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Ikaruga
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GameCube - Treasure - Shooter - E - 2 Players
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| At the time of this writing I have spent 38 hours, 27 minutes, and 27 seconds with Ikaruga, and strangely enough I feel wholly unqualified to write this review. Ikaruga is Treasure's follow up to the highly acclaimed (and highly priced) Saturn game Radiant Silvergun. Originally released in Japan for the Arcade and SEGA Dreamcast, it finally comes state side via a GCN port, courtesy of our friends at Atari. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| You are Shinra. A few years ago Tenro Horai discovered Ubusunagami Okinokai - the power of the gods. Dubbing himself and his followers the "Divine Ones" Horai began to wage a war of genocide against other nations in the name of peace. However, a group of freedom fighters known as Tenkaku banded together to try and stop Horai's reign of terror. All of the Tenkaku's fighters were wiped out, save one. You crash into the small, isolated village known as Ikaruga, which is inhabited by a group of aged peoples sent into exile by Horai. You are pulled from the wreckage of your plane, and kept alive only by your desire for revenge. You are given command of the fighter plane Ikaruga, which the villagers built themselves, in order to wage one last battle against Horai. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Ikaruga fighter is the first plane integrated with the two energy polarities. Yin and Yang, good and evil, black and white, or whatever it is that you call them; you're capable of switching between the two. While your ship is black, you absorb black enemy fire. You also shoot black bullets yourself, and thus do double damage to white enemy fighters. The opposite holds true when you're ship is white. By absorbing enemy fire, you build up your "Energy Release Gauge For every 10 bullets you absorb, you are able to use one homing missile, firing a maximum of 12 at one time. Your primary means of attack is the genre standard issue Vulcan Cannon, capable of firing both single and double shots. I'll admit that you're artillery is pretty underwhelming, especially when compared to the games predecessor. However, Ikaruga is a different type of shooter, where succeeding doesn't necessarily depend on what you destroy, but rather on what you don't. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| In order to understand my above statement, you need to know about a little thing called Chaining. Chaining my friends, is what Ikaruga is ALL about. A chain simply consists of destroying 3 enemies of the same polarity in a row. For example, Black-Black-Black. Then you're free to start a 'new chain'. An example of a successful chain would be: *Black-Black-Black_White-White-White_White-White-White. However, doing something like this would break the chain: *Black-Black-Black_Black-Black-WHITE. After the first chain you complete, you receive a point bonus of 100. Your point bonus doubles for subsequent chains until you reach a total of 9. At this point you have achieved a "Max Chain" and each chain that you do after that rewards you with 25,600 points. Though it sounds a tad bit complicated, in practice it's quite simple. You kill enemies in groups of threes. And as luck would have it, the WHOLE GAME is laid out in such a way that allows you to do that. Simply put, playing Ikaruga without chaining is like trying to take a picture with the lens cap still on; you're just not doing it right. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| That said, Ikaruga is not for everyone. It's a niche game in an already niche genre. And if you go in expecting some good ol' mindless carnage, you're going to be disappointed. At times the game seems to have more in common with a puzzle game than something like Strikers 45. You see, the first few times you play a stage the game seems mesmerizing. The enemies/bullets move in hypnotic patterns, and the whole screen just seems like such a mess. However, by hanging in there (or checking out the conquest videos...), eventually you’ll form an understanding of what's going on, and you're able to see how to chain/survive a given section. In certain sections (4-2 springs to mind) you're not dodging bullets and destroying enemies as much as you're becoming one with the game’s patterns. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| But don't think it'll be easy. It's actually far from it. Ikaruga requires one thing above all; patience. To competently chain a chapter is to know it inside and out. Throughout each of the game’s five brilliantly designed levels (THE understatement of the year, I know) you're constantly confronted with new patterns and attack formations. I really don't think you ever see the same thing twice. And considering the fact that the game is a solid 30 minutes of that, there really is a lot of learning to be had here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| But the really amazing thing about Ikaruga is it’s astonishing depth. I'm serious, there never has been this kind of depth in a shooter before. After 40 hours I have barely scratched the surface. Though I can chain the first 3 chapters well enough, there's so much more that I could be doing. You never really 'learn' a chapter in Ikaruga, since there's always something you can improve. When you start the game, you'll barely be able to survive, let alone care about your score. Eventually you start hitting certain simple chains, and you steadily progress beyond that point. Though initially daunting, in the long run this added depth is not only extremely surprising, but extremely welcome as well. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Though not as boss heavy as some of Treasure’s past action games, there are still a fair share of monstrous, umm...monstrosities for you to take on and do battle with. Bosses range from the Giant Samurai and Yin Yang of Doom all the way to Large Snake Heads and massive Battle Ships. All of them are highly entertaining to fight and each and every single one of them use the dark/light system that the game is built on to its fullest extent. Hell, a fair share of them can even be chained! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The musical score in this game is nothing short of incredible. I hold it up there with the soundtracks of video game classics such as Castlevania, MegaMan 2, and Super Metroid. Since the game is automatically scrolling, that gives the composers the opportunity to match the music with what's going on screen. And they do just that. And even though the little story blurbs at the start of each chapter were nixed in the American version, the music tells Shinra's story better than words ever could. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Ikaruga is one of the nicest looking games I've ever had the privilege of playing, both artistically and technically speaking. It's amazing how much was accomplished considering not only the fact that the game was made essentially on Dreamcast hardware, but also because every single enemy in the game is based of off one of two primary colors! While the game looks nice enough in still shots, they really don't do the game justice. Watching a decent Ikaruga player run through the game is one of the most awe inspiring things you'll ever see in a videogame. The amount of care that went into designing each and every single section of the game is frightening. I shit you not. I'm frightened. One only needs to experience the start of Chapter 2 or any single part of Chapter 4 to know exactly what I'm talking about. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| After every major accomplishment you make in the game or (and more likely) every 5 hours you spend with it (up to 20), you unlock a new secret, including an Art Gallery (which is nothing short of amazing), a Sound Test, and an alternate Game Mode. I've spent a sufficient amount of time checking out each of these bonuses. Also available are a Practice Mode, and a mode called Conquest. Conquest mode breaks each level down into small pieces and lets you focus your attention on them by either playing the game at half speed or watching a recorded video of someone playing through that section. Let's not forget the fact that the game has 3 different difficulty levels. Instead of affecting something trivial like how many hits an enemy can take before it's defeated, the difficulty mode actually has a major effect on the way you chain. Each difficulty mode changes the conditions for which enemies fire at you when they're destroyed. This effectively forces you to form new strategies for each mode of play. Last, but not least, there is always the 2 player co-op mode. This mode allows for some interesting strategies as well, involving one player acting as a shield for the other and things like that. Though the game 'only' has five stages, the game virtually has infinite replay value. Let's not forget the extraordinarily high challenge either. After 40 hours, I still haven't beaten the game (To quote Eggo of GameFan magazine "Continues are but a crutch for the weak"...) and last time I checked I was ranked among the top 100 Ikaruga players world wide. Hell, I'm just starting to get a decent grasp on the first level! The amount of depth is simply amazing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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