GRADIUS V

By KCET/Konami Sony Playstation 2 2004

Reviewed by Mike B

'Set lasers to maximum bend captain'.




A friendly Bacterion Mothership
pops in to say hello.. again


The 'windscreen-wiper' bendy lasers in action against some weird bio-organic suns.. yesterday.


An evil Bacterion war-machine fails completely to hit your ship due to the slight flaw of having a blimmin' great gap in its lasers


Dispatching a boss is just like the 4th of July, in your room, on your telly..


Beware the brain! Well in this case, like previous Gradius games it doesn't actually DO anything..


A nice example of the directional Type II options lasers in action against a persistent Mothership


The good old bio-organic level in homage to Salamander, except in this one the walls move in and try to squish you


A level which in fact I have never seen, thus a caption which is rather pointless. Sorry.

ONCE MORE INTO THE BACTERION FRAY, DEAR FRIENDS..

Konami's last stab at the Gradius franchise was to all intents and purposes a rather soulless and unambitious attempt to re-hash and re-package the classic Gradius formula on new generation hardware. And that's exactly what it did, namely give us graphically tarted up versions of levels we'd already played through in the first three games, with absolutely no new innovations to counter that sinking feeling of deja vu most players felt on attempting to play it. Gradius IV was an ill-conceived exercise in player frustration, highlighting the dated nature of a power-up/restart system that now seemed even more unfair than ever. Dying in shooters is never much fun, but Gradius IV rubbed it in your face, dumping you back half a level then stripping you of all power-ups and speed, and leaving your ship with the defensive attributes of a house brick, a practically impossible situation to recover from on later levels. Debuting as it did only a couple of years after the definitive 2D Gradius game - the Playstation-only Gradius Gaiden - fans were aware that the series had actually devolved, leaving IV looking like a rather pointless footnote in the Gradius canon.

So what makes a game like Gradius Gaiden great and one like Gradius IV er.. not? Well Gaiden has a lovely feel to it, some superb weaponry - some familiar, some brand spanking new - spread across four different selectable ships, great and inventive level designs which were densely challenging but still gave you the necessary 'space' to get through unscathed, and some of the best 2D art direction ever seen in a shooter. Gradius IV, with its fancy textured polygon pseudo-sprites had far less character, your ship was particularly bland, its levels were over-crowded and 'fiddly'.. it was just too hard to be enjoyable.

Enter Treasure, famed Japanese purveyors of the 'alternative' video-game. Now I don't profess to liking everything these guys ever produced, and I know a lot of people were never that happy with concepts like the 'colour-changing' system in Ikaruga, complaining that it actually got in the way of the fun aspects like actually blowing stuff up. Well all those people now at least have something to be thankful for. Because it's official. Treasure have made Gradius cool again.

INCREASING YOUR OPTIONS

When you first fire up a game and enter the now famous Gradius 'weapon array' select screen, along with the iconic and familiar weapon systems such as tailguns, doubles, lasers and shields you'll notice an initially bewildering array of options for your..er.. Options aka Multiples. Unlike in previous Gradii they are now fully configurable to the degree that you can not only choose their attributes during the pre-game weapon select screen but also have a certain degree of control over them during the game itself via the R1 button (more on that later.) Let's see what they are then:

The Option systems are all quite radically different. The closest to the 'classic' Gradius option system is Type I, which is basically your bog-standard 'follow-and-forget' multiple formation of Gradii of old, with the updated ability to 'lock' multiples in a particular position relative to your ship by holding down the R1 button, very useful when applied to boss 'cores' if you string them all in a line to concentrate firepower. If you are anything like me you might end up sticking with the first one you get the hang of, which in my case was Option Type II. This system lets you sweep a continuous stream of 'bendy' lasers across the screen through 360 degrees when holding down R1, cutting through 'popcorn' enemies like the proverbial knife through Golden Churn. Extremely satisfying and visually appealing as this is however it's really quite un-Gradius-y if you think about it, removing a lot of the skill from the good old traditional method of actually aiming at enemy targets with your forward firing lasers and bombs. Plus it can get fiddly when trying to pilot the Vic Viper through narrow passages at the same time as attempting to rotate your directional fire at targets, kind of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. The last two option systems are possibly the least useful of the four. Type III can be spread out above or below your ship at various intervals should you so desire to have your firepower strung out in this way across the screen. Type IV gives you spinny options that circle your ship in a slightly dizzying manner, presumably to act as a defensive ring against oncoming enemies, though I can't confess to actually ever using them much. Especially as given, for instance, the remarkable propensity for screen-wide destruction available to you through Type II's 360 degree directional firing arc, the less than astounding ability on pressing R1 to make them spin in the opposite direction comes as rather an anti-climax.

DESTROY THEM ALL

Right so you've got your weapons and multiples sorted. Let's have a look at the rest of the game shall we? The first thing you'll notice is how amazingly good everything looks compared to Gradius IV. The first level, a stunning orbital vista visually echoing Treasure's magnum-opus Ikaruga, pulls of the feat of containing some of the finest imagery yet seen in a traditional shoot'emup, while still managing to look like a Gradius game. Detailed futuristic gun-turret encrusted scrolling backgrounds? Check. Pesky laser spitting Mothership sub-bosses? Check. Gorgeous incandescent scarlet flaming suns a la Vulcan Venture? Check. Large, improbable multi-pronged boss graciously flaunting its shootable core and with ill-measured defense system leaving just enough small gaps for you to survive? Check, most definitely.. And it all looks so damn fine superimposed as it is over impressive, swirling polygon backgrounds. The Vic Viper has never looked as good as it does here. Indeed throughout the whole lovingly crafted package it's obvious Treasure love and cherish Gradius as much as we do. Gradius V also boasts a rousing soundtrack by composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, of Radiant Silvergun and Final Fantasy Tactics fame, which highly sucessfully distills and remixes elements of the famous tunes of old into something distinctly epic and more contemporary.

