Little Things: Fire Shark

I admit it: I neglected Fire Shark for a long while. You can’t blame me that much. It seemed mundane when I sampled it during my trips through Sega Genesis shooters, and even the label for the North American version of Fire Shark is a boring black-and-white deal without illustrations, apparently due to someone’s desperate attempt to trim costs. So the game was easily overlooked amid the throng of M.U.S.H.A., Gaiares, the Thunder Forces, Phelios, Grind Stormer, Sol-Feace, Wings of Wor, Dangerous Seed, Forgotten Worlds, Arrow Flash, Hellfire, Vapor Trail, After Burner II, Zero Wing, Bio-Hazard Battle, Insector X, Gleylancer, Atomic Robo-Kid, Whip Rush, Burning Force, Steel Empire, Truxton, Panorama Cotton, Galaxy Force II, Eliminate Down, Sagaia, Curse, Elemental Master, Task Force Harrier, Air Diver, Air Buster, and, of course, my beloved Trouble Shooter series.

 

Sorry, Fire Shark, but you didn’t wink at me like Trouble Shooter did.   

I’ll still acknowledge that Fire Shark doesn’t look like much at first: you pilot an ordinary biplane into an oncoming force of tanks and aircraft, also of mediocre appearance. Yet things perk up very soon. Enemy fire constantly forces you to dodge and destroy as quick as you can, and the weapons gradually change from a routine spread shot to a twirling spiral green laser and a screen-filling octopus of a flamethrower. The opposition also gets more impressive, growing into more stylish assault vehicles and immense stage bosses. It’s a fantastic workhorse of a shooter. It’s not always pretty, but it’s constantly challenging you, leaving you wanting more at your inevitable defeat and even dropping small details for you to appreciate when you're not weaving through certain destruction. 

When it comes to those details, my favorite is the ground crew that awaits at the end of each stage. They’re tiny green figures that scamper across the curiously friendly airfield where your plane lands, somehow in the middle of hostile territory, and those mechanics are usually up to something. At the game’s start they’ll form an encouraging arrow for you. On another level one of them will try to fly a plane like yours, only to crash it and apparently survive. 

The best ground-crew routine appears at the end of stage four, when they’ll rush toward the landing strip and line up…except for one crew member, who trips over the barrier.

Whoops! Quick, get up and get in line before someone notices!

Uh-oh. Your boss noticed, and you’re getting chewed out.

But it’s okay, because now you’re back with the others…only you’re just a little out of step with the rest of the crew. That’s really a nice touch.   

Toaplan went on to make more complex shooters with more complex background details, perhaps reaching their apex with that gorgeous spread of ocean life in Batsugun’s first stage. I think that Fire Shark was the start of that. There’s a certain care to it that isn’t really apparent in earlier works like Tiger-Heli, and it set a lot of standards for shooters both inside Toaplan and out of it. For example, Seibu Kaihatsu's original Raiden has a lot in common with Fire Shark, from the round, bullet-spraying tank turrets to the overall intensity of it. So when people talk up Raiden, you can mention that it swiped a lot from Fire Shark. You’ll be the old-school shooter version of those people who won’t let anyone mention the Ramones without bringing up MC5 or the Dictators or the New York Dolls.  

There are several ways to enjoy Fire Shark, including a recent port of the original arcade game for the Toaplan Arcade Garage. Yet the Genesis version, which Toaplan themselves programmed, is hardly irrelevant, and I actually prefer it in many ways. The soundtrack has more impact there, and a special code lets you max out your weapons at any time. This fixes one of the game’s few general flaws: power-ups are a little too infrequent in the face of the opposition. So don’t feel guilty about pumping up that  fire cannon and filling the screen like some b-movie giant spider. 

So now I appreciate Fire Shark. I don’t like it quite as much as I do M.U.S.H.A or the Trouble Shooter titles (did I mention those?), but I think Fire Shark places in the top five shooters on the Sega Genesis. And on a system so full of them, that’s saying an awful lot.

Lunar Remastered: Hope Springs Eternal

Hey, the Lunar games are back! There’s a new collection with Lunar: the Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue! What should I say about them? How about a discussion of the common RPG cliches that the Lunar series polishes up and arguably perfects? Or the differences between the Sega CD games and the PlayStation remakes? Or the schism between Game Arts and Studio Alex that effectively derailed the series? Or those Working Designs localizations, controversial hodgepodges of dramatic dialogue, lavish musical numbers, and Baywatch jokes?

