The Discreet Charm Of The Filler Game: The Definitive Review

Actually another piece on R-Type Final 3 Evolved

Having proudly finished my fourth game this year¹ with the completion of Avowed, I left myself with a real quandary about where to go next. I downloaded Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and managed to offend myself to such an extent in the opening chapter that I noped out at the museum sequence and refused to play it any further. Instead, I turned to a pair of old faithfuls: Gran Turismo 7 and R-Type Final 3 Evolved. Turismo is my weekend wonder; that constant turnover of weekly challenges always offers a little bit of cash to spend in the second-hand dealership. The distance those challenges cover means you inevitably score a daily driving marathon ticket too. It has to be said that sometimes, the marathon ticket comes up with some truly unbelievable wins and hence, you are an absolute bellend if you don’t do those weekly challenges. Thus Gran Turismo is less a filler game and more a religious observance in my weekly routine. It’s an omnipresent entity in that regard, especially as the chief collectables - cars - are still being added. I’d say that to occupy the full filler status, the game needs to have some goal to grind that gives you a terminal destination and a subsequent sense of completion, only you do it in lots of bits rather than one long run.

This is where a timely return to R-Type Final 3 makes perfect sense. With a full month to go until The Outer Worlds 2 and a worry that buying Ready Or Not may now constitute a political act I don’t want to remotely consider undertaking, the vast swathes of locked ships in Final 3 Evolved are precisely the kind of filler-game target I can knuckle down on. Having happily shot for the 101 unlocks in the original R-Type Final, it seems only right and just that I should do the same in this contemporary update and once again, this was spurred by Shmup buddy Spencer getting his suite of full unlocks, not to mention that this goal has been on my mind since purchasing. Suddenly having a convenient gap is an alignment in the stars that’s too good to pass up. This is, of course, greatly assisted by the modern sequels’ gleeful adoption of materials grinding as a chief unlocking mechanic.² I’m deep in the weeds of trying to extract as much Etherium as I can, while also trying to whip together a passable imitation of being a decent shmup player. The comedy here is that the grind is serious - ships average around 300-500 units each of the three grinding currencies to unlock, with a playthrough on Practice difficulty netting 300 or so, for each currency, per run. When you have 50+ ships to go, it’s a fairly hefty workload but it feels attainable, and that’s perhaps a key quality for a good filler game.

This was key in my younger years as a thirtysomething Musou pervert, forever grinding out XP and weapons across a thousand battlefields as I set about unlocking every Warriors Orochi character I could, across a succession of IP-blending titles. Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate being a shining star in that respect, it worked extraordinarily well as a filler you could return to for a few weeks at a time, incrementally filling out the grind to peak levelling with battles that became increasingly leisurely the better your characters became. There’s a lovely climb to the plateau with Musou grinds, where you end up hoving through maximal crowds with growing ease as your levelling allows you to crank up the difficulty while keeping the challenge largely the same. Musou becomes a game of efficiency more than a challenge. By the time you’re regularly running at Chaos difficulty, you’re so familiar with the ebb and flow of each stage that failure is a result of your own lazy incompetence rather than the game actually besting your skills (not that Musou ever claimed a high skill threshold in the first place). Instead, speed comes to the fore and the flow-state glory of inputting combos and directions to most rapidly deal with mobs and officers abstracts out into something nearly sublime when you’re well-versed. It takes on the 100-kills-a-second pleasure of the shmup to some extent, but also the satisfaction of puzzle game stage completions; that evergreen reward that comes from diving into raw chaos and tidying it the fuck up. There’s an intellectual music in that which always pleases and just by typing this, I’m provoked to bust out Warriors Orochi 4 and get back to it, for there is an almost Disgaea-like amount of work to do in reincarnation levelling in that motherfucker. BUT NO. We are here to play R-Type Final 3 Evolved, and hopefully become quite good at it.

