Space Harrier II — Day 2

I thought today would be the first day of my grind after I used yesterday’s session as an opportunity to get a quick overview of all the stages and bosses. I sat down with a pen and some scrap paper to take notes on how many times I died in any given stage and which sections were particular problem points. I’d even put a header at the top labeled “Attempt 1” because I expected to be getting a Game Over fairly early and having the time for multiple attempts in today’s session.

What I didn’t expect was, uhhhh…

??????????

…this. To straight-up beat the entire game on attempt numero uno. I guess what I didn’t account for is that the game is incredibly generous with its extra lives. By my estimates, you get an extra life every 1.5 million points. So basically, I ended up with more lives than what I started with.

Let’s go through each stage one by one and see how I did, though.

Stuna Area and Fors Yard (Stages 1 and 2): No deaths whatsoever, much to my surprise.

Yees Land (Stage 3): Died twice. Probably in stupid ways, from what I remember.

Zero Polis (Stage 4): Only one death. Which is a little surprising, given that this is where the game starts throwing Doms at you. They’re those armored enemies of which you can see one on the title screen of the original Space Harrier, and they tend to have some really wacky movement patterns that can end up with them ramming into you. All the towers didn’t make it any easier to get a clear shot on the enemies, either, who would often take cover behind them.

After every fourth stage you clear is a bonus stage where you hop on a flying saucer and have to shoot down as much stuff as possible while completely invincible. If you do well enough, you can really rack up on the extra lives here.

Copper Hill (Stage 5): One death. Nothing particularly noteworthy, except for the Ghost Armors (of which one can be seen on the box art), which have rather vexing movement patterns, too, albeit not quite as bad as the Doms.

Fallpyram (Stage 6): Two deaths. This is where the difficulty starts picking up a bit more. I may have complained about Doms and Ghost Armors, but Ghiddores (devil-like creatures with bat wings) trump them all. Their movement patterns might not be particularly erratic, but they always seem to be making a beeline towards where you’re trying to be.

Craddha (Stage 7): Another two deaths. How do you make Ghiddores worse? By pairing them with Syuras (floating rock faces). Some are stationary, but others try to ram into you. Either way, they’re hard to hit and a pain in the ass.

Monark (Stage 8): Only one death this time. The stage design was a little annoying here, with Tomoses (black orbs that can only be shot when they briefly open up) flying up in my face all while I had to dodge towers, which of course blocked half my shots, too. It wasn’t too pleasant.

I was also starting to get a little low on lives at that point in the game, so I was relieved to make it past stage 8 and into the second bonus stage. Same as the first, but boy did I need the extra lives.

Felcold (Stage 9): One death. I didn’t remember what it was to, but I remembered as soon as I looked at the screenshot in the manual: I was shooting down a row of enemies and ran right into a tower that I couldn’t see because said enemies and their explosions obscured it from view until it was too late. Good stuff.

Hope City (Stage 10): One death again, and the Doms came back. Not much else I can recall about it.

Hell Peak (Stage 11): Surprisingly, I hadn’t died once to the stage part, only once to the boss. Though much like in stage 8, I had some trouble with swarms of Tomoses hiding behind towers.

Hot Palace (Stage 12): This stage is mostly an obstacle course, throwing rows of towers at you that span the entire playing field, with a single gap for you to squeeze through. My one death this stage was from the gap in one row being too far away from the gap in the next for me to get there in time. There’s also Ghiddores trying to ruin your day, of course, but I found that vertical streaming does the trick for them just fine.

Get through all 12 stages and you reach stage 13, which is a boss rush.

Trimuller: Flying three-headed turtle. Shoot down each of its heads when they pop out and you win.

Paranoia: Weird cloaked monster thing surrounded by orbs. Shoot down all the orbs to make it just sit there and… do nothing. It probably does something if you let it be for long enough, but mash the fire button fast enough and it won’t even get the chance.

Brizard: A dragon that looks like it’s made of blue flames and acts like Squilla from the original Space Harrier on steroids. It goes down much the same way, i.e. shoot its face when it gets close, stream its bullets when it distances itself.

Neo Dom: A cluster of Doms that fire at you ceaselessly. Pretty much the only strategy is to fly in a circle and shooting at them until they all die or disperse.

Mantichora: I kinda like this one. It’s like a huge sabertoothed cat with wings and actually has two different phases. Phase one is pretty basic aside from the fact that its body is invulnerable and you have to shoot its wings instead. Once those blow up, it runs back and forth across the screen a few times before charging at you. Unload as many shots into it as you dare and then get out of the way.

Wizard: Splits into three. The real one is the body that shoots bullets at you. Made more complicated by the fact that aiming is kinda difficult, but I’m pretty sure it goes down in only 1-2 clean shots.

Medusa: Another Squilla-esque enemy, although with a slight twist. She alternates between moving far into the distance and shooting slow bullets that you might run into if you stream too tightly, and not moving as far away but shooting lightning-fast bullets. Same rules apply otherwise, though.

Neo Tomos: Basically like the Neo Dom from earlier. Not much else can be said.

Cragon: Giant jellyfish that shoots not bullets at you, but smaller jellyfish that you can actually destroy. Shoot down enough of those and it becomes a sitting duck, like Paranoia from earlier.

