R-Type Final 2 and 3 Evolved: The Definitive Review

Force the force, forcefully

Guilt and a PlayStation Store sale make for a powerful combination and it was thanks to precisely those two things that I ended up buying R-Type Final 3 Evolved. Thanks to Granzella’s stunning dedication to a genuinely bewildering DLC program, I actually have no idea what 3 Evolved contains. I just know it has all of R-Type Final 2 and some extra stuff and as far as I’m concerned, that’s totally fine. I’d been a day-one player of R-Type Final 2 and had logged enough play time to rack up a nice little roster of ships, though as with the original R-Type Final, I never really expected to reach the full 101 unlocks within my first decade of play. I was pretty chuffed to recount my sporadic 16-year push to gain the 101 in the PlayStation 2 original on Eurogamer, and even more chuffed that Slateman, the creator and host of an essential R-Type Final ship registry found the article and commented on it, so I got the chance to thank them in person. It also kinda blows my mind that I first wrote about R-Type Final professionally back in 2013, which makes R-Type something of a personal touchstone in terms of impassioned videogame criticism that other people wanted to read. I’ve yet to write about the arcade originals, though I wouldn’t discount that happening within a few hundred words from here. Though really, I owe my recent efforts to one Spencer Kingman, for as a forum buddy he’d shown that the 101 was entirely doable in R-Type Final and thus a noble goal to pursue. The fact that he did the same with R-Type Final 2 is the reason why this piece starts with the word ‘guilt’. I mean, it’s kinda obvious what I have to do, right? For me the Final games have always been about lusting after that ship roster rather than the flawless 1 Credit Clear.

Of the things I value most in the R-Type Final 2 and 3 Evolved proposition is the freedom to wander around the R’s Museum in a first-person viewpoint. Curiously missing from the PlayStation 2 original, this opportunity to walk the halls of R-Type morphology satisfies a kind of techno-lust that’s borne out of a lifetime of perving at spaceships, from Apollo equipment through Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, The Last Starfighter et al, and on to whatever pixelated craft the Shmups of the 80s and 90s threw at me. R-Type Final’s glorious indulgence in exploring the idea of the Shmup-ship into triple figures remains unique, even if we find embryonic attempts in the bounteous rosters of the late-era Raiden titles Raiden Fighters and Raiden Fighters Jet. Likewise, a cult of one (me) adored the M.A.M.E. curio from a pre-Sega Sammy, Change Air Blade. Like the Raidens, it featured a suite of playables that ran a lovely stylistic gamut. Where Raiden championed the hard mechanical edges of contemporary jet fighters through a kind of Macross lens, Change Air Blade was happier to hybridise the historical vintage gear of the Strikers 1945 series with Raiden’s modernity and involving some very clear homages, including almost direct tributes to Battle Garegga and Raiden itself. Speaking of Garegga, it’s criminal to ignore Armed Police Batrider’s fabulous suite of craft, which includes guests on flying carpets and full-on dragons. Then, of course, we turn to the real elephant in the room, Gradius. Or rather its comedy offshoot, Parodius. This takes us as far back as 1990 to get a ship roster where each craft has tangible differences that demand different tactical approaches. I’m sure there are older titles that did it first, but I cannot personally be fucked to dig any further back. Why? Because it genuinely feels like the comedic absurdity of Parodius offering the gleaming sleekness of Vic Viper alongside an octopus and a penguin is essentially the R-Type Final concept of evolving an armada from hard metal into pliable flesh and exploring all sorts of combinatory ratios between the two. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

