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Gradius, as a series, is a bitter seductress. When you first engage it, it seems charming, quirky; inviting, even. In reality, it only exists to shoot you down. It's as cold, arbitrary, and unforgiving as videogames get. I'm convinced it doesn't really want me to play it. For my part, I abide where I can; I turn the game off when I lose my first life. Of all its permutations, the only one that has stuck with me through the years is the NES version of Life Force -- yet that game, I adore.
More than one of my favorite genre pieces, Life Force is one of my favorite overall games for the NES -- and probably one of the games I feel the greatest affection for, overall.
Now isn't that odd.
The formula differs only a little; Life Force remains a classic horizontal-style shooter (even in its vertical stages), and a pretty tough one. It relies on memorization as much as any shooter from the period. Unlike its earlier drafts in the arcade,[1] the final version retains the traditional Gradius-style upgrade system, where collecting power capsules moves a marker along a bar; the player can select what he wants when the marker hits the appropriate box. The weapons and upgrades are a slight variation on the standard fare. Most of the series mainstays are present, from intergalactic moai to erupting volcanoes to floor-and-ceiling planetscapes. Even the level structure is familiar: every round begins with several rows of enemies, flying from right to left, each row leaving a power capsule; the main stage follows, with its particular theme; at the end, a pattern-based boss.
The differences look subtle. The most obvious is a two-player cooperative mode. To facilitate this, players respawn at death instead of restarting from a checkpoint. The dead player's Options (also known as "Multiples": glowy-orange drone units that follow the player's ship, miming all its actions) remain on-screen, to be reclaimed by either player. The game's theme is more organic than usual. Its level environments demand more interaction than usual. And again, every other stage switches to a vertical orientation.
Of the changes, that last one sounds the most drastic: a complete change of perspective. In reality, it doesn't add or remove much. I barely remembered to list it, since the vertical levels feel fundamentally the same as the horizontal ones. I want to call it a gimmick. It's not; it's just a play for variety.
And Life Force sure is varied; that's one of the its greatest charms. The real key, though -- the thing which saves it from the Gradius trap -- is the respawning. For as mentally-draining a game as a shooter, there is something discouraging about checkpoints: not only do you die and lose all your power-ups; you're then punished for your stupidity by being thrown back and taken out of the moment. In any shooter, this is annoying. Knowing I screwed up should be curse enough, especially if doing so leaves me defenseless. Worse than that unfair feeling is the break in continuity. It pulls me out of the game, forcing me to spend a few moments to reorient -- both physically (where the hell am I now?) and mentally and emotionally: I have to get my vibe back. Re-establish communication with the game. That can be tough to do in any shooter. Gradius, though -- recovery becomes something else.
The reason lies in one of the two key features that distinguishes Gradius from other series: the power-up bar. Depending on the game, it takes about thirty capsules to max out the player's ship. Now, it's one thing to deal with this in the first level; each stage begins with maybe a dozen throwaway capsules, and at the beginning the game doesn't throw much at you. Gradius, however, is a series that thinks cheap deaths are funny. If I should die on a later level, I won't -- I simply won't -- recover. At the ship's default speed, with no Options, with no power-ups, I'm a sitting duck. There's no point in continuing. So, off the game goes.
Life Force, now -- it has flow. I die, I come back, I keep moving. Heck, I can even recover my Options -- both the second-most expensive items to earn, and perhaps the most important in any Gradius game. So I'm not even back in the hole as much as usual; all I have to do is speed up a little, fix my weapons, and maybe raise some new shields. That's all pretty easy.
What I have found interminably strange is how little Konami has seemed to learn from Life Force; all the later games returned to the template of the original Gradius -- for no apparent reason except familiarity. Sure, you'll see details from Life Force: enemies and weapons and level ideas. Gradius is a series built on inside jokes and reference -- to the extent that Konami's own spoof, Parodius, with its octopusses and penguins and giant can-can dancers, feels more like bitter satire than a straight send-up. Maybe it's just a lack of perspective. Square's just stuck Yasumi Matsuno on a mainstream Final Fantasy game, and it looks on its way to be the first relevant thing Square's done in a decade. Then look at what Retro's done with Metroid. Sometimes the best people to break a tradition are those it doesn't apply to.