Wow. For something so straightforward in tone, the Lunar series sure carries a lot of baggage. The important thing to understand is that the first two Lunar games are cult favorites twice over. First on the Sega CD and then on the PlayStation, Lunar: The Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue were extraordinary treatments of ordinary RPG elements, coating the conventional and the lightweight with novel settings, memorable characters, neat battle systems, excellent music, and impressive anime cutscenes. In the late 1990s Lunar was the second biggest console RPG series in North America, right behind Final Fantasy, and that alone cemented the games as classics in many corners. Theirs is a long tale of rising and diminishing fortunes, of remakes and cancellations, of shifting tastes and resilient stories.

So I’ll just talk about a magazine ad for Lunar 2.

Even that gets complicated. You can’t discuss Lunar without discussing Working Designs, the North American publisher for the series in the 1990s. Forever playing fast-and-loose with the original Japanese scripts, Working Designs refashioned everything; dramatic dialogue generally retains the impact of the story, but more comical situations and casual conversations with villagers are filled with frequently crass humor and references to everything from milk commercials to The Matrix.

I often find myself defending Working Designs and its co-founder Victor Ireland. At the very least, I think it’s worth analyzing and taking in their localizations line by line. You’ll see some things that shouldn’t be there, usually jokes that aged poorly or that shouldn’t have been made in the first place, yet there’s an undeniable sense of respect for the games’ more serious moments, preserving the spirit and tone of the drama if not the literal meaning. And I can’t deny that the goofy lines from random civilians are often amusing. It’s a fascinating study, partly because the liberal rewrites of optional townsfolk dialogue have no equivalent in more linear forms of storytelling like prose and cinema, leaving comparisons to similarly rewritten anime or live-action dub scripts ringing hollow. And it also raises the question of how Working Designs succeeded in one goal of translation: making the audience forget that something was originally in a different language.

There’s nothing simple about Working Designs, and I hope someone one day writes a book about the company. They could call it Fantasy and Fart Jokes: The Working Designs Story. Yet if there’s one point on which I will brook no disagreement, it’s the polish that Working Designs put into their packaging and promotions. Their releases grew from nice foil manuals to gargantuan box sets, peaking with a free punching puppet for Lunar 2's PlayStation preorders. Their advertising was equally sharp, as it usually employed the original Japanese art when many publishers did their best to bury that sort of thing.

At last we come to the magazine ad for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue on the Sega CD, which might be my favorite magazine ad of all time. Yes, it’s vacuous of me to have a favorite piece of advertising in any sense, but hey, blame capitalism.

This Lunar 2 ad catches the eye with its first page: a stark depiction of heroine Lucia enrobed like a monolith against the blackness of space, a planet and a moon in shadow behind her. The game’s title appears nowhere, but in true Working Designs fashion, there’s a pun: “In the darkest hour, hope springs eternal.” And in true Working Designs fashion, it works. Running this spot alone would be a risky move, so let’s turn the page.

The spread that unfolds is a flurry of revelations; a movie reel of screenshots, a bizarre ship pointing its cannons skyward, a collage of the characters grinning and dancing and gawking and casting spells. The contrast works nicely, as the first page’s reserved negative space lets the inner spread explode out at the reader. There’s no real story summary, but the images tell just enough to entice and invite conjecture about dragons and temples and gloating, Harkonnen-esque wizards.

I cannot recall another advertisement, print or otherwise, that so completely floored me. Some of the impact came from the timing of it all. For me and a good chunk of young nerds, 1995 was still an era when anime was a new and innately compelling realm, when even the most generic sight of stylized blue hair or energy beams grabbed our attention. Lunar was there at the crossroads of RPGs and what mainstream media pieces still labeled “Japanese animation,” and with those sharp cutscenes and colorful Toshiyuki Kubooka designs, it had the best of both worlds. We could go from playing Lunar 2 to watching Cyber City Oedo 808 or Ranma ½ or Giant Robo (from which Kubooka possibly reused bits of Taiso’s design for Lunar 2’s Ronfar) and always would it seem novel. For most of us, that halo departed by the end of the decade, and we learned to take anime and anime-flavored games just as discerningly as we would anything else. Most of also learned to hold on to what mattered.