The freeform dawdle you can take through the ships you own in R-Type Final 3 Evolved lets you inspect the craft in a way that drives a burning desire to do the same for other series. In a sense, Final’s commitment to the giant roster almost demands the implementation of a new standard, that perhaps other well-established and much-loved series should do the same, to explore their possibilities and imaginations to the extent that R-Type does. But then R-Type has always been able to call on its imaginativeness as a foundational point of pride. I remember reading the wild-eyed superlatives that 8-bit computer mags lavished on R-Type in their arcade sections and upon viewing the screenshots, finding them far more valid than hyperbolic. Compared to contemporaries like Darius or Salamander, which had suitably impressive bosses and level settings but nonetheless sat in a kind of establishment aesthetic orthodoxy, R-Type was strikingly different in style and content. While R-Type’s first stage is steadfastly traditional, its series-iconic boss, Dobkeratops, blew minds that had already seen everything Darius and Salamander had to offer. Even 1988’s Gradius II/Vulcan Venture couldn’t match the wildness and opulence of R-Type’s gargantuan bosses and biomechanical style. There was, in essence, an entirely different sense of sophistication at play and it had taken the Geiger influence to heart without endlessly re-treading Alien. In fact, it got that homage out of the way immediately to focus on the more Lynchian-Cronenberg physiology of hybridising cephalopods, actinia and mammalian genitalia for its second stage. Then, for its third, it makes the entire stage the boss. And it’s a fucking cool giant space battleship into the bargain. The leap was almost generational, and this is before you get to the key interactive innovations that R-Type employed.

Of course if you have even a scintilla of self-respect you’ll know I’m talking about the force. Or is the Force more correct? Anyway, the brilliance in taking the Gradius multiple and making it both a shield and controllable ally is simply wonderful design work. In the context of the Shmup, the way it expands the palette of playstyles is absolutely unprecedented. Nobody came close to a similar innovation until perhaps Ikaruga’s polarity switching or Psyvariar’s graze mechanic, and neither offer the tactical scope of R-Type’s 0-day innovation. I remember reading a guide to the arcade back in the ‘80s that offered a showboating run that uses Force flinging to lodge it in boss weak spots for stages one and two, with a detailed plan for pushing and pulling the Force around the battleship of stage three. With skilful manipulation and sufficient pre-Danmaku bullet-dodging skills, a deft player can pull off some real feats with the Force. It’s an entirely new landscape of play compared to the standard practice of simply shooting everything until it’s dead. I for one love a bit of Force bully-ramming, convincing myself that I can 1CC the game with only Force manipulation and fully-charged wave cannon shots. This is to the extent that I’ve assigned the Force shoot/recall button to the right trigger for R-Type Final 3 Evolved to optimise the amount of bashing I can do against boss cores and high-HP enemies. When you’re waiting for third or fourth loops on the cannons, that kind of rapid-fire ricochet damage is considerable with a full Dose, not to mention astonishingly aggressive in posture. And it’s safer than the grazing technique with the Force attached. It made me feel almost sorry for the early-stage bosses. There they are, trying to charge up their own massive wave cannon and there’s some fucking R-fighter right in their face, basketballing the force off them while they’re really trying to concentrate. Naturally, R-Type Final went apeshit by adding all sorts of different Force types that not only change the kind of beam outputs you get from normal shots, but also exhibit different behaviours when detached. Again, it’s the depth. The exploration, the experimentation. And giving it all to the player to try for themselves, even referencing back to R-Types Delta and Leo.

Another aspect of the modern R-Type is that sweep of history. As I’ve written before, the Shmup is one of the true archaea of videogaming, an archetype that stretches back, via the abstruse interpolation of Space Invaders from Breakout, to Pong itself, while arguably taking thematic inspiration from Space War! And it’s really only R-Type that’s taken the generational leaps in technological capability in its stride. Thinking of the transition from the less-popular R-Type Leo to R-Type Delta, the series navigated the bitmap to polygon filter with absolute aplomb, which made its wild expansion onto the PlayStation 2 somewhat easier perhaps, though as self-evidenced by the 101 ships, nowhere near a case of resting on its laurels. But R-Type Final offered perspectives and traversals beyond the imagination of Delta, alongside exploiting the far more enhanced realtime lighting capabilities of the PlayStation 2’s Graphics Synthesizer. Final sets its stages ablaze with the player’s destructive output, making for a visual splendour that even Gradius V failed to match. But then the slower pace and darker, claustrophobic environs of signature R-Type Final stages almost are awaiting the light to wash away their darkness as those last dancers weave their deadly routines. I remember Edge’s Ben Schroder remarking on the neon fireworks of a fully-powered R-fighter in the heat of battle being a key part of the experiential joy of the game, that some unique charisma arises from the visual systems it sets in motion. And with that peculiar pace and staccato staging, R-Type Final pulls off a unique charisma that’s utterly unmatched, even by its modern sequels.

