strategy and enemy pattern memorization will be needed.
There are no power ups in Ikaruga, nothing fancy you can snag to make you invincible, nothing to upgrade your weapons. There are two basic types of enemies, light and dark. Your ship is able to change polarity from either light or dark. All of your lasers can kill any enemy, but light lasers dispatch dark enemies quicker and vice versa. Switching polarity is instantaneous, one button is all you need. You also are able to soak up your enemies fire if it is the same polarity as your ship. By doing so, and you are able to unleash a powerful homing missile attack on your foes once enough energy has been saved up.
Firing patterns in the game are made to take full advantage of this system, causing you to always switch back and forth between polarities as to not die a painful, horrid death.
Ikaruga also employs the chain system. This system rewards the players with points as you rack up consecutive same polarity kills. A chain consists of 3 of the same color enemies (white or black). Once three of one color are killed, you may kill another 3 white or switch to 3 black. Kill two black and one white, and the chain is broken and you will start over again. The chain aspect of the game play offers a great challenge to even the most seasoned of shooter gamers.
There are 5 levels to play through in Ikaruga. May not sound like much, but to master each of the levels will take quite a bit of time. The first 3 levels are not too terribly difficult, though they are hard to master, but once you hit level 4, all hell breaks loose and the difficulty level gets ramped up about 50 notches. While you may think you are strolling along, collecting multiple chains and kicking butt in level 3, when you hit level 4, it will be all you can do just to not die, forget about collecting chains.
There are 3 different difficulty levels to choose from that will alter the game play significantly. Even on the easiest setting though, Ikaruga may make some players through their controller in a fit of rage and go back to playing Mario or something, cursing the shooter and all its evilness for revealing that they are in fact, not old school.
One of the main keys to Ikaruga is memorization. All the enemy patterns are the same every time you play it. If you are at a total loss about how to get past a level, tutorial showing what must be gods of gaming playing the same levels are available to watch so you can get some clue about what you are doing wrong. Very helpful.
The boss battles are spectacular. They require you to find the bosses weak spot and exploit it, all while trying to avoid its barrage of attacks. You will die often, oh yes, often. (Insert evil laugh)
Graphics
The graphics in Ikaruga are very nice to look at. They are a mix between 2D and 3D for an end effect that is very pleasing to the eyes and makes for one pretty shooter. The particle effects and the explosions all look fantastic and the bosses are unique and very stylish. Not that you will be paying much attention to the graphics as you play Ikaruga, what with you just trying to survive and all.
Sound
Good sound quality overall. The music is there, but never overpowers the game play. All the lasers, missiles and explosions sound like they should. Before each boss battle, sirens will sound and are great for producing even more stress and tension than you already have when you are about to go toe to toe with a boss.
Bonuses
There are some great unlockables in Ikaruga. Sketch Art, movies and tutorials are all available to unlock either by beating the mission scenarios or by playing for a predetermined amount of time. It is nice they made the extras unlockable by time spent playing the game and not just by beating the game, as there will be some who are unable to beat this game, but still want to see the extras. Thumbs up.
Overall
In the end, Ikaruga is one of the last pure technical shooters available for any of the new systems and one of the best ones made. It's a true successor to Radiant Silvergun in most everyway and is every bit as good. If you have a bad temper or low tolerance for pain though, best to stay away from Ikaruga as it will only send you to therapy that much quicker. It is a hard game, but a very rewarding game. Just beating one level makes you feel like you accomplished something major.
The shooter is a dying breed because it doesn't sell well. That is a shame because as Ikaruga demonstrates, you don't need zombies or magic plumbers or hardened stealth operatives in a game to make it good. You just need old fashioned, thumb twitching, use your mind game play. Many complain it is way to hard, to these people I say, toughen up kid. A game is supposed to be hard, supposed to offer some kind of challenge, that's what a game is. If it were all just flowers and candy, where would the fun be? Old school indeed.
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