So. About Gradius V.
How or why Treasure got this gig, I don't know. I do know they are responsible for the second game in the series that I really like. More than that, Gradius V feels like the answer to all that Gradius could have been yet never quite was. In effect, the series has been reborn. That's not hyperbole; it's just an observation. So what's the difference this time? What did Treasure do that Konami hasn't been doing? That's the thing; most of the answer is above. I've already laid it out. The trick is making sense of it all.
The first thing they did was make Gradius V a direct sequel to Life Force. This is, I'm sure, more a pragmatic than a sentimental decision; it's the most clearly progressive game in the series. It's also a kind of a side-story, so I suppose framing Gradius V as a follow-up frees Treasure from whatever baggage they feel like dumping.
So the respawning returns, as does the two-player co-op. This is dandy, and welcome. The game does provide a toggle in its setup menu, for those who happen to enjoy gluing their nostrils together, chewing on nails, and returning to checkpoints whenever they screw up. It's not the default, though. A lot of gratuitous weapons, enemies, and level concepts intrinsic to Gradius, are missing; even then, the game is still crammed wth as many in-jokes and references as Treasure could fit in there. (It's interesting to note that one of the only common complaints I've seen about the game -- aside from "Get that Ikaruga crap out of here!" -- regards the lack of moai. And what's Gradius without moai, I ask you?[2])
These are all good details. They fix the problems. They plug the holes. They're not what makes the game, though. What Treasure did is look hard at Gradius, the series, and find what makes it tick. Find the heart. Find the key. Not just the key to its problems; the key to its identity. You've not only got to eliminate the negative; you've got to accentuate the positive. So. Gradius V finds its focus in the most curious and distinctive feature of Gradius, as a series.
Remember the Options? I keep mentioning them. If you, reading this, have never played Gradius before, know that they are a puzzling phenomenon. If you know the series, and harbor even a little affection for it, you probably grin a little on the inside when I bring them up. If you have an Option or two, you always have a chance. If you don't, you're close to screwed. They're the second-most expensive items. And if you can hold onto them in Life Force, it's never that hard to recover. And to top it off, they're inexplicable. I mean, what the hell are they? I don't think it's all that bold to say that Options define Gradius much as how R-Type is defined by the R9's Force module.
If indeed we accept that Options are what makes Gradius tick (and let's do that, for this discussion), then why not build the game around them? Why hasn't Konami? Until now, Gradius has been preoccupied, more than anything, with generally looking and feeling like Gradius. The problem, as far as I can see, is that Konami doesn't really know what Gradius is about, so they just hold onto everything that might be a clue -- all of the weapons and enemies and systems and mechanisms that are associated with the series. Why are moai in every game? Because they've been in every game, duh. What do they do, when they appear? They... sit, and shoot bubbles.
...
And that's where the clutter comes from.
In contrast, consider the power-up bars in Gradius V: when you start a new game, you can select one of four schemes, each with its distinct upgrade path. This has been a standard for the series since Gradius II; one layout might give the player a ripple laser, while the next has a "toothpaste laser" instead. The double shot is replaced with a rear shot; there are different missiles and shields; you get the idea. What seems odd about the bars in Gradius V is how little variety there seems to be. They all have the same laser and the same style of shield. Speed-up, of course, is universal. The differences amongst the double shots and missiles aren't worth getting excited over. The only real distinction is in how the Options behave.
If Gradius V has a gimmick, there it is; holding R1 gives a degree of tactical control over one's Options. Depending on the scheme, you can either freeze the Options in place (relative to the ship), revolve them quickly around the ship, spread them out like fins, to the top and bottom of the ship, or -- and this is really the centerpiece -- rotate the Options to fire in any direction. What all this does is give the Options something definite to do other than follow you around -- therefore giving you something definite to do with them, therefore adding a new skill to ask of the you, therefore adding a layer of strategy and inner logic missing from the series until now, therefore giving the whole game a reason to be.
