I finished Thunder Force III on MD a week or so back, just went back at it and got the 1CC after a couple of epic collapses at ORN Base (I hate that stupid boss).
Having now 1CCed both Thunder Force AC and Thunder Force III, I gotta say I'm surprised that:
1) III vs AC is a serious debate, and
2) That III seems to have come out ahead given how highly it rated in past top 25s on this site.
The main argument I've heard is that III is more challenging. I played the JP version, so I don't know if the Western revision got jacked up on the difficulty. But my experience was:
Levels - the main difference is that 2 levels were replaced from III in AC. Of those two, the rocky level, Haides, is quite memorable, but also contains several of the cheapest surprise deaths in the history of shooters. When you have the game at home to play as much as you want to memorize, that's not such a big deal. But I fully understand why they'd cut that for the arcade. There are untelegraphed traps that just
will kill you the first few times through.
The other cut stage, the ice level Ellis, is thoroughly forgettable. The only things of note that happen here are the brief (and simple) vertical scrolling section, and the weird face-in-a-bubble thing that you evaporate in 2 seconds flat if you have sever. Nothing much was lost here.
Meanwhile, I thought the stages AC got were pretty cool. The space level that transitions to ruins and has you making some quick darts in & out of narrow spaces for bonuses is a nice risk/reward add. I haven't finished TF II yet, but I've heard the other temple/speed tunnel stage was cobbled together from that game? Either way, it's more memorable than ice Ellis was.
And the final stage - it gets one. Imagine my surprise in TF III when I got to stage 8, beat the wiggly arms guy who it throws at you right away, and then the last boss was just sitting right there behind him.
AC loses the level select, but honestly the only purpose that served for me in III was getting Seiren out of the way first. Stages were rebalanced to be a bit easier (or really, less cheap) in AC, and Seiren really needed it. The bubble currents were toned down, and every super-fast zako the level shoots at you isn't an M1 Abrams tank. The one exception was Gorgon, the flame-geyser & fireball traps were redone in AC to be tougher, and at least one of them the player won't see coming the first time through. The other element was that lot more hidden bonuses were added in AC, that's one thing I really noticed/missed in III.
I will say though, I was pretty shocked at the bosses at first. For some reason many of them are made of paper in AC and go down in 5 seconds, making for pretty unsatisfying fights. The fire-breathing Gargoyle at the end of Hydra is a complete pushover in AC, but was actually the toughest boss in III until the Orn Base, I thought. He tagged me a number of times until I learned to just start on another stage so I'd have sever (and hopefully claw) when I got to him, which took him down much faster. On the whole III didn't take me any longer to 1CC than AC did, though granted I had some foreknowledge from finishing AC before it (though a surprising amount didn't carry over).
Ultimately you're splitting a lot of hairs here, but the one major factor that plants me firmly both feet in the AC camp is the music. AC gets two new tracks for the new stages, both of which I prefer to the previous entries which they replaced. But the real capper is that it gets an extra sound channel, and thus sounds fuller, but more importantly it doesn't get quite so drowned out by the shot firing sound effects like it does in III, or not at all if you have the definitive Switch AGES version. In a game where rockin' tunes set so much of the energy and atmosphere, that really makes a difference.
All that said though, please don't interpret me as being down on TF III. Especially in its original context, fall 1990 in the West, the end of the Genesis' first full year, there was absolutely nothing comparable to it. I love Truxton & Fire Shark, but they're not the same kind of audio-visual tour de force. The TG-16's STG standard bearer was still Blazing Lazers a year on from launch, which while wonderful just wasn't doing quite as much, or doing it quite as big. The only NES shooters released in Q3
or 4 in 1990 were Silver Surfer and the rather obscure Thunderbirds (yep, based on the puppet show). Unless you want to include Solar Jetman. Which I do not. So yeah, I get how a generation of Sega players grew up remembering Thunder Force III as being completely jaw dropping and generally all-round badass.
Steven wrote:
Hishouzame plane = Flying Shark and Same! plane = Fire Shark. Fire Shark is the reincarnation of the Flying Shark, which was at that point considered a hero plane for fighting in the previous war, which would of course be the events of Hishouzame, although I don't know how a plane can be reincarnated. Don't think about it too much, I guess lol. This is all from the Japanese Same! Same! Same! arcade version's manual, which you can fortunately access in the gallery in the M2 ShotTriggers release.
Oh hey, you're right. The MD version's instructions tell the same story. And it's literally written out as 'furaingu sha-ku,' lol. I did not see that coming given how kanji heavy Toaplan stuff tends to be.