There’s undeniable nostalgia behind the Lunar Remastered Collection, which packages the PlayStation versions of the games with new voice acting and the majority of the original Working Designs script. As with that ad, however, the Lunar games hold up beyond those misplaced yearnings for more innocent ages of RPG filled with battles or VHS tapes filled with grainy fansubs. They’re still exceptional games. The Silver Star Story is perhaps a mere excellent treatment of a very typical premise, with an earnest hero and a timorous heroine and a colorful supporting cast. It’s charming and straightforward, a good introduction to old-fashioned RPG stories if you’ve never experienced them—and a good encapsulation if you have.

Eternal Blue goes deeper with its vision of an everyman protagonist meeting a mysterious woman, delivering more complex character arcs and insights. It surpasses the usual “What is…kiss?” cliches of an otherworldly character’s path to understanding humanity, and it’s probably my favorite treatment of that entire trope. In fact, I’d place Eternal Blue next to Final Fantasy VI and Earthbound as one of the best 16-bit RPGs—though I’d recommend the PlayStation version, either in its older form or through this new collection.

I would not, however, recommend paying absurd amounts for it. Lunar Remastered Collection is an Amazon exclusive and sold out rapidly, but publisher GungHo announced that they’ll print more copies. That’s another contentious point with the games: even old Sega CD and PlayStation versions, like all Working Designs releases, are expensive to come by. The Remastered Collection has new voice-overs, trims some offensive lines from the Working Designs localization, and lacks that cool Lords of Lunar mini-game. Yet they’re still the marvels that drew in so many of us decades ago. And they’ll do that again now if you let them.

Valis Analysis

The Valis series is far more interesting than it first appears. Yes, it’s a line of side-scrolling games with anime heroines and fantasy worlds and less-than-sensible armor, all of which is hardly unique in video games. Valis, however, was in at the ground floor of all that back in 1986, and as such there’s a lot to say about its influence and history. I tried to get into as much of that as I could in my review at Anime News Network.

 

 

One thing I briefly mentioned was Renovation’s advertising of the Valis games that appeared on the Sega Genesis. Now, there’s no question that Telenet created Valis with male players in mind: Yuko and her friend Reiko wander about in bikini armor, and the home-computer and PC Engine versions of the game sport the same gratuitous undressing scenes that anime OVAs of the era exploited. Yet when Valis III and a remake of the original Valis came to the Sega Genesis in North America, Renovation seemingly marketed them just as much to a female audience. In fact, I assumed Valis was a game for girls when I first saw it in GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly so long ago.

Evidence? Well, here’s the ad for Valis III, exhorting players to take on Yuko’s role and wield the sort of Valis. We might laugh at the costume, but we might also note that it’s far less revealing than Yuko’s in-game attire (though the screenshot doesn’t show it). There’s no battle brassiere, no bare midriff, no sights that might turn away concerned parents. Renovation wanted to pitch Valis to a wide range of customers. 

This went against just about everything the Sega Genesis stood for in North America. Sega had swiped away a big chunk of Nintendo’s market by peddling aggressive adverting that targeted teenage and pre-teen boys. Sometimes it was a commercial with groundhog puppets getting squashed by TVs and yelling “SEGA!” Sometimes it was a box illustration that no qualms about showing the heroines of Golden Axe or Alisia Dragoon in full pulp-fantasy metal swimsuits. You might even look at Renovation’s ad for El Viento, in which we’re told that the Mistress of the Wind "will blow your mind." Har har. They weren't going for that with Valis.

The Genesis version of the original Valis went further. The artwork renders Yuko’s outfit as nothing that would be barred from a Super Friends cartoon, and the accompanying writeup seems acutely targeted at girls: what would YOU do if your friend started dating a weird dude from another dimension? It again seems far from the usual pitches for Genesis games full of action and violence and yelling.

Perhaps that’s why I first assumed that Valis was aimed at the same audience as She-Ra, that Yuko was an avatar of feminist empowerment in a world of evil male oppressors. And the games, at least in Genesis form, don’t really dissuade that. There are no absurd sequences of Yuko getting dressed or her compatriots taking showers. It’s entirely possible that some young women latched onto Valis exactly as Renovation hoped. Like Trouble Shooter snatching up slogans like “The best man for the job is a woman” for its box copy and magazine ads, Renovation’s packaging of Valis struck an interesting turnabout in the brazenly male-focused marketing of the Genesis era.

Renovation’s Valis spots and Yuko’s altered costumes bring to mind another obscure case of companies marketing women warriors: Golden Girl and the Guardians of the Gemstones. This was Galoob’s attempt at replicating He-Man’s success in the mid-1980s, predating She-Ra by a year or so. Golden Girl faltered rapidly and didn’t last long enough for a TV series or a second wave of toys, and I suspect that the promotional art on the boxes (stolen from this auction) might have put off some parents and possibly kids as well. The toys were aimed at girls, but on the packages Golden Girl looks more like something a 23-year-old bassist would have painted on the side of his van circa 1985.