Suddenly everything makes sense. Of course you always want the same kind of weapons; if you, the player, are expected to think on your feet, the rules need some clarity and regularity. Likewise, from a design standpoint, Treasure wants the player at all times concerned with the logic of the gameworld -- about what she can do and how she can do it, given her present circumstances and past decisions -- rather than distracted by toys and choices that don't serve any real purpose.
I mean. It would be cute to shoot moai bubbles. But.
There are two sides to the issue: in order to allow the player the greatest liberty, you must set strict limitations. And to design a balanced game, you must expect not only the effect of the player's actions, but what choices a player might be liable to make. If all you have to worry about is some combination of lasers, a double shot, a choice of Options, and how one might use these tools, you know exactly what you want for level hazards and enemies. You can design a better game.
This is the quality which usually betrays a Treasure design: a simple, limited set of rules, extrapolated to a bizarre logical extreme, to demand that, should the player wish to succeed, she need learn and apply every fundamental aspect of those rules. The better she plays, the more alternative tests present themselves by virtue of her increased capacity for juggling those concepts -- or, if you prefer, her increased understanding of how the game thinks.
On a basic level, it's not hard to grasp a Treasure game -- and that's part of the point. Treasure's games love being videogames. They revel in the tradition they uphold. Yet in their postmodern way, they also realize how fundamentally silly that same tradition can be. When you know what a person expects and how he is likely to react (not all that big a task when it comes to videogames and the average gamer), teasing becomes hard to resist. When Treasure throws boss ship after boss ship down a narrow corridor at you, pressing you against the left side of the screen, just barely destroying each one before it rams into you, even as you scream in terror, you can hear their unsurpressed giggle. It's there, in the game data, and in your head when it plays you. You know they're fond of you, and of what they're doing -- but really, they ask, how can you approach this kind of thing with a straight face?
Judging by the scowl some people wear, I suppose it's pretty easy.
Anyway. In this case, Treasure's focus on strategy has another side effect.
As in Life Force, Options stick around to reclaim when you die. Normally, they will remain your one constant through the game. And if the game is to rely on them to the extent that Gradius V does, it should well be so. Still, things happen. We make mistakes. Sometimes you end up with nothing. Yet -- the game continues. It just gets trickier. Without big guns, the player is forced into a more resourceful, cautious mode. The first time I reached the level-four boss, I was fully powered-up; I lost a credit and a half, before destroying him. The second time, I had nothing -- yet I didn't get hit once. I just screamed a lot. As a friend of mine commented when I relayed the story to him, "That... didn't used to happen in the old games." No. It did not. Now, instead of the game being over when you die, the psychology just changes. You need to find a new strategy.
Gradius V, along with games like Outrun 2 and Metroid Prime (and just maybe a few seminal works like Symphony of the Night), is one a of a new breed of sequels. In the best cases, these new sequels surpass the originals in nearly every way. When I play Outrun 2, I'm not just playing Outrun. I'm playing the focused, concentrated essence of everything that is Outrun. And it's not because of the mechanics, or the design for its own sake. It's not because of the license. It's nothing that straightforward and logical.
It's that, rather than just repeating what's been said before, or attempting to force the original trappings to some alien template (as with all of the misdirected 3D attempts of the Playstation era), these sequels work to revive the feeling of the original by finding the soul of the series -- what it cares about; what makes it breathe; what makes it unique -- and filtering that core through all we have learned about design (and more importantly, the use of design) since the original game was made. By doing this, the games somehow come out the other end and feel more akin to Pac-Man or Asteroids than a contemporary project. They appear to escape time, and work on their own rules. It's the Katamari Damacy effect.
The difference is one of conception; it's the same principle that leads to all things healthy. Basically, find what you really care about; what intrigues you personally. What tickles you. What brings you joy. Then run with it. You don't have to know what you're doing, really; you will find your way. Everything will fall into place. Somehow.
If it doesn't, you're probably thinking too hard. That, or you're just in the wrong business.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
derives joy from the tears of a kitten
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