Gradius Galaxies (GBA)

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Reverie Planetarian
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Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 4:01 pm

Gradius Galaxies (GBA)

Post by Reverie Planetarian »

Game: Gradius Galaxies
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Developer: Mobile21 (published by Konami)


More Like Gradius Globular Cluster

Somebody tell me if there's ever been a bad Gradius game.

I'm sold there never has been: Gradius 1-3 were classics, I know some shmuppers who swear by the Salamander games, I am forever smitten by Gradius Gaiden, Gradius V was thought to be the second coming of shmups not more than a few months after R-Type Final put an end to the R-Type series as a shmup franchise, the Parodius games are well-remembered and Otomedius isn't what you'd call a blight on the franchise.

So someone tell me if there's ever been a bad Gradius game, because I'm seriously calling Gradius Galaxies out for being one simply because it doesn't measure up to its peers. I'm sorry, but when you don't add a single thing compared to games anywhere from one to a few years your elder, I will call you out as the runt of your particular litter. There isn't anything particularly wrong with this game, per se, but when anything right I can point out has already kind of been done by other games in the series, in particular its older Playstation sibling, Gradius Gaiden.

Yet another game I was introduced to only after it appeared on the PSP, Gaiden was my mental image of what a Gradius game should play like. Lots of gorgeous sprite visuals, ships with wide arsenals, plenty of interesting levels and amazing bosses. Back before I got Galaxies I had heard of Gaiden and thought Galaxies was a Gaiden approximation for the GBA.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when Galaxies and Gaiden played nothing alike. But is it founded? Well, I've played it through a couple of times, so here's my thought process as I lived with Gradius Galaxies.

Or Gradius Generation if you're Japanese.

Or Gradius Advance if you're European.


Story

I really hesitate to talk about Gradius Galaxies from a story perspective. Like most of the game there's nothing spectacularly wrong with it. In Gradius Galaxies' case, in between the events of Gradius III and Gaiden, the war between Gradius and Bacterion rages on. Bacterion creates a weapon they intend to use on Gradius, but it was destroyed before it could be finished. The remains crash on a nearby planet and turn it into a mechanized fortress world (which begs the question of why this was not the original plan in the first place) which must be killed before it gets too powerful. So you are sent off in typical Gradius fashion: one Vic Viper against several levels of Bacterion freaks.

We're told none of this in the opening animation, though: we're just shown a scrolling procession of the Gradius games that came before this, including pre-Gradius Konami game Scramble. Then, roll title.

That's pretty much it. I would never really critique a Gradius game, of all things, for its story, not unless something was deathly wrong with it. The plot is nice, fills up one solitary page on a GBA instruction manual and it makes good sense for explaining the Gradius laundry list of environments. Nothing feels particularly out of place, but we're never brought anywhere new either. If the story of a game involves its setting, then why pay attention if it's nothing but the same tale retold?

Summary: 6/10. It's the same old Gradius experience, which isn't bad but it's not entirely the best thing either. You could label the story and setpieces of this game "A History Of Gradius 1985-2001" and not be very far off the mark. Which is kind of sad, really.


Graphics

One word describes the sprites in Gradius Galaxies: standard. On one hand, this is a good thing: the Vic Viper looks like the Vic Viper, enemies look like enemies, enemy bullets look like enemy bullets, and you can clearly see what you're doing as opposed to your enemies. Again, I think Gaiden, and post-Gaiden I feel the series used that high water mark as a guideline for graphics.Now, this isn't a bad thing: the environments and elements are all very good. There are giant panels of breakable glass, jagged, cratered rocks everywhere, big comets that look like uncut diamonds, mechanical bits and that one level you always see in R-Type-uh, I mean the Gradius standard bio-environment. The animations are all good, and aside from some honestly silly-looking sprite inflating and deflating and a lack of imagination for some bosses which could have been eye-opening, all the effects are completely believable. They would be almost perfect if they stretched a bit more, but what we got is still just fine.

While I'm not torn up over seeing no Lord British, Falchion Beta or Jade Knight, I do wish each of the four weapons setups you get in the game could have gotten their own ship design to go with them.

Summary: 8/10. A little more polish would have made this a GBA Gaiden, but unfortunately that didn't happen. What we're left with is still exemplary so long as you remember it's a GBA game. The four weapons setups and color schemes wish they could be the foursome in Gradius gaiden but they stand out alright on their own.


Sound

Up until now all my thoughts lined up in each part of Gradius Galaxies, and the were all gunning squarely for Gradius Gaiden, which I consider Galaxies' main inspiration. "Wants to be like Gradius Gaiden, could have been like Gradius Gaiden, is nothing like Gradius Gaiden..." You can hardly say the same for the sound. It's hard to tell where the sound in Gradius Galaxies wants precisely to sit, particularly in the music department, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's confused between wanting to be a Game Boy Advance game and a Game Boy Color game.

The truth is that it has its feet planted firmly in between the two systems, and while it's nice to see a Gradius game sounding a little old-school, it starts to get jarring after a while. NES/SNES-style wave tones that are only half-memorable dominate the game and sit awkwardly next to sound effects that only the GBA would have been able to deliver, such as environmental sound effects and the unique firing noises of each individual Laser weapon. One sound effect I thought was rather weak was your death noise: rather than sounding like your ship's exploded it's a bullet ricochet noise, and a rather often-used one at that. Naughty. Another one was the overblown, fuzzy KRONG noise you made whenever you hit anything damageable on a boss.

