Gradius - The Definitive Review
Which do you choose? A hard or soft Option?
In what seems like an age ago (December 2023), I blithely professed an urge to commit to a shmup one-credit-clear and suggested Konami’s Gradius to myself. After all, it’s going to be FORTY next year, so why not pick this truly iconic STG as a suitable target for brutal repetition until I finish the thing on one credit. My choice of hardware is perhaps a bit quixotic - PC Engine, but then it is the best console of all time so why the fuck not? This has nothing to do with me showing off that I own Gradius and a PC Engine1, because as far as I’m concerned that’s a pairing that everybody who dares to think of themselves as a STG fan should have at close hand, at all times2.
My Gradius journey so far is likely close to the average user’s experience. I’m recording a commentary for every attempt I make and it’s fun to chart the progress, even if painfully slow. Not to worry, I have until February 2nd 2025 to wipe the floor with this game. Now, that first stage opener is burnt into my synapses quite nicely, as is the wonderful experience of losing all your powerups early on and having to navigate the whole thing with one accidentally-selected Double shot and no speedup. It’s always fascinating how Gradius and its contemporaries used powerups as a means to make the challenge easier, leaving you guessing that perhaps the stage balancing is done with a fistful of Options and lasers in mind, rather than the dire capabilities of a Vic Viper on the charity powerup and the meagre scatterings Gradius sometimes offers for in-stage deaths. And it’s that slog through stage one with a bare minimum ship that almost defines the game. Learn all this with fuck all and the flawless run will seem like a walk in the park. Something mediocre R-Type players will be wonderfully familiar with. It pushes those powerups into reward territory - you get them for playing well, for not making silly mistakes out of bravado, for respecting the scenery and the single-bullet kill. That’s not to say the first stage of Gradius opens up like a Cave shooter, but it can get pretty dense with ordinance if you’re not clearing with the efficiency a suitably powerful Vic Viper should. At the time of writing, I have made it to the dizzying heights of Stage 3. As I remarked in a commentary, Stage 3 is a particular stumbling block for me. I have stalled here on many a shmup, though it’s fun to recall those where I pushed through; Salamander, R-Type, R-Type Final, R-Type Final 2, Thunderforce 3. Note that aside Salamander, they’re exclusively horizontal games. And, of course, Salamander is a hori/vert hybrid. Struggling to think of other horizontals I may have succeeded with, I recall immediately how awesome Blazing Star is before remembering how thrilled I was to get past the meteor section in Scramble, thereby segueing us with extreme pretension into the realms of hori-shmup archaea.
I first encountered Scramble as one of Grandstand’s table-top LCD games and then, more explicitly, in the form of Melbourne House’s Penetrator for the ZX Spectrum. I was immediately gripped with the freedom it offered over other shooters. The freedom to move around the screen, the freedom to bomb stuff. This added ballistic dimension seemed so fun, especially as you had the normal shot too. The craft seemed way more powerful than the (quite poor) clones of Space Invaders and Defender that circulated in the early years of the 8-bit micros. People had tried to foist Imagine’s Arcadia onto me as the premium shooty spaceship experience, but it was clear that Penetrator was so much better, so much more of a game3. It didn’t take much to work out that Penetrator was a version of Scramble, and that Konami was a publisher worthy of joining the ranks of Taito, Sega, Atari and Japan Capsule Computers. In the swirling morass of mid-80s gaming, the flux of one’s arcade exposure, should you not live in a seaside town, was down to the tastes of travelling fair operators4. And we were lucky enough to have one regular visitor with two arcade trailers in my teenage years, within which could be found a then-hokey Gradius machine. I mean, by the time I was 15 in 1989, the game was a shockingly ancient four years old. Everybody else would be shoving their coins into Golden Axe or Double Dragon, with particularly cash-rich players dropping £1s by the handful into Afterburner. I would always save a 10p for Gradius and never get very far5. I’d also come across a pirated copy of Simon Pick’s superlative conversion for the Commodore 64, which helped me gain an intuitive understanding of the game’s signature powerup system, but a keen reliance on cheats meant I never really mastered anything. Instead, that came with a slightly older me and Ocean’s conversion of Salamander6.
Salamander had beguiled me to such an extent that I wrote a piece for Eurogamer to celebrate its personally emblematic status for the JAMMA golden age. Released in 1986, I would have been 11 when I played it. At a roller-rink for a classmate’s birthday and being unable to skate, I spent the whole session in the arcade. Serendipitously, it was a wonderful lineup; Marble Madness, Paperboy, Commando, Bombjack, Battlezone and Salamander. Elsewhere was a Choplifter and a Dragon’s Lair. But it was Salamander that captured my heart. Learning it was a sequel to Gradius7 made perfect sense. Between the vibrant 16-bit graphics and the sleek spacecraft designs, the sense of growing power and the wild environs, the pair felt like some intoxicatingly exotic sci-fi universe that would forever be slightly out of touch, slightly unknowable, but utterly captivating. Even now, nearly 40 years later, I still have Vic Viper t-shirts and am glad I’ve never mustered the attention span to sit through the Salamander OVA, lest that imagined mythology be corrupted by the official canon.
