Final Soldier (1991)

Well, I admittedly haven't really played the series that this is based on. It looks a bit like an enhanced version of Super Star Soldier. Nice! Audio Visual is good, colorful bright, bullets are overall easy to spot (except in a few areas, which are levels with video effects designed to deliberately make it more difficult) Weapons in this are great, I enjoyed them all. Upgrade a weapon by collecting a second version of the weapon, or collecting "V" containers. M upgrades your auxiliary missiles (so grab that too). Collect a satellite option and let it shoot homing missiles and forward gunfire, or launch it to use it as a bomb! I honestly liked this mechanic and thought it worked really well for the game because: the game isnt that hard, so its not a do or die decision to burn an option. FS plays at a decent diffculty, reasonable speed, features responsive controls, and satisfying shooting action among almost all the weapon systems

The game features 2 minute and 5 minute caravan bonus scoring modes which are LOTS of fun. You also get a full campaign, whats not to like?

Very competent, decent design, (even though it doesn't really do anything new) I give this five stars due to reasonable difficulty and the integrated caravan modes. It's perfect. Definitely one of the finer SHMUPS i've come across.

(Also, there is also a caravan only version of this game called Caravan Special or Specail Version, but since all it is is the caravan mode itself, its kind of pointless)

Definitely eager to see more of this series!

Platform: Turbografx-16

Final (like the title says) part of the successful Star Soldier series on the system.

Again this is some solid shooting action. Some of the more experimental changes from the previous game in the powerup system were toned down again, you can still sacrifice the pods that follow your ship around for a powerful screen clearing attack, but it's always the same explosion, no matter which weapon you choose. The presentation is exactly as you remember it from other games in the series, so everything is consistent here, good palette choices too. Also it plays well like the others.

However compared with its predecessors it falls short for several reasons. For one the arsenal feels a little less inspired than in the other games, with less versatility. The bosses are a bit simpler, with the last boss being particularly underwhelming, and being mostly annoying because it has so many hitpoints. Also this game unlike its predecessors has some really noticable slowdowns on some bosses. It's not game breaking, but surprising because the other games had as much if not more action on screen and ran smoothly at all times.

All in all this is the weakest 16bit game in the series. That doesn't mean it's bad, the series just had the bar set so high that it was difficult to reach, and this game didn't seem to even try to surpass it's prequels. It's just another game in the series, and easily forgettable for that reason, but it's still a very competent and enjoyable shmup.