https://noahsbarks.com/video-games/battle-clash/

I recommend reading this review at my site, linked above, for proper formatting and images.

My background

Battle Clash is an action game for the SNES and one of the few developed solely for the Super Scope. The Super Scope was the SNES’s light gun peripheral and is similar to the Zapper on the NES, which was used for many classic games such as Duck Hunt. The Super Scope didn’t catch on nearly as much as the Zapper, and it has essentially been forgotten by time.

To be blunt, the Super Scope failed not only because it wasn’t released alongside the SNES like the Zapper was to the NES, but because it sucked. The Scope is modeled after a bazooka rather than a handgun, and this greatly affects its ergonomics. There is no longer a typical trigger to fire the gun like with the Zapper. Instead, the player had to press a button on top of the gun, which made holding the Scope incredibly awkward. There is, at least, a switch the player can use to toggle turbo fire. This is appreciated, but I don’t see why we can’t have turbo by simply holding down the fire button. The Super Scope also required six double AA batteries, which it would use up very quickly. This made the Super Scope quite a costly armament compared to the Zapper, which plugged into and received power from the console itself. This cost increases when you consider that the Zapper was bundled with the first run of NES consoles, yet the Super Scope had to be bought separately. What a nightmare!

Believe it or not, I actually owned a Super Scope—but I never even got to use it. My grandpa bought it, but I recall hearing from him that one of the parts was missing and he never got the Scope to work. Tragically, I think I accidentally had the part he was missing! It was a small controller port adapter that allowed the console to recognize the Scope. For years, I carried that adapter around with my various SNES and Genesis console components. I never knew what it was for, but kept it in case it someday turned out to be vital. I eventually put two-and-two together and realized it was most likely the missing Super Scope part my grandpa mentioned. I don’t know how it came into my possession. I would guess that either me or my mom was cleaning up my consoles after one of my countless visits to my grandparents’ home, and the adapter was lying around and simply got caught in the cleaning crossfire. I doubt I would have deliberately taken it, since I had no idea what it was for and therefore saw no value in it.

My grandpa never returned the Super Scope. I didn’t ask, and he’s long since passed on, but in hindsight I would assume this was because he owned it past the return deadline. My grandparents lived two hours away, so we typically only visited during holidays. That provides gaps of time where he could have bought and used the Super Scope, which could explain why he neglected to return what would have been a “defective” product. I assume this was prior to my first time seeing the Super Scope, which was when I may have accidentally taken the adapter. I hope that’s the case, because I’d like to believe he got to experience some of what he paid for. Sorry, grandpa. I was like, six years old. I was barely cognizant of my surroundings. I still am.

So, while some grandkids find live grenades in their grandparents’ storage, all I got was a crappy plastic bazooka. No, really: he let me keep the Super Scope. Now that it was just a hunk of plastic, he had no need for it. I would often play pretend with the Super Scope, shooting at imagined monsters and the like. Playing pretend even allowed me to imagine the Super Scope had an actual fucking trigger. Maybe things were better that way. I left the Super Scope behind at my childhood home when we moved out, so it went to a Goodwill or something similar. Since it wasn’t as inconvenient to carry around, I may have pointlessly kept the adapter. It might even be sitting in a drawer a few feet away from me. But I don’t wanna get up!

One of the things included with the Super Scope was a pack-in game, Super Scope 6. I don’t remember ever seeing that cartridge. I vaguely recall seeing the Super Scope’s box, so I would assume my grandpa had it, never showed it to me, then resold the game once he lost the adapter. From the sound of it, it’s a compilation of minigames instructing you on how to use the Super Scope. I imagine it was included due to the Zapper coming with Duck Hunt. There had to be some equivalent—especially if they were demanding you purchase the peripheral separately this time.

There was one other piece of Super Scope memorabilia from my childhood, though: Battle Clash. This mysterious game haunted my childhood. My grandpa either returned the game or resold it after losing the adapter, but we (I) kept the box and manual. I would frequently flip through that manual, which had official full-color artwork of every enemy pilot and their associated mecha. The designs were great, and I imagined the gameplay in my head thanks to the descriptions of each opponent’s strategy. To some extent, I even came up with some of my own background lore based on the character designs. All of this for a game I had never seen even one second of.