Gradius’s own history has been told in some lovely interviews, notably with Machiguchi Hiroyasu, the series’ creative director of sorts. And you have to see its spread via conversions to a wealth of platforms as proof of its seminal, genre-defining qualities. Certainly the UK 8-bit conversions and the more global NES take insured its place in the pantheon of shooty legends, and it shares the luxury with R-Type in enjoying decades of sequels and admirably crossing the sprites-to-polygons rubicon8. For me, Gradius matured the idea of the shmup as a journey. It did this somehow more intently than the contemporary verticals, despite the terrain traversal (and differentiation of landscape and target) within Xevious or the gleaming rock-and-metal aesthetic of Tekhan’s lesser-known scrolling vert from 1984, Starforce. With Gradius you get explicitly themed levels and a real sense of outer space voyage. This transportative quality that sends you though a vast tunnel to brave twin volcanoes in the first stage, through turret-bristling ruins for stage two and on the Moai-imbedded strata of stage three. And it’s perhaps those Moai heads that lend the game a certain esoteric, mystical charisma9. There’s a gleaming quality to its new-age, astrologic transcendentalism which, via those Moai, chimes Von-Daniken ancient astronauts with the request to specify a star-sign at high-score entry. Despite the claptrap, the presentation sparkles thanks to the timelessly beautiful pixel fonts, and special commendation should be given by allowing ladies to specify their heteronormative gender alongside their initials and star-sign. Perhaps this additional allowance of personalising your high-score entry underlines a certain work ethic at the heart of Machiguchi’s project. Within the aspiration to build a worthy sequel to Scramble and the sheer thrill of developing on Konami’s first 16-bit hardware, Gradius was built to excel, and excel it did - across every discipline it could. The leap between the two is wonderfully vast, one of those exhilarating forward dashes into a lush and vibrant future, so perhaps the quixotic oddities like the formalism of the high score entry stems from some wish to fulfil the potential, to allow the previously unallowable.
In the cultural study of videogame lineages, it's sometimes more important to consider the games that matured a set of tropes rather than those that introduced them. And while Gradius certainly introduced plenty of its own ideas, it matured the concept of end-of-stage boss fights, the notion of the shmup as a visual showcase, the idea of the geographical journey in force-scrolling games, and perhaps most boldly made powerups a fundamental property of the genre. You’d be hard pressed to find a post-Gradius STG that didn’t have some kind of permanent (for a life) enhancement of abilities, although for those into obscure arcade shooters, Jaleco’s Star Fox10 from 1987 is a delightfully anachronistic exception to that rule. The Gradius legacy is most obviously seen in its cultural successor, R-Type, and its lesser third-string underling Darius11. Yet none of them dared copy that signature powerup system, which I have some to think of as the spiritual backbone of the Gradius journey. Its distinct iconography and the sheer mystique of the Options seem to surpass the glory of R-Type’s Force orb, even though I adore Irem’s implementation of the Force and the wonderfully daring and creative ways you can deploy it. Yet for some reason, those spectral glowing orange ovals warm my heart more. Perhaps it’s the work required to get four of them and the glorious power they bring, and there’s certainly a lot of inspiration for the Force’s wrangling abilities in the way a decent Gradius player can lead and corral their Options into defensive and offensive postures. I’ve always been a huge fan of running the Vic Viper in a circle, creating a massive gatling-gun effect as the Options whirl in concert. With Laser activated, it makes for a horizontal strip of player-ordained devastation that takes up a good third of the playspace. They are extremely nifty for sequences like the first stage’s volcano assault pre-boss. With four Options and Missile12, you just park old Vic up in the top left corner with the correct wiggling to have the Options arrayed beneath you in a horizontal line. Thus, when the twin volcanoes disgorge, the Options do all the work for you.
I’m sure there are plenty of other Option positioning tricks to discover and re-learn on my 1CC journey, which is taking place on my PC-Engine for the sake of being able to simply sit down, turn on a TV and the machine and be straight into Gradius grinding. The PC-Engine conversion is surprisingly late - 1991. This almosssttttttt makes it a deliberately retro release on Konami’s part, especially considering it goes on to convert Salamander and Parodius with equal quality. As a conversion, it’s really quite excellent and pretty much complete but obviously pushes the poor machine further than it’d prefer. Slowdown abounds when flooding the screen with bullets (or volcanic discharges etc) but as we all know, in a shmup slowdown is a super-power. Konami’s Bubble System board was a classic pairing of the Motorola 68000 with a Zilog Z80 for sound, where it controlled two Yamaha AY FM chips and a custom Konami sound chip. It’s hard to find detailed data on the graphics processor, but it seems it was capable of managing 256 sprites on-screen. This is compared to the 8-bit 6502-derived processor in the PC-Engine and its affordance of 64 sprites, so it's both easy to see why it would encounter frame-rate issues and what a technical marvel the conversion actually is. I can absolutely live with the slowdown when the game’s feature-complete and pretty joyous to control on the PC-Engine pad. There’s a real fastidiousness to the conversion that gives it an air of being an almost academic reconstruction rather than the compromised revisions seen on the 8-Bit micros. But still, graphically it feels - in a mad way - like a cartoon version of its arcade big brother. So while I’m gunning for a 1CC on with the most frictionless version I have, it’ll always niggle that I don’t have the same for the arcade so hey, it’ll eventually be time to waggle some fight sticks on my M.A.M.E. PC. And after that, who knows? But obviously it’s Salamander. I mean, how could I not?13
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I was bought my PC Engine as a gift (for which I am still mindfucked over) and immediately went to town with amassing a HuCard shmup collection when it was fortunately quite cheap to do so. Gradius, Salamander, Parodius are all in there, as is the line of Hudson's Star Soldier titles. But I'm more proud of Tiger Heli and Raiden. OF COURSE I HAVE R-TYPE 1 AND 2. But have you got Sidearms? HMMM?
I wish I could convince myself to carry my GT in a bag but it feels so fucking fragile I'm frankly terrified to pick it up, let alone turn it on.
I should also point out that Penetrator had a map editor so you could create your own versions of a meteor-deficient Scramble. Just lovely.
For the unaware, rural UK was serviced by travelling fairs that would set up on village greens and small-town parks, sporadically from spring through to autumn. They came with a suite of rides and attractions, stalls and games, and rather wonderfully, very noisy and often dense arcades full of cabs. Lots of bootlegs, obv.
Speaking of the 10p credit, I was once in an arcade in Northern Ireland in 1990 (?) that not only had a sit-down Galaxy Force II, but a Data East Robocop set to 5p a credit. Needless to say I was fucking delighted to have a shitload of 10 pence pieces jangling in my pocket.
I remain immensely proud of my C64 Salamander 1CC and rightly so, because it was a banging conversion.
This happened, I think, in a review of Vulcan Venture (Gradius II) from the magical time when even Commodore mags had arcade review sections.
While I absolutely admire, adore and respect Gradius V, it never really captured me the way R-Type Final did, nor do I think it comes anywhere close to Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga for pinnacle Treasure at the atomic edge of shmup design. TBH, it’s the cutscenes and the tunnel navigating. Fucked me right off. I never had enough time with R-Type Delta to master it, but can confirm that Gradius IV is a bit weird and freakishly ugly. :(
Moai had a great run in 1980s JAMMA, being also the obvious inspiration for Doh, the arch antagonist of Taito's Arkanoid.
Starfox/Exerizer is 1) too weird a game to relegate to a footnote and 2) where else could I write about gawping at it in the departure lounge at Heathrow on the same day that I got my very first gaming magazine? That Heathrow departure lounge was a minor delight. It had Return of the Jedi and Temple of Doom Atari cabs, Starfox and Shaolin's Road. I think it maybe had a Chase HQ but I could easily be making that up.
Like Dead or Alive vs Virtua Fighter and Tekken, I could never love Darius with the passion I had for Gradius and R-Type. Firstly, it was initially a ludicrous attempt to justify 3-display ultra-widescreen gaming and secondly, it always felt a bit aimless and threadbare aside its aquatic bosses. G-Darius had that massive laser thing, right? I was just too disinterested by then to try and master it. And, like, if you must Taito your shmups then Rayforce is fucking sweeeeeeeet.
Yes, this is actually possible on Stage 1 if you don't take Laser, but then why the fuck would you not take the Laser?
Of course, a discerning STG enthusiast would have every right to physically assault me for not mentioning a single Toaplan game but then - gasp - I don’t think much to Toaplan’s horizontals. Hellfire is amateurish and a little bit shit, as if its an Amiga wannabe. Yeah, like Menace, Blood Money and Apidya. Yeah, that’s right. I said what I said. I mean, Hellfire’s no fucking Progear No Arashi is it? Yeah, that might be a completely unfair comparison but it’s kinda to do with Toaplan and, you know, Progear is absolutely stunning. I mean, Cave busts out DoDonPachi, Dangun Feveron, ESP.RA.DE and Guwange to revolutionise verts and then, seemingly for a bit of a laugh, does the same with horizontals. Bloody love Vimana and Outzone though. Sick as fuck with the tightest pixel art. Gorgeous.