Bangai-O: The Definitive Review

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As my after-school gaming club progresses, we’re moving towards the end of the 20th century and those glorious years of the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. I am lucky enough have three Dreamcasts, although one of them has a fucked drive and the other isn’t happy about displaying anything. This is why I’m glad I have three. They’re actually my second, third and fourth Dreamcasts as I managed to lose an entire collection through a combination of laziness and shame. In short, I lent it to a friend sometime in 2002 and then never saw them again because I moved to London. With that collection, I waved goodbye to the likes of Shenmue, Gunbird 2, Gigawing, Fire Pro Wrestling and a few other titles including PAL Cannon Spike (ouch) and my all-time Dreamcast favourite, Bangai-O. And it was losing Bangai-O that hurt the most.

Whenever I think of Treasure’s most delirious of shooters, I’m always reminded of Bangai-O Spirits on the DS. I absolutely adored that game, to the point that ten years ago I was lucky enough to write a retrospective for Eurogamer. More recently, I bought a DSi and dutifully softmodded it purely to play Bangai-O Spirits again (awfully, I’ve lost my DS cart but still have the box). It gave me the same, giddy intoxication that it had in 2008. I just love Treasure in fun mode, for it indulges its vices with real commitment. Obviously, Treasure’s more serious works are absolutely magnificent; Gradius V is so fittingly correct, and Radiant Silvergun is simply wonderful. I hold Ikaruga as one of the most beautiful games ever made, specifically in terms of striking a perfect harmony between sensory and intellectual aesthetic delight. Bangai-O Spirits isn’t beautiful in the same, crystalline way - it’s fucking bonkers, a wild beast promising a wild ride. Bangai-O is the crashing tsunami to Ikaruga’s towering mountain. Bangai-O and its offshoots sit more closely with Gunstar and Guardian Heroes, or perhaps the weirder stuff like Silhouette Mirage, which barely gets mentioned whenever Treasure is discussed. In fact, I think that McDonalds game gets more attention even though Silhouette Mirage directly links Gunstar Heroes and Ikaruga.

As an aside, has any developer arrived with such an effortlessly astonishing debut as Gunstar Heroes? I own a Japanese cart-only copy of it, but seeing a GDQ speedrun of its entirety reminded me how dazzlingly vivacious it is, how it explodes with supreme technical finesse and just has so, so many ideas implemented so, so well. The speedrunners steel themselves for the RNG hell of the late-stage board game and its dice-rolling antics, but they’re not frustrated. The idea is just so fucking great, so wonderfully playful, you can’t hate it when it scuppers a record run. And this was Treasure’s opening statement! It’s still breath-taking, especially in the context of what the Mega Drive had in 1993. I first played it in the mid-90s, and it was astonishingly good and beautifully unique then, even as the polygonal revolution was really taking hold. Likewise Bangai-O also stands apart as totally unique. I mean, can you describe it in one short sentence? It’s a real reminder of how incredibly special Treasure is, and what an absolute privilege it was to play its games in period. That said, I never finished the Dreamcast Bangai-O. After the indescribable battering that Bangai-O Spirits gives you, the original seems much less formidable a challenge and, hence, I went and bought a copy.

I buy a fair few games from eBay, and often have minor tremors of delight when opening the parcels. It’s a nice little reward to have lost items back in my ownership but, unsurprisingly, Bangai-O was different. I felt the richer elation of a reunion, as if a lost friend had finally returned. I remember just how much I respected the game for how uncompromised it was, for its intensity, for its idiosyncratic design and its shining uniquity. Treasure indeed. I think it’s marvellous that the idea came from Mitsuru Yaida wanting to see how many bullets he could fit on screen as a personal coding challenge, while simultaneously recalling an old, old game from 1984. I love that Treasure saw fit to expand Yaida’s idea into a full game, the kind of latitude we so rarely see in the commercial sector. To have it then mutate into Spirits and the (I think) lesser HD Missile Fury sequels seemed like some kind of divine beneficence, an astoundingly rare gift from above. Spirits, of course, takes all the biscuits for being a) portable and b) ludicrous in every regard. When you consider that by Bangai-O Spirits' release in 2008, Treasure had already completed Gradius V and Gunstar Super Heroes, it feels like Spirits was some kind of celebratory party. In a way, Treasure didn’t need to do any more; its catalogue was complete enough. With a Sin and Punishment sequel on Wii to round off its personal work, Treasure finishes with Missile Fury HD and two Gaist Crusher 3DS titles for Capcom, ending its run in 2014. This legendary company has now retired into re-masters and re-releases of Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun etc. And why the fuck not? They’re magnificent and deserve to be persistently available. Treasure followed me back when I found its Twitter account and oddly, that sense of a two-way contact warmed my soul. Being lucky enough to preach my Bangai-O Spirits sermon to Eurogamer’s flock was fantastic, but I don’t know if Treasure, or Mitsuru Yaida himself, ever read it. So this anonymous contact feels like more of a bond, more of a mutually-understood message somehow. The follow-back was a thank-you, a token of gratitude. Treasure now knows that some geeky westerner wants to hear from them.

When it comes to the after-school games club, I don’t think I’ll be forcing anyone to try Bangai-O when there’s Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi to play. But by god, I am going to force my children to play it, for they must know and they must understand the sheer explosion of pleasure that comes from the correctly-timed missile fury. That delay as it charges to maximum, the claustrophobia of enemy shots homing in on you, the shuddering release and collapsing frame rate of the missiles’ launch and the destruction that follows. It’s such a singular delight, so personal to the game, and yet so wonderfully calibrated and refined. And it pushes the hardware to the ragged edge. It was a key point in my Eurogamer piece, that fucking the DS’s frame-rate is a feature, a marker of success, something to be celebrated. It almost symbolises Treasure’s extraordinariness, its indefinable difference, its riotous spirit. I adore that disrespect for the 60 FPS orthodoxy, for you know if Yaida could have optimised the code to smooth that frame-rate, he’d just add more missiles until it broke again.

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