In this squib we discuss a venerable standard of the shmup genre,
Flying Shark. The game’s immense popularity entails that there have been dozens of ports across the decades (see the discussion in the wiki). The M2 “Shot Rigger” ports represent modern faithful renditions of the game on PS4 and Nintendo Switch, however. The game is notable for being a subtle but pervasive seminal influence in the genre, along with other fellow Toaplan shmups. Tsuneki Ikeda from Cave, among many other videogame designers,
grew up playing this title and
Slap Fight, for instance. The game comes into various revisions and regional versions (e.g.
Hishou Zame is the game’s name for the J(a)P(an) version), which differ in various minor details. We have various threads and a classic review
here, so my squib aims to be concise. Let us make haste with the squib, to discuss all these details:
Flying Shark (
Toaplan, 1987, with Taito handling the distribution) is a (ro)TATE shmup that pits Rudo Schneider and its blue biplane against a veritable legion of enemy planes and tanks. The game is notable for being one of the first shmups introducing a “bomb” attack and for having a great OST. More controversially, it is also notable for introducing the complex type of enemy positioning and Stage design that evolved into the modern
”Bullet Hell” genre. This latter aspect of
Facet hinges on the fact that Stages become “busy” with enemies and bullets early on, and once players loop the game, careful positioning strategies become indispensable. The goal of this squib is to provide players with evidence supporting this claim. The goal of this squib is also to convince players that 1-CC’ing the game (well, at least a loop) is a perhaps a central achievement for any fan of the genre.
Summarising 1987 for the arcade scene and Toaplan’s early years in a single paragraph would be almost “hobbyist malpractice”, I know. Throughout this and further Toaplan-dedicated squibs, I will attempt to sketch a minimal context nevertheless. Toaplan was an intriguing little company that, in the memories of
Masahiro Yuge, had a “wild party” atmosphere and some unhealthy work practices. Arising from the ashes of
Orca, Toaplan produced simple platformers/puzzle games like
Performan on hardware allowing modest audio-visual presentations. Pilferers and innovators in equal parts, Toaplan programmers were smart designers with powerful ideas who established themselves with shmups such as
Slap Fight in 1986,
Kyukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra and
Flying Shark in 1987, and
Truxton/Tatsujin in 1988. Toaplan shmups looked modest, but presented players with remarkably creative design ideas and a feeling of smooth, fast-paced action that could almost match contemporary legends like Taito’s
Darius, Irem’s
R-Type and Konami’s
Gradius II.
Before we turn to the finer Facets involving game mechanics, a brief mention of the plot will help us in framing its minimal world setting. The story pits an unnamed fighter, nicknamed the “Flying Shark” or “Sky Shark” depending on the game’s version, against the enemy forces in an undefined Pacific Ocean war theatre. Our hero must fly behind enemy lines and rescue fellow pilots and prisoners of wars. It is a though mission, but somebody must do it and obviously our hero is the best choice. Readers may wonder why these forces fight with biplanes in WWII, or why and how a single biplane may rescue these aforementioned prisoners. These are details to simply set up a cool battle with biplanes in the Pacific, really. The identity of the “Flying Shark” as Romu Schneider originates in
Batsugun!’s, Toaplan final game, which suggests that this story takes place in an alternate version of Earth.
Let us now discuss the minimalist game mechanics. Players control Rudo’s biplane in eight directions with the joystick. The A button shoots two central shots, and can upgrade to 12 relatively wide shots after collecting five “S” power-ups, obtained by shooting down formations of six to eight red planes. The B button controls the bomb attack. When pressed, a bomb briefly travels forward from the plane position, and then detonate in a spiralling explosion that cancels bullets and damages/destroys enemies in its range. Collect “B(omb)” icons from destroyed tanks; each bomb in stock is worth 3k points as an End-of-Stage bonus. The bomb stock replenishes at three bombs, if players have less units after clearing a Stage. Shoot down yellow and silver biplane formations to collect 1000 extra points and one extra life, respectively. Players start with two lives and extend at 50k plus every 150k points, in most versions.
The audio-visual presentation is also minimal, though far from basic. The game is set in the Pacific theatre of WWII, and thus features luscious jungle backgrounds, battles over azure seas. Assaults to military bases involving steel grey buildings, brownish grounds and other colour from a simple, realistic palette. Enemy tanks and biplanes come in a few colour combinations but are well-animated and realistically designed. Bosses have massive sprites: the bombardier from Stage five occupies most of the screen, and the battleship from Stage three is several screens long. Mid-size enemies are also bulky and aggressive, and enemy formations often offer a choreographic if threatening feeling about their positioning. Toaplan designers did not have powerful hardware at their disposal. However, had a firm grasp on how to convey the feeling of a single man against an army comparable to other classics of the time (e.g. Seta/Taito’s
Thundercade, Capcom’s
1943).
