Rezon (Arcade)

[King Slime]

This is my review on Gamefaqs.

I've played many difficult video games throughout my life such as MegaManX1-4, Contra: Shattered Soldier, Super Contra(Arcade version), Gradius5, Devil May Cry1&3, Ninja Gaiden, R-Type1-3, R-Type Delta, R-Type Final, Ikaruga, Image Fight, and plenty, albeit none can compare to the masochistic tyranny of this backwater R-Type clone outdoing both R-Type2 and Pulstar by in terms of difficulty.

Once you toss in your quarter and start playing, you'll immediately notice that Rezon completely ripped-off R-Type. The ship looks almost identical to the R-9, the enemies replicate R-Type, and even graphically wise Rezon tries its hardest to successfully mimic R-Type. Unlike Pulstar or Katakis--which attempted to recreate some originality and atmosphere, Rezon is perfectly contented in being a mere shadow of R-Type. Even though it is just a shadow, this is one of the rare occurrences in which the fake is transcendent to the real thing.

Throughout each of Rezon's six overwhelmingly hard stages, you'll encounter unusually designed machines blandly scrolling from the right to the left outerscreen. Blasting one of these machines will reveal a power-up. Either a speed-up, speed-down, or a weapon addition will be presented for you to collect. (Pretty much like the capsule guys in R-Type). When a weapon power-up is obtained for the first time, two orbs will appear. One directly above your ship, while the corresponding one is directly below your ship. These orbs are the meat of Rezon's strategy. (Much like the force orb concept in R-Type). When you fire your ship's gun, the orbs respond and fire in unison with your gun. The orbs fire the same fire power the ship fires. Obtaining another weapon power-up will allow the orbs to fire either blue bouncing balls, a very powerful red laser, or a useless yellow ring weapon (which is pretty much like the red laser, just not as good). Obtaining one more weapon power-up will beef up your orbs' weapons. (Force orb power-up system ringing a bell?) Moving your ship forward will cause the orbs to face behind and fire behind you. Flying your ship backward will make the orbs face the same direction of your ship, blasting enemies from the front. The orbs can also be used to your advantage to block enemy bullets.

Rezon is a thinking-man's shooter, resulting the game to be heavily based on memorization and planning. After dying for the millionth time and you are thinking you'll never make it past the obstacle that keeps kicking the crap out of you, Rezon gives you that one more go feeling, making you attempt the obstacle again and again until you finally succeed in conquering the cruel obstacle only to quickly wind up in the same predicament as before a few seconds later. Every tactic, every evasion skill, everything you do is a close call. To add to the already evil difficulty, Rezon's attitude towards continue points makes the game much more of an bastard than it already is. The halfway points are very far apart from each other (unlike Gallop: Armed Police Force/Cosmic Cop) and when you die against a boss, you'll be thrown all the way back to the halfway point clear across the fairly lengthy stages of Rezon. This may either motivate you to continue, or it might turn a player away (which most unfortunately might turn away). I, on the other hand, enjoyed suffering through the cruel stage over multiple times only to get pwn3d by the boss repeatedly.

The bosses in Rezon are nothing to snicker at. The bosses are usually tougher than the stages. Stage four's boss is probably the hardest boss ever designed. I'll provide the strategy for the walkthrough I am making.

"This boss is MEAN. The fight is mostly based on raw skill. I see a lot of inspiration from R-Type2's Rios in this giant generic asteroid design too. Unlike Rios however, the boss does not attack you directly. Instead, he relies on the asteroid obstacles and these little IRRITATING machines that shoot a bunch of lasers at you that cannot be blocked by your orbs. Well, actually the boss does have these two lasers that he fires from these two guns above and below his central core. So, he does attack you directly, he just doesn't have as much arsenal as Rios. When the boss music starts playing, start shooting in the middle of the screen. The boss will appear and shoot him in the green orb as many times as possible before the fight initiates. He'll start moving up and down the screen while asteroids (which by now you've noticed take a good number of shots to kill) make this boss already a chore to hit. As if Alhummer didn't think that was hard enough, you'll end up being overrun with little machines that shoot lasers aimed for you. Thankfully, they only take one or two blasts and they are history, but evading them their lasers is still next to impossible anyway--plus, more laser shooters keep coming throughout the fight. Okay, once the fight actually starts, I advise taking out the large asteroid near the bottom of the screen. Destroying this asteroid will enable much more mobility on the screen. Don't worry about hitting the boss for the time being. Destroy as many of those laser shooting machines as possible while doing what you can with the other asteroids and the occassional two blue lasers. You'll have a better aim at the boss when that large asteroid is destroyed, but he isn't your target in order to win. Okay well he is, but in order to win, you need to constantly take out the asteroids and the laser shooters. In the process, you'll hit the boss many times too. After some time, another large asteroid comes along where the previous one was and takes its place. Take this one out too. Keep repeating this over and over. After an unbelievably intense two or three minutes, you'll have this boss beat. I'm sure you wish you could sit down and take a breather for a second, don't ya? Well, if you are playing it on mame, luckily you can. Take a minute to relax if you need it. But if you are playing this on arcade, Alhummer figured, tough...keep playing."

The soundtrack of the game is complete and total ass. All of the songs are four or five second reiterating loops that will eventually just annoy the living hell out of you. The sound effects are nothing more than your average space shooter crap. Yeah, the music and sound effects suck.

The one minor disappointment, but can easily be overlooked is the fact that the game lacks a charge shot like most other thinker shmups have you often rely on. Other than that, this game is awesome and even holds true to the nonsensical, poor grammatical congratulatory ending paragraph plagued by all other arcade shmups at that time. This game isn't for everyone. It is aimed for only a very, very select few gamers who adore masochistic, ludicrously hard, quarter-sucking arcade games. So, this is right up my alley. My favorite game out there.

9/10