Galoob apparently missed an important memo for 1980s and 1990s advertising: if an outfit shows a woman’s navel, it’s no longer appropriate for children. Renovation apparently knew better. 

Did it work? I have no idea, but Renovation could take heart that such advertising was worth it if at least one girl with a Sega Genesis felt included by the Valis games or empowered by Yuko. It probably did them more good than playing Sword of Sodan.

Little Things: Pop Breaker

Pop Breaker could have very well ended up forgettable. It’s a puzzle-shooter for the Game Gear, putting together its stages with basic graphics and rigid design. Heck, even its name sounds like a bland, long-buried knockoff of Breakout or Arkanoid. Yet it went through the trouble of decorating itself in anime aesthetics of a certain style, and so it became, then and now, a cute encapsulation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That’s nowhere more apparent than in the game’s seemingly irrelevant intermission screen.

 

Yuki, the heroine of Pop Breaker, guides a tank named Diana (or “Daiana” as it appears in the game) through overhead stages of drones and turrets and other bullet-spewing hazards. Both tank and pilot are seemingly drawn from the pages of Masamune Shirow’s Dominion Tank Police, with Yuki resembling Leona quite a bit and Diana resembling Bonaparte only a little. The game adds some small strategy when you select just where to mount Diana’s cannon. It can be stuck in the middle or placed on either side, for that Bonaparte look, and it plays a big role in how you’ll face the game’s challenges.

It helps to consider Pop Breaker a puzzle game above all else. The tank scoots along gradually and fires slowly, and from the first stage it’s apparent that strategy is the only way forward. You’re even given the chance to look over an entire level before starting (and again by pausing), and this lets you figure out how to use the barriers and power-ups and bullet-bouncing mirrors to your advantage. The game doesn’t run all that smoothly and Diana is an uncommonly large target, taking up a good chunk of the screen and having armor so thin that just one shot sends it up in flames. Even so, that brings a certain satisfaction when you finish a level. 

Beating each stage also brings up an intermission screen, one that serves no apparent purpose other than to show Yuki chilling in the cockpit of the tank. No, the player’s score isn’t tabulated here; that happens on another screen. The intermission is just there to exhibit an impressive pixel portrait of a woman and her workplace.

Yet that adds something. In Pop Breaker’s scrap of storyline Yuki is piloting Diana through the rigorous tests for a special-forces police unit, and the intermission is a reminder that it’s all just a game, that Yuki’s taking it one stage at a time and allowing herself a cocksure moment with each small triumph. Games of this vintage often skip the details, especially when they’re cramming a lot into a handheld’s screen, but Pop Breaker wants to make sure it evokes the feel of Dominion Tank Police and the surrounding school of anime heroines and bulky vehicles. We can find plenty of games that combine those two elements today, but they’re rarely done in that casual, fluffy-haired 1980s style that so clearly influenced Pop Breaker.

Also appreciated is the game-over screen, where we see a green-haired coworker greeting a slightly embarrassed Yuki with a banner that reads "Game Over" in hiragana. You know, just to rub it in. There’s no smoldering wreckage of bitter defeat to be seen, since it's just an entrance exam. Maybe that’s why Diana is so fragile and enemy fire so damaging: this academy only accepts perfect scores. 

The game’s ending is also short and comforting. Yuki passes the course and gets her official uniform, now resembling Dominon’s Leona even more, and poses triumphantly before a Diana that now looks like a low-slung Metal Gear mech. Pop Breaker avoids any soberingly Pyrrhic twist or a DonPachi-level revelation that you were fighting and killing your fellow soldiers the whole time. Nope, none of that. It just shows another cheerful picture.

So I salute Pop Breaker, a sluggish but generally enjoyable action-puzzle game with just enough touches to evoke a charming and largely dormant style of anime and manga style. It’s a neat little find among Microcabin’s varied offerings, and it deserves to be remembered now that it’s forced to share search engine results with an identically named smartphone puzzle game. 

By the way, actual Pop Breaker cartridges are curious in that they only work on Japanese Game Gears—not by design like certain Mega Drive games, but because of a bug. That’s an obstacle for anyone who wants to play the game in its only officially released form, but Pop Breaker is all about facing obstacles and taking them in stride.