Masahiro Yuge’OST offers a strong argument for Toaplan’s designers being gifted with sheer ingeniousness in the face of modest hardware. Yuge infused the OST with his love for
Progressive Rock and especially British band
Yes, though it definitely could access basic synthetisers and software to create this music. Stage one’s
Asia opens the game with a medium paced, relatively dramatic theme; Stage two’s
Against the Attack moves to a more upbeat tempo for some ocean-based action. Stage three’s
Water Front switches to a dramatic riff, and Stage four’s
Behind the Bush leads with an almost hard rock-styled anthem. It is Stage five’s
Last Fighter exhilaratingly dramatic theme that plays the closest to
Yes’s classic works, with its notes perhaps echoing
South Side of the Sky from
The Fragile. Sound effects are almost 8-bit console-like in simplicity, but the OST is a synthetized prog rock-like cavalcade framing Rudo’s fight with epic and dramatic flair.
Now that we have a framework for the aesthetics Facets, we can discuss the game’s difficulty. I propose that the difficulty in this game comes from game mechanics and Stage design/layout, which in turn corresponds to Enemy wave/formations and their layout. First, players must master use of the main shot: even at maximum power, it covers roughly half of the screen. The numbers of shot waves on screen have a limit, so players should also learn to point-blank enemies to increase shooting frequency. Certainly, use of auto-fire options across ports can help players to overcome that lingering subjective feeling that firepower is sometimes insufficient. However, players who aim to play the game in its arcade form need to master this ability. Therefore, they need to learn to dispose of larger enemies and bosses in a brutal, aggressive and efficient manner, while also learning to dodge quick attacks with precision.
Second, bombs require some practice for players to use them as secondary weapons, their intended function. Bombs do not denotate immediately, but must undergo half a second of so of “dropping animation” (with matching sound effect). Once they hit the surface, they create a spiralling whirlwind of fire that cancel bullets and damages enemies and last around 1.5 seconds. The radius of the explosion is roughly half of the horizontal axis, a fact entailing that bombs do not cover the entire screen, on the vertical axis. Thus, bombs can be a good defensive measure against sniper enemies on the horizontal axis or attacks from behind the plane/the bottom of the screen. If enemies are shooting from the top side of the screen, they might even be useless due to their limited reach. Their use must thus be tactical, as “panic bombing” may often result in untimely deaths.
If we divide the total 50 points into two halves of 25 points, then the game mechanics motivate a 3/25 difficulty score. Players should potentially master these Facets with little effort and a clear understanding of their basic principles. While game mechanics may be an easy obstacle to overcome, enemy/Stage layout/formations provide the main source of difficulty in the game. Two sub-Facets provide the key sources of difficult, within this sub-Facet. First, enemies mostly aim in eight directions, but also aim their shots by using simple “baiting” strategies. A formation of biplanes can enter the screen and aim their single shots at Rudo’s biplane, forcing players to move in e.g. the up-right direction. Sniper tanks may then appear and shoot at the biplane’s expected position, taking the plane down. This strategy, in combination with a sapient positioning of enemies, forces players to memorise enemies’ placement and potential trap attacks.
Second, Stage layout provides a “macro-source” of difficulty, building atop of enemies’ formations “micro-source”. The game has five Stages, and loops indefinitely though the score should max out at 9999990 points; loops start from Stage two, however. Each Stage is divided into “areas”, i.e. mini-sections that establish the spawning points after death. Each area acts as a mini-puzzle or maze in which players must understand what is the best order(s) of enemy formations to destroy, for survival purposes. Biplanes, tanks and small ships shoot fast, aimed flashing bullets; bigger planes shoot pattern-based bullets (e.g. three-way shots); bosses use bulkier attacks of various types. Players thus can focus on solving each area as a mini-maze, then “connect” this solution to the next area, and so on. This approach is virtually necessary for survival purposes, also because players must learn how to survive after death when entering each re-spawning point.
Overall, players should develop general strategies involving carefully timed movements to dodge bullets and destroy enemies as soon as possible. For Stages and areas, players can develop specific tactics such as the tactical use of bombs upon respawning or to shorten boss fights. Combining these pieces together leads to a veritable resolution of the “maze game” underpinning
Flying Shark. I thus propose, for simplicity, that each Stage is worth three points of difficulty: one for the Stage itself, one to learn its harder respawn points/areas, and one for the Bosses. At 15/25 difficulty points, this Facet offers a considerable challenge for all players. The total thus becomes 18/50 points, close to the
Shmup difficulty Wiki score. Add two points per loop, as enemies become more aggressive and have more H(it)P(oint)s.
Flying Shark is a top-tier challenge for intermediate players, but multiple loops can reach grandmaster (i.e. 40+ points) difficulty levels.
Let us wrap up this squib with my experiences of the game, thus. Xenny? He’s gone to a
The Presets concert; we are quite safe (or: do not try to hide, dear reader). It is 1990, though I do not remember exactly when: my memories regarding this game are hazy, and I only recall that my uncle never had a board of this game. I probably played this title while visiting the big arcade that had the dedicated cabs and
City Connection in their big underground room. Other details are definitely hazy, and I perhaps I only played this game when I started junior high school. I have this memory of my father playing
Twin Cobra to my side, while playing this title. The arcade had the classic Toaplan games lined up in the South-East corner of their big room: playing these titles meant braving darkness and smell of mould.
