Beat on Hard with 0% damage to Corneria, 168 time, 3 stars (whatever that means), all targets destroyed, 12 missiles destroyed, and 35 explosions (not sure what this means). Most text was in Japanese so I could not understand a lot of the game. I played as the cat. Based on the icons I guessed it was fast with low health and shields. No idea how speed factors into the game. I chose Fox as my partner, but I regret that because of him constantly saying "what up?". What's up Fox is that I am working hard killing stuff and I don't see you doing anything other than complain. Should have chose the dog girl since that would probably be the least annoying voice. I wonder if I missed a mechanic to switch who you play as, because that would have been useful. I started off by clearing the initial wave of attackers, then going deep into enemy territory to attack the pink planet along the bottom. I reasoned that the planets were probably missile bases and I should destroy the source to prevent being overwhelmed in the future. I spent way too long on that planet figuring out what to do and how to use the Walker form. I also took a lot of damage there and dogfighting the first boss, to the point where I came out with only 1 shield bubble. Corneria was under siege pretty badly by then and I tried to limp back to base to heal, but the pig boss was not having that. Took some save state scumming but I managed to beat him without dying. Took about half of his hp from a sweet point blank charged up shot. After that it was simple to beat the rest of the game; I took out the battleships, then the other 2 planets, then the reserve forces, then on to the final stage. I did much better and never had my shields get low again. I found the Walker to be much better than flying because of more powerful shots and circle strafing. Every boss that could be fought on ground I easily wrecked to the point that they did not seem calibrated to deal with that extra firepower. Later I got twin shot to make the flyer shots just as good, but strafing from the ground was still better the flying around.

I liked the battleship fights the most; approaching while avoiding fire and shooting down fighters. I would have preferred to have to make multiple strafing runs on the capital ship to destroy its weapons and key systems, rather than just going straight inside. It makes no sense to have a big ship that a smaller ship can simply fly inside and destroy. The boss dogfights were pretty good, but the rest of the game had too few enemies. The planets were not nearly action packed enough, and dealing with each little missile, probe or few fighters was a little repetitive. At least there was not as much dodging random shapes. The concept of the game was very cool; mixing flight combat with a bit of real time tactics/strategy. It would have been much better with a larger scope where all of the characters were in play at the same time, fending off much larger forces. Choose how to direct each pair, and maybe even switch who is controlled. Pull off complicated strategy like holding a line while 1 squad flanks, a diversion to lure enemies away from a target you want to hit, etc. The biggest problem with the game was performance. I was getting around 15 frames per second; the play was painfully slow. I can definitely see why the game was not released back in the day. The sluggishness made aiming jittery, controls sometimes unresponsive, and it was difficult to tell what was going on. I am not sure if I could stand playing again on Expert.

6.5/10 but I would gladly bump that up to 7 or almost 8 if the game ran at a decent framerate