There are some voices, particularly a male voice which announces which powerup you've activated and where to shoot, and a robot voice which rather rudely tells you to start your current life by droning "START" once. I suppose "get ready" was too mainstream for Mobile21.

Summary: 7/10. Disappointingly, Gradius Galaxies isn't quite the complete package it should be when it comes to the sound department. While the sound effects are nice, the music sounds annoyingly cheap. On a worse game this would be somewhat excusable, but this is a Gradius title with a lot to live up to. It's nowhere near as catchy as other Gradius titles in the sound department.


Gameplay

Gameplay is where a Gradius game should shine, and gameplay-wise, Galaxies doesn't disappoint. The controls are as tight as any Gradius game should be, and the challenge level is as high as it ever has been in any Gradius title.The good and the bad of the Gradius series are both here in Galaxies: the scorching rapid-fire weapons of your ship, the ability to have up to four Options trailing you, shields, blue and red capsules, the tiny hitbox...for all those who know Gradius there's nothing really new.

For those that don't, here's the rundown. In Gradius you don't gather power-ups linearly: you scroll across a bar which gives you choices between abilities as you grab individual red power-up capsules. You can do anything from speed up your ship to create options to switch weapons this way, and it's a very streamlined system that not only keeps too many items from clouding the player's head, but also forces you to be strategic about the power-ups you activate. When you die, you lose all your power-ups, almost all of which are the ur-examples of common shmup weapons.

This has also given rise to the phenomenon known as Gradius Syndrome amongst some shmuppers. Should you die in a particularly difficult spot you're likely to get a game over due to being completely depowered and having to face an enemy that was just as merciless as when you had all the powers and weapons you could need.

Gradius Syndrome is only partially remedied in Galaxies: you are capable of getting up to areas where you're allowed a breather and some generally free powerups as lulls in the action, but they don't happen at every checkpoint, and at the higher levels of difficulty, anything that you can grab a powerup from tends to shoot back or shoot preemptively.

The game again cribs from Gaiden in how it treats weapons, but it only halfway follows through from the Gaiden model of sets rather than customizing a la Gradius III: you can choose one of four sets of weapons, an entirely manual or semi-automated powerup activation system, and from either durable frontal shields or less durable force fields. This should be a recipe for surefire Gradius satisfaction, but in the grand scheme of things it's just not a complete package.

Let's look at Gaiden as a comparison: all four weapons sets were their own beasts. Each ship had its own Missiles and two different types of Lasers, and so all the ships were entirely different. Gameplay hinged on which arsenal you could get a handle on the best, and as a nice addon you could swap where on your scrolling power bar each weapon sat, so you could pick and choose the order in which you could get weapons. Here you get no such weapon switching, and the arsenals crib from one another: you get one laser attack per ship type, but two ships share the same multiple-direction shot type as opposed to having entirely different arsenals, so you're really just playing with, say, two-and-a-half different arsenals. The missiles are watered-down versions of the ones in Gaiden, with one type's Not-Jade-Knight-Color-Scheme Missile basically being Vic Viper's Missile II in Gaiden except twice as slow, and a second one simply having the Jade Knight's Twin Laser setup with no Round Wave while crossdressing in the Falchion Beta's colors. Of course I'm not asking this game to be completely different or entirely the same as Gaiden or, say, III, but the game is so close that it might as well have been an adaptation and therefore played like a much better game by being a port, or have cherrypicked ideas from either III or Gaiden and come out with its own identity rather than appearing too much like one game or the other.

While the stages and bosses are all passable there's nothing new in where we go: there's the one Moai stage, there's the stage with fire or some kind of sun, the obligatory "snakelike fire being" boss, the obligatory Moai level and one level full of glass. There are no boss rushes in Galaxies, nor are there particularly memorable bosses. As far as gameplay goes they're pretty neat bosses but they aren't eye candy and there are almost no memorable boss types from games past, such as the Tetran or the Rolling Core. There are no setpieces or gimmicks that give the player something new to worry about, such as the black hole in Level 7 of Gradius Gaiden, either.

Were I to pick food to compare this game to-which I'm about to-it's like a bag of plain chips: it's satisfying and it's not very easy to screw up, but of course you know what salted chips taste the hell like!

Summary: 7/10. The gameplay is solid as ever, but overall you get the feeling you're playing an SNES port rather than a full-fledged GBA game in terms of gameplay.


Conclusion

I suppose there was bound to be one Gradius game in such a long-running series with so many titles that was the series just phoning it in. Having Konami delegate the task of developing the game to a third party certainly didn't help, and sticking the whole thing chronologically in between the tight Gradius III and the legendary sidestory Gradius Gaiden didn't help matters, as gameplay clearly borrowed from both to the point of being borderline plagiarism.

Where precisely this could have been avoided is so obvious in places that it's sad. Gradius Galaxies could have been its own creation but it'll always be compared to its flashier, more famous siblings.

Final Verdict: 6/10. Bear in mind that I don't inflate my scores or anything: a game that at least functions whenever you play it gets a 5 in my book.
"Enjoy a nice Brown Betty with DEATH! But, but mostly eat death." ~Crow T. Robot~
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