The first credit I play of this game is almost embarrassing. Even by 1990 standards, I find the game really ugly, simply put. I also struggle to follow the trajectories of the bullets, due to their weird flashing animation. Sound effects are primitive, and the way the game uses the bomb is annoying. My golden standard on this mechanic is
Thundercade, so any bomb that has a delay in detonation is useless: my poor gaming skills demand a crutch, not a secondary weapon. I believe that I barely make it to the first boss, failing at its three-way shot. I see from the high score table that the game does mark the stage but something called “areas”. I wonder what they are, honestly. I did not see any signs that I was entering different areas when playing, but “reaching area 21” sounds better than “losing against the first boss”.
Over an indefinite period of six months or so, perhaps more, I visit this arcade with a certain regularity and I become more and more attracted by Toaplan’s modest-looking games. There is also something about the music in these games that I find hypnotic. Music sounds quirky, as if they were playing sounds from some home console like the Famicom, but backwards or under heavy distortion. My 2025 definitely remembers that my 1990 has no idea on the sources that inspired Masahiro Yuge, but also that, in the long distance, the 1990 began to like these chiptunes quite a lot indeed. It is however 1990, and I definitely feel that playing spara-tutto (literally, ‘shoot-all’ in Italian) games from Toaplan feels like appreciating second-rate movies or comics with flashes of brilliance. Still, there is something about their artisanal passion exuding from their games that charms me to no end.
Over this period of six months or so, though, I definitely get better at these games and I definitely begin to appreciate these people’s ideas about game design. My progress in
Flying Shark is a slow, almost painful but always resolute journey through the areas of this title. Stage four is though, and the fact that I must beat the two armoured train bosses during the Stage is a veritable ordeal. I progress one area every few credits, and possibly one Stage per month; but I progress, and I manage to connect the areas of the puzzle, sooner or later. I do not remember what month or day, or season is, but I do remember that the first time I hear
Last Fighter, I am transfixed. It is one of those “eternal” moments in which the mind knows that it is going to remember the event forever, indeed.
The few opening notes turn me into intellectual dust and rebuild me anew in a few seconds: all of a sudden, I can perfectly understand that the designers want Stage five to be epic, intense, viscerally difficult. How could it be otherwise? The song is mesmerising, and the enemy formations are suddenly massive, shoot more, and literally swamp the screen. Enemies crop from everywhere, and mid-way through the Stage
two of the battleships from Stage three re-appear, baying for my blood. I believe that my 1987, 1988…selves like
sparatutto because they seem to offer some compact metaphor of life: sometimes one lone fighter takes the fight against legions, and the one has no choice but to win or turn into dust. My 1990 self does not know the name of this song, but my 2025 self knows that
Last Fighter is
the name that epitomises shmups’ music as a genre.
After two months of botched tries, I can finally reach the behemoth plane at the end of Stage five. It takes me another three weeks or so to learn its attack, and then another week of practice to clear the final area before the end of the Stage. Clear! But then I discover that the bloody game starts again, and from Stage two, even. I keep playing the game for a while longer, and end up clearing the second loop. I subsequently move to other games, and do not play
Flying Shark until my MAME gap year in 2000. I spend a few weeks practicing the game until I can clear four, five loops and get bored after all those loops. I play the game as years pass: my 2012, 2014, 2018…selves like having the pioneering feeling of the game. As a foundation of “the maze”,
Flying Shark is unrivalled.
It is time to summarise, before I lose myself in vague statements.
Flying Shark is a (ro)TATE shmup pitting Rudo Shneider as the “Flying Shark”, a lonesome biplane fighter against hordes of enemies on a mission to rescue prisoners of war. The game offers modest but well-designed graphics, a great OST and an early approach to the genre that features complex, maze-like handling of enemy formations, fast bullets, and massive bosses. The game also offers a moderate but solid challenge for players who want to clear at least one loop, and ever-increasing challenges for players who pursue multiple-loop clears. The game represents a core chapter of the genre, together with other Toaplan games and has shaped entire generations of successors (e.g.
Raiden and its ilk, but also
Cave games). As a synchronous lesson of history and a great shmup, any proper shmup player should play it and enjoy it to its completion.
(2691 words, or 6.8 pages, times new roman, size 12, single space; the usual disclaimers apply; I only played the game sporadically, after that period; however, I have always had a version of
Last Fighter with me, be it on a mixtape, MP3 player or PC. I believe that a friend of mine once commented that
Last Fighter sounds like somebody played an “8-bit mellotron” while recording it, which sounds like a rather hilarious description of its signature sound. I also believe that this friend of mine once forced me to play this song and a few other “absolute resolve” themes while we were preparing for exams, during our BA days. We probably ended up playing this,
Red Thunder from
Surprise Attack and
Assault Theme from
Metal Slug until our ears were bleeding. The exams begged us for mercy, after all that hellish preparin’!)
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