Before I move on from this story, I have to share an alternate memory that resurfaced while I was recalling my background with Battle Clash. I think what might have actually happened was that my grandparents had come to visit our home, and my grandpa brought the Super Scope and Battle Clash with the intention of us playing it. I think he may have bought the game while on the way over. Somehow, the adapter was separated from the other Super Scope things he brought over, so we were unable to play. In truth, I think it was misplaced while in my house, but before we attempted to play the game. He left, and then the adapter resurfaced in my home with me having no idea of what it was. I kept Battle Clash in its entirety while he took the Super Scope back to his place. Eventually, he resold or returned the cart without its packaging, and I would take the defunct Super Scope home with me after one of my visits. So the timeline was most likely:

My grandpa buys the Super Scope and Super Scope 6 came packaged with it. After some indeterminate amount of time, he comes to visit me with a copy of Battle Clash and the Super Scope itself. In whatever kerfuffle of things moving around, the adapter was misplaced and we were unable to use the Super Scope. My grandpa took the Super Scope back home, but forgot (?) to take Battle Clash. I somewhat recall having the cartridge for a short time. My grandpa, either of his own volition or by mentioning it to my mom, received the game he recently purchased and can’t play, Battle Clash, so that he could return or resell it. I still have the packaging and the adapter at my house. My mom would not have thought to gather the packaging, so this seems likely to me. I’m unsure of this memory being related, but I know at some point I visited a game resale store with my grandpa. He allowed me to pick out one game, and I chose Super Bomberman. If this was when he exchanged Battle Clash, I have to say that I came out ahead. While visiting him, my grandpa sees me playing around with the defunct Super Scope and allows me to keep it as a toy. The Yankees win the world series. Sorry for that long-winded story. It’s not even that interesting. But it helped to try and make sense of these ancient memories. Anyway, Battle Clash never left my mind. Many years later, it occurred to me that I could simply emulate the game and the Super Scope and see what I missed out on. A mouse is hardly comparable to having to actually use the Scope, but it’ll have to do. The alternative is setting up a CRT and buying out-of-production peripherals. Screw that. The mouse is more accurate, anyway.

The game Now, let’s talk about Battle Clash, known in Japan under the very blunt title of Space Bazooka. This game has a somewhat interesting pedigree. It was developed by Intelligent Systems (IS), known for their creation of and involvement with the Fire Emblem and Paper Mario series (among many others). IS organized a specific team to develop Super Scope games, the very bluntly titled Team Battle Clash. The team featured several members of Nintendo R&D1, the development studio responsible for the Zapper games Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley. It’s also produced by industry legend Gunpei Yokoi, the man responsible for basically everything other than what Shigeru Miyamoto created. Outside of the design of the Super Scope itself, everything needed to have Battle Clash succeed seemed to have been gathered.

In the game’s post-apocalyptic future setting, Earth is engulfed in chaos. To decide the ruler of this battered world, a competition with the very blunt title of the Battle Game is held periodically. Competitors seeking global rule battle it out by piloting large mechanical weapons called Standing Tanks (ST). A previous Battle Game decided the world’s current ruler, Anubis. In his brutal climb to the top, Anubis killed many ST pilots, including the father of our main character, Mike Anderson. Enraged, Mike participates in the upcoming Battle Game to avenge him. Battle Clash is very light on story, and you’re not getting much more than that explanation.

The most interesting part of the narrative might be how the player is incorporated. You do not control Mike Anderson, but rather his unnamed and mute partner. The conceit is that Mike controls the ST automatically, while you fight as the mech’s gunner. He moves and you shoot. Does that make the fights 2-on-1? Whatever. It’s up to you and Mike to defeat Anubis and restore order to the world. But first, they must defeat his subordinates, the Battle Chiefs, who are scattered across the world.

The game’s structure is essentially that of a fighting game. Each stage consists of a battle against a fixed opponent, and upon defeating them you move onto the next in line. Before and after each fight, there’s a bit of dull dialogue between the opposing pilots delivered with a hilariously bad translation (“the time to be defeating you is now!!”) You face the enemy in a first-person view, and the pilot who depletes the other’s HP gauge is the winner.

You have two main methods of attacking: rapid gun fire, which cannot damage your enemy and is used for shooting down their projectiles before they hit you; and charged laser blasts, which charge automatically while the player is not firing. While the laser blasts are the primary way you damage your opponent, they can also be used to deflect your opponent’s weaker shots all at once, or to intercept some of their stronger shots that can’t be stopped by your rapid fire.