There’s a bleak slapstick comedy to my re-encounter with R-Type Final 3 Evolved, as I found myself falling into oddly malformed flow-state runs that showcased my incompetence far more than displaying any innate skill born from four decades of commanding the hori-shmup. Having already run a fragmentary campaign with R-Type Final 2,³ there are vestiges of immaculate runs in my fingers, but they’re decidedly wonky. It’s a weird thing to observe yourself doing - I was surrendering to the flow, but that flow often involved making the same mistake over and over again. I was colliding with the same enemy at the same point in the level, often running the same checkpoint repeatedly for half an hour or so. All on the lower difficulties, mind, with a semi-tragic effect. At some points, and despite the best efforts of the game’s RNG, I’d find myself being killed by the same fucking bullet. Such was the comedy of the degraded flow. Shmups are all about memorisation to the point where instinct can take over. That’s where the zen lies, but for my R-Type Final 3 Evolved runs, I needed to aggressively shake off that entrancement to the flow and actually pay attention. Annoyed as I was, I had to actually learn stuff. On the lower difficulties, things like enemy and bullet density are leisurely in comparison to the upper end, but this allows you more mental capacity to plot out the sequencing of each level and begin to trace out various traversals. Much like my Musou days, these R-Type runs in easy mode are prep for the meatier work at the high end. I’ve begun pumping the difficulty up to Bydo to get much more favourable grinding currency harvests and the change in gameplay mood is wonderful. In Practice, you get plenty of challenge but it's laid in the sequence, in conquering each series of events that a stage represents, and that each offer a distinct challenge to master. The peaks of challenge on any given stage in Practice are interspersed with moments of calm, where you can charge up wave cannons and steel yourself. On Bydo, those gaps are all the more shorter as enemy waves fill the space, with their far higher shot counts pushing the play mode, your method of engagement, closer to true Danmaku territory than the meandering procession of Normal difficulty for the R-Types Final.

It’s a behaviour common to Gradius, Darius and even Scramble that the horizontal shmup journey tends to be less fraught than the unrelenting barrages of the verticals. This perhaps is down to the horizontal making much more challenge from terrain, a trait tied to the commonality that horizontals like to be low-level flights over surfaces whereas verticals are high in the sky. There are of course exceptions: Progear being the most notable, but largely the horizontal shooter likes to play with roofs and tunnels and environmental enclosure in a way that the verticals find harder to represent. This could be more a product of the culture than the capabilities of the template; Defender has trivial geography, Scramble does not and as it subsequently defines the form, the geography must continue to play a challenge role. However the verticals barely considered navigational challenges until well into the JAMMA era. This gives a subtle difference in playstyle; the horizontals, when played optimally, become more about clearing the screen of baddies than dodging their bullets, because the route you take includes environmental hazards too. A fully-loaded ship is often more than capable at reducing the challenge the player faces from enemies, so you can focus on the environmental traversal - and this is most definitely true of both Gradius and R-Type. There’s a real comedy in realising that the expert run is the easiest, because you’re carrying the full complement of power from the second or third stage onward. A slapdash amateur faces a far more gruelling slog. If you’re of the opinion that exposure is key to learning, then you’ll grind away at late-stage levels with pitifully low power-ups, and hence experience the level in a completely different way to a pro who sails through with their ship fully maxed. Getting back to the point, Bydo and R-Typer difficulties challenge that mentality altogether. Where a comfortable run on Normal or easier has you sweeping the entire screen visually, the stress-laden Bydo run has you focused on your ship and its immediate surroundings, as you have to be constantly dodging, constantly navigating. There aren’t the blissful moments where you can park your ship mid-height on the screen and just keep firing, secure in the confidence that your powers and arsenal will protect you. It’s like leaping forward a few game-complete loops in Gradius, and the fuckers are aiming right you, all the fucking time. And you have to balance the environmental traversal with the Danmaku vibes. This is the value of doing an absolute shitload of runs on Practice to get those routes cast in dendrites, to get you instinctually fluent with each stage’s sequencing. Naturally, finishing levels on the harder difficulties reaps more currency - but not that much. But of course the challenge is so much more intense above the Normal difficulty that making it through a level feels like a triumphant accomplishment. With Final 3 Evolved’s brilliant affordance of tuneable difficulty options, you can max the grind output by reducing player lives to just one ship and disabling special weapons, giving the whole thing an even greater highly-strung tension. Even if you don’t go for the min-max challenge, it’s nonetheless lovely to be able to pick and choose the intensity of each run just before you start it, something marks out the fundamental concept of R-Type Final 3 Evolved as being a cut above.