Bins Been: Basically an oversized d20, but also the trickiest boss of them all, if you ask me. It starts by moving right into the front of the screen into one of the corners, then moving to another one. You have to be at the very top or the bottom or you will die. After it did that a few times, it backs up and tries doing something else, but by then you’ll have popped a cap in its fragile ass (it goes down in no more than two shots).

Love Face: Starts by chanting before splitting into four pieces. Move into one of the corners and you’re safe. Once it reforms, it moves into the distance, shoots some bullets at you, comes back and repeats the cycle. Not too difficult.

Cthugha: It’s Brizard but red and even faster. A little underwhelming for a Lovecraftian god, perhaps?

I got through the entire boss rush so far without a single death. In fact, aside from Bins Been, I didn’t even die to any of those bosses when they first showed up in the preceding 12 stages. I wasn’t kidding when I said the bosses are easier.

???: One last boss, who I’m not gonna spoil because it’s not mentioned anywhere in the manual and meant to be a surprise. This was my first time encountering it, but even so, my usual strategy of “fly in circles/figure-eights while spamming fire” held true and I was able to defeat it with zero deaths.

Much to my surprise, the game’s ending felt very fleshed-out and rewarding, too. I remember how disappointed I was with the barely-even-an-ending of the Game Gear Space Harrier, so having an actual epilogue was rather unexpected. I know this sounds like I’m damning the game with faint praise, but the ending is genuinely really good, and it helped that I was able to go this long without spoiling myself on it.

At any rate, if you’ve been keeping score, that’s 13 deaths total. Pretty damning number, but you also start with 5 lives and I got 14 extra lives from scoring. So as surprising as it is that I got my 1cc as quickly as I did, I’m glad I was able to revisit the game and finally finish my business with it.

Just left with one problem now…

I have no idea which game to play and journal next!

Oh wait, you’re supposed to enter your initials? Well, uhh… Greetings, my name is Matthew Allan Upton. (No, it’s not.)

Space Harrier II — Day 1

Apologies for the dusty-looking console. I didn’t realize how badly it needed a wipedown until after I took that photo.

Anyway, say hello to my Sega Mega Drive. This console had been in my family’s possession since before I was even born, and I’d gone over a decade worrying that I’d broken it by pulling cartridges out of it while it was still on… at least that’s what my dad told me. It wasn’t until after I’d turned 14 that I did some testing and found out that — after removing the dust from the contacts of the cartridges — it was still perfectly fine and it was just the RF cable that wasn’t working quite right anymore. It’s been in my ownership ever since.

Not that we had a whole lot of games for it, either: literally just Sonic The Hedgehog, The Revenge of Shinobi (which I used to be scared shitless of for most of my childhood), and Mega Games I, which is itself a compilation of Super Hang-On, World Cup Italia ’90, and Columns. So I’d ended up buying quite a few additional games for the system over the past almost-12 years, including Space Harrier II, which is the one I decided to revisit for today.

Probably the most interesting fact about it is that it was one of the two launch titles for the Mega Drive in Japan, but it actually looks and sounds really good for how early it came out. What little there is in the way of digitized samples is clear and crisp, although the music itself pales in comparison to the original Space Harrier‘s iconic and nostalgic soundtrack. Still, I’d never gotten anywhere close to beating it before, so I thought I’d take the occasion to grind it out a little, see if I can manage it.

Not in 5 minutes, not after dinner. NOW.

The game has 12 stages. You can start from any stage you want, but you still have to do all of them in one go, so even if you start from stage 12 and clear it, you’ll just go straight to stage 1 and then continue from there until stage 11.

There’s also no continues. I didn’t think I’d be able to get through the whole game on my first attempt, anyway, but the lack of continues still stung a little. For this session, I decided to just try to get through each stage at least once, restarting from the last stage I reached whenever I got a Game Over.

If you have never played or even seen a single Space Harrier game before, here’s a quick crash course on what it’s all about:

Man In Latex Suit Runs/Flies Over Infinite Chess Board And Shoots Everything: The Game

It’s a rail shooter where you can move up and down and side to side while shooting into the background. Enemies and obstacles appear in the distance and come towards you, may shoot bullets, and if they hit you or ram into you, you go like “Aaaaaaaugh!” and lose a life.

Personally, I find the bosses overall easier than the stages, mostly due to the lack of indestructible obstacles you have to weave through, but also because the strategy for them usually just boils down to “fly in a circle along the screen edges to stream the bullets and never stop mashing the shot button”, though admittedly some bosses do need a little more finesse than that, and some bosses shoot insanely fast bullets, making streaming a “do it perfectly or you’ll die” kinda affair.

The stages themselves can get really nasty, though. Most of the aforementioned indestructible obstacles are towers, and the game loves lining them up in walls with only a single tight gap to fit through, made even more difficult by the fact that you’ve got enemies and bullets to worry about running into. The perspective doesn’t make aiming and dodging any easier, either, and it seems like often it’s safer to just stick to one plane, namely the floor. Trying to hit any airborne targets is usually a crapshoot.

That said, for my first attempt and the fact that I hadn’t touched the game in I-don’t-even-know-how-long, I’d say I did surprisingly well. There are 12 stages, and it only took me seven attempts to clear each one once. There wasn’t a single stage I had to restart from twice, either. We’ll see how I progress going forward.