While fighting, your opponent will sometimes fly off screen, in which case you have to move the Super Scope to the left or right to chase after them. Other than that, you cannot move during battle. Each enemy ST has their own way of fighting, as well as their own weak points that the player must find and fire at in order to efficiently win the battle. By clearing stages, the player can receive bonus items to help in upcoming battles. There’s a one-time use bomb, which hits everything onscreen and deals good damage to the enemy; plasma bombs, which are rarer and more powerful than normal bombs, but can only be used when your laser is charged; a special shield that protects you from fire for a limited time; and the V-System, which is basically your “super mode.” The V-System increases your speed and attack for a limited time in exchange for actively draining your health, providing a risk factor to using it.

Battle Clash‘s difficulty is very much on the easy side. There’s constant action due to you needing to shoot down your opponent’s incoming fire, but you can shoot so rapidly that you’re unlikely to miss any targets, thereby completely avoiding damage. The only tricky part of the game is when your enemy tries using a charge shot, as the only thing that can deflect it is one of your own charge shots. If you don’t charge it in time to intercept or fail to hit the projectile, you’ll take a significant chunk of damage.

The decision to have only charged shots damage your enemy is certainly an interesting one. I suspect they wanted to raise the skill level of the game by not allowing you to make progress simply by rapid firing randomly across the screen. This way, every charged shot you miss is more time for the enemy to wear your health down. You need to steady yourself and aim before firing, but there’s still a sense of urgency because you want to start charging your next shot as soon as possible for greater damage over time. The start-and-stop flow of the combat does affect the pacing of the action and add to the game’s sense of repetition, but I suspect things would be even duller without them routinely demanding different approaches from the player.

The opponents tend to change their attack pattern once half of their health is down, which is a great touch that makes battles more narratively dynamic, but the aforementioned advantages combined with infinite continues for what is already a short game make Battle Clash an extremely brief experience. It only took me about 15 minutes to beat the game (and that’s including the few minutes it took me to learn that only charged shots could hurt the enemy…)

Upon beating the painfully short main game, you are given a code to input on the title screen that unlocks a higher difficulty. I assume the game lacks any save functionality, and the use of passwords is just to save you from clearing the game again in future save sessions. Still, passwords are annoying, and they could have opted to have all difficulty modes unlocked from the start of the game. To me, it’s apparent that they structured the game like this to desperately extract more playtime.

It’s obvious that Battle Clash is designed to be an arcade-style experience that you return to and attempt to improve your personal records. That’s perfectly fine and appropriate—except for, if you recall, the fact it doesn’t fucking save. That’s kind of a cardinal sin in my book. The most important aspect of this game’s replayability is rendered moot, presumably because the publisher did not want to pay the increased cartridge production costs from having a save battery. Nintendo spared an expense, and the player paid for it. Considering the necessarily high cost of admission to even be able to play Battle Clash, I think this is kind of shitty, honestly.

Other than the main campaign, there’s Time Trial and 2 player modes. Both of these use the same interface. There’s an easy, normal, and hard mode the player can select for these modes (like they should have been able to do with the main game) and each difficulty mode has a small number of stages from the campaign the player(s) can fight on (why not all of them?) A strange decision is that the player’s time upon defeating each enemy is recorded during the campaign and displayed upon beating the game, so Time Trial mode may as well serve as a convoluted stage select. Yet, the game does have an actual stage select option via use of a code. Of course, it hardly matters, as your best times aren’t saved, either. For such a simplistic game, they sure found some novel ways to fumble with the UI.

On a more positive note, I do really like the industrial-esque soundtrack composed by Yuka Tsujiyoko (who worked on many other Intelligent Systems games like the aforementioned series.) It’s a perfect fit. The graphics are bright and colorful, and was a real treat to see the excellent official artwork brought to life in-game. However, I find the colors to be a bit too bright at times, which can cause the enemy and background to blend together somewhat. The background could have used a slightly darker palette, but I otherwise quite enjoy the visual style.

All in all, I was happy to have finally experienced Battle Clash (at least to the degree that I am able to.) It was a fun little ride, even if there’s many obvious ways to improve on or add depth to the game. I have a huge soft spot for Japanese mecha, so it was kind of inevitable that I would get something out of the game. I probably would have loved the game as a kid, but alas. I’m not sure if I would recommend the game to anyone not specifically interested in the Super Scope’s library, or to anyone who doesn’t share my affinity for its 90s “anime OVA” aesthetic. A sequel to Battle Clash was released a year later in 1993 with the very verbose title, Metal Combat: Falcon’s Revenge. Check out my review of that game too, if you’d like.