Mentioning Gradius, it’s perhaps worth stopping off at Gradius Origins for a compare and contrast session. I bought it for Switch on launch day,⁴ still keen to definitely master a Gradius 1CC before the end of the year. While that almost certainly isn’t going to happen, I love having so much Gradius in one package, including Salamander III. Or at least I was until I jumped back into R-Type Final 3 Evolved. For Granzella’s tribute to a tribute feels much more the correct celebration of the original, particularly in its DLC stages. Where Gradius Origins is absolutely the historical collection I wanted, it’s not the Gradius I needed, even with the quixotic 90s-fetish pseudo-sequel of Salamander III. Delightful as that is, it falls short of offering the same blend of thrilling modernity and old-school rigour of R-Type Final 3, just as Gradius V fell short of matching the ambition and high-minded conceptual creativity of R-Type Final.⁵ That’s not to say Gradius V was shit, nothing of the sort, but it’s not operating in the same sphere. And holy fuck, I really wish it would. Only the other day, I was recording a (failed) podcast episode with a friend and we both expressed huge and utterly insatiable desires for Treasure to do an R-Type Final with Gradius VI. It’s not as if the precedent is missing - not only are there variant craft across the Gradius series, there’s all the bonkers delights of the Parodius craft too, as well as the rest of the Konami shmup canon. The less said about Capcom’s cruel abandonment of its glorious shmup heritage the better, though perhaps I need to start a campaign about assembling a Toaplan All-Stars kickstarter should I ever be able to afford vibe-coding and AI-genning such a thing.

It all served to cement my belief that the R-Types Final are special in a way that all the others seemingly cannot even understand. I almost feel bad using it as a ‘mere’ filler game as I await the arrival of my next blockbuster pick. But it’s in that gap where R-Type Final 3 fits best, and with the time left in that gap, the quantified grind job feels very attainable indeed. I guess that’s where much of the propulsion comes from, but I can’t deny the charm and the magic of the R-Type mystique being key to it all. I wouldn’t be so enamoured if it was some unimaginative re-release. I wonder what the upcoming R-Type Delta remake will feel like in comparison to the reworked Delta stages in the Final 3 DLC. I mean, the difference in intent is right fucking there - where any formal remake is a re-tread, in R-Type Final’s purview it’s a repurposing, a re-imagining, with hundreds of ways to play it through. I doubt the Delta remake will connect to your Final saves to allow ship imports, because that would be far too cool and brilliant to actually happen. The saving grace, of course, is that R-Type Final 3 Evolved exists, and that its sensibilities are confident enough to embrace the abstractions and absurdities of spanning nearly forty years of R-Type in a single package. There’s a DLC level where you enter the universe of Mr Heli, and it’s brilliant.⁶ You’re suddenly in a Taito-esque Rainbow land, but with all the Final ships at your disposal. How daring, and what fun, right? Despite its formal seriousness, there’s a Parodius-like spirit at the heart of R-Type Final 3 Evolved that seems to understand that if the series died and R-Type Final was the funeral, then R-Type Final 3 Evolved is the latest dance through a wonderful, carefree afterlife.

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1. Frankly, a miracle. Especially given the timesink gravity well of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.

2. R-Type Final had unlocks tied to completing stages but also in ‘flight time’ with the craft. It was often the case that for any given lineage, to unlock a successor ship, you had to do time in its predecessor. While this meant flying some absolute bags of shit into battle against the Bydo, it did give a sense of earning the lineage by conducting its research, rather than merely accruing artificial currencies to spend willy-nilly.

3. Horrifyingly, my R-Type Final 2 save didn’t transfer to R-Type Final 3 Evolved, so I had to start from scratch. Waaaaaaaa.

4. I actually had an immense flip-out and bought Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga for the Switch as well, fully intent on turning the machine into an eternal graveyard of aspirant 1CC runs that I will never complete.

5. And mid-stage unskippable cutscenes. Never forget, NEVER FORGIVE.

6. There was a seriousness about R-Type Final that seemed to cast each stage as being real to the universe in which the game is set, creating a cohesive journey though a single reality. Even when it goes bonkers for the late-stage abstracted spaces, it’s to be understood as taking place in a universe. With the DLC stages, R-Types Final 2 and 3 break out into a knowing and deliberate abstraction, a kind of post-modern understanding of itself that redefines the boundaries of what is both possible and acceptable within the contemporary R-Type continuity. Similar to the anarchism of Bangai-O Spirits, it’s not quite as radical a redrawing of player/content relationship as Treasure’s handheld masterpiece. Yet within the stuffy formalism of the horizontal shmup, it’s a leap that feels almost revolutionary.