Metal Black's surrealist imagery, bleak and lonely atmosphere, as well as its eclectic soundtrack from Yasuhisa Watanabe, unleashed a newfound appreciation for the shoot 'em up genre and developer Taito. There's nothing quite like Taito's shoot 'em ups and this isn't even the one I'd consider their best. It's honestly one of those games that continues to stay in the back of my mind and I get this constant urge that I should write an essay on what it manages to convey. Video games don't have to be filled with hour long cutscenes or be dialogue-heavy to provoke that level of thought.

I noticed this game got a release on Arcade Archives and while I can't buy it at the moment, went to go try it on MAME and it was a fun time. This is a shmup made by Taito and it's one of their better games to play in the Arcades.

This game has this mechanic where you grab these atom like things that power up your weapon but they also power up a special move. Using this special move can drain the existing power you have but it's good to use on bosses or if you're in a pinch. Just keep in mind you're not invincible doing it.

I really like how the bosses also have this mechanic and you have to stop them from grabbing the power ups as well. The game overall has this cool vibe with the aesthetic and bosses that just really gravitates me into the journey.

If there is one issue I have with the game is it's just too hard for me. You thankfully don't have to restart at checkpoints if you die but I do wish I wasn't so awful at it. There were times I wasn't even sure how to avoid things.

Metal Black is a game worth playing if you ever get the chance. It's got a good atmosphere and gameplay that'll keep you going. Even the music is really good. It even has a weird wtf kind of ending that I still am not even sure what I did. It's very weird, I love weird.

in some ways a victim to arcade shooter culture at the time, housing a handful of frustrating segments where it feels like the devs just haphazardly