It's on losing a life, however, that the game reveals a subtle but extremely important change from previous games. Instead of robbing you of all your collected power-ups and then plonking you back several screen to a 'restart point', your new 'life' respawns where you died, and your Options remain on screen where they can be grabbed during a brief period of immunity. You do still lose your weapons such as lasers, missiles etc, and your speed, but your all-important chums Multiples A-through-X depending on how many you managed to grab before your unfortunate demise are there for the taking. Gradius V wants you to favour the Option as the preferred vehicle of your victory over the Bacterion scum, with your other weapon systems being relegated to almost secondary importance. It's therefore a better strategy to collect, along with your first basic speed up (although the main ship starting speed in this game has been tweaked to not actually be as all crippling after dying than it used to be) as many Option power-ups as soon as you possibly can. The other stuff can wait.

Re-spawning with invincibility and the ability to grab ex-power up items left onscreen is of course not a new idea, Raiden for example has done it for years, as did this game's half-sibling Salamander 2, but it's the first time we have seen it in Gradius. Hard-core Gradius fans might bemoan it saying it takes away a lot of the challenge, and indeed the bane of this system, players re-spawning then 'sitting' on a boss and causing it maximum damage while invincible, only to escape to safety just as they are about to become mortal, is tempting later in the game, but I'd say this is a good trade-off for the restart point frustration hell of Gradius IV. Plus if you really should desire, you can always turn it off and revert back the the restart system of old.

SHOOT THE CORE

The other important change here is that of the reduced 'hit-box' on the Vic Viper- it will now only be destroyed by collision with the central body of the ship and cockpit. This is actually quite noticeable during the rotating 'laser attack' pattern of the first boss when you'll see your ship's nose-cone quite happily taking up the same space a great hulking laser beam. Again purists will argue against such a feature but as I'm getting old and my eyes (and motor neurones) aren't really up to pixel perfect maneuvering any more it gets a thumbs up from me. It's almost as if Konami/Treasure knows that Gradius fans are getting on a bit now.. bless 'em. Lastly, Gradius V has finally implemented the ability to 'roll-over' your ship speed ie activate enough speed levels and your counter resets to the default speed. This might seem very minor but its something I've been wanting to see in Gradius for years - I remember all too well the frustration of upping my ship's velocity in order to survive the fast laser attacks of many a Gradius boss, only to smack un-heroically into the scenery at the start of the next stage because my ship was too fast and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. Another change for the greater good then.

The kind folks at Treasure have also given us a number of other welcome features. One of the best is the high-score save system which now saves your initial credit's score should you choose to use continues, ignoring the scores on subsequent credits, meaning all scores entered are comparable in starting from round one and not some later stage in the game. Initially the game gives you a paltry 3 continues (credits) but this increases with play (I'm currently on 7 and admittedly still haven't completed the game). Also here are stage select options allowing you to instantly jump to and practice any level you have yet reached, with infinite continues, although the game ends when you finish that stage. There is now a score attack mode providing verifiable passwords for high score competitions and five levels of difficulty from 'very easy' to 'very hard', with the game keeping track of high-scores for each seperate setting. Later you can unlock a 'Weapon Edit' mode which does exactly what it says on the tin, namely edit and experiment with different weapon and Option set-ups till the cows come home.

YOU NEED MORE PRACTICE

Ultimatetely Gradius V is a much more forgiving game than its predecessors, which is not to say it's soft, it just wants you to actually have a good time playing it. You do get auto-fire now and the separate main fire and missile buttons of the older games are now mapped to one button, relegating the need to hammer or hold down two buttons at the same time to the annals of history. It may at first appear to be one of the easier games in the series, and in fact veteran Gradius campaigners might well want to crank the difficulty setting from 'normal to 'hard' but for us mere mortals who want to actually see a decent chunk of the game's eight levels this should be perfectly fine. The game has a well-judged difficulty curve with the fairly straightforward introductory nature of the first couple of levels culminating in an unexpected 'boss-rush' paying homage to several familiar faces from earlier Gradius and Salamander games. Bosses here though don't aim to eradicate you in a matter of seconds with attacks impossible to evade unless you knew they were coming (as in Gradius IV) but give you a fair chance by usually warning you in advance, so if you die it's generally your own stupid fault. And if you do die, not having to face the inevitable slog back to the point of your death sans power-ups is very welcome indeed. Later levels up the difficulty considerably, and include tricky uppy-downy vertically scrolling bits, but still seem eminently beatable, given time and practice of course. And the extra level control you can exert over your Options leads to a renewed appreciation of the little buggers, especially when stacking a full compliment of Type I multiples into an impenetrable line of laser death against a boss or synchronously arcing an array of pulsating Type II 'windscreen-wipers-of-doom' across the screen with one deft flick of the D-pad.

This could well be the very last Gradius game ever as although critically acclaimed and given the luxury of a Western release in North America and Europe as well as Japan, Gradius V's sales were apparently not up to Konami's expectations, a situation probably not helped by the strange decision by Treasure not to release the game in arcades due to 'time constraints'. If so I would probably say that it's a fitting finale to a much-loved classic series but I've used this cliche far too much previously on 'Destroy all Monsters!' so I won't. Gradius V is a majestic game (if falling ever so slightly below the ridiculously deep and feature-packed R-Type Final in terms of long-lasting appeal among PS2 shooters) and I love it dearly but I'm not sure I love it quite as much as my old mate Gradius Gaiden.

Score out of Five:

Mike B