That’s not to say R-Type Final 2 and 3 Evolved are specifically worse, but they are lacking. But that’s the romance of Final, you see. It’s got a funereal fatalism, a mournful sense of its own, (then very real) finality that the modern entries absolutely lack. They are far more exploratory and celebratory, and rightly so. They’re a rebirth, and a glorious one. And not to be shabby about anything, they once again exploit the capabilities of the generation they find themselves in. When I dare to take the time, I marvel at the visual detail of Final 2 and 3 Evolved. The environments have a wonderful richness at times, and display some gorgeous ideas around biomechanical representations and the natural fusing with the artificial, once again merrily dabbling in the union of the biological and the synthetic. I particularly love the weird shipping containers on stage one of the Final 2 course. They just have a vibe I find eerily seductive within the decaying walls of the space station you traverse, which feels like some haunted remnant of the original R-Type’s opening level. Yet it’s a far cry from the freeform jazz of R-Type Final’s downed colony, with its swooping transitions, weirdly slow pacing and upside-down crab mid-boss. With Final 2 and 3 Evolved you may be getting a far more traditional ride, but the fidelity kinda makes up for it. I often gawp at the detail in the R-fighter models, right down to the cockpits. Where the R-9 Arrowhead of R-Type felt like a novel design, its blue-white glass cockpit was a handful of pixels. In R-Type Final 3 Evolved, you can see through the glass, sometimes silhouetted by your output, the seat and the controls are discernable and if you look hard enough, the thin shadow of you, the pilot. Suddenly, the scale of it all is humanised, understandable, and awe strikes. It’s only in Armed Police Batrider that I recall being able to see the humans controlling the player’s ship and in the cast of the modern R-Types, it’s a wonderful detail. In a strict sense it’s not necessary at all but what it does underline is Kazuma Kujo’s vision and Granzella’s dedication to the craft, to the sheer indulgent delight of going to that level of detail just because you can, and just because you should. Likewise, the way the lighting has been implemented so that a fully-Dosed Force emits its own distinctive glow is a wonderful thing. On top of that are the dynamic shadows cast across surfaces by rotating parts of certain Forces, the wave cannon-specific lighting effects that can change depending on charge loop levels, the stupendous flares of pure light that bathe everything when a big shot is finally fired. It all creates a sense of an opportunity fulfilled, of a game accrediting itself to the generation it calls home.

Taking a moment to recall my pure delight and burning desire to see the game for real after seeing blurry screenshots in Commodore User back in 1987, and then playing R-Type Final 3 Evolved now and seeing how much it encompasses of the thirty-seven years of progress we’ve seen is humbling. There is a kind of monumental wonder in R-Type Final 3 Evolved’s totality. It bears and absolutely upholds the respect of a true relic, yet has so much to offer the imaginative or curious player. And the action is eternally rewarding, either as instinctual improv or obsessively-rehearsed choreography. Personally, I think that with shmups you come to love every stage just by getting to know them through repetition. As the rhythms and beats become as familiar and innate as your muscle memory in navigating them, they become pleasing as they become smooth. As such, I don’t really care for critiquing the level content. Put in the time and you’ll come to love them all. Just choose how you want to do it, which dancer appeals to your groove, which light illuminates the darkness best for you. I’ll state again that all shmups need to shoot for 101 playable ships, just to see how far the imagination can go with the specifics of the ruleset. Gradius 6 should be exactly that, perhaps. Yet with R-Type Final 3 Evolved, the generational leap is perhaps not quite there. Obviously what those 105 112 ships need is 105 112 stages¹.

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1. With apologies and much gratitude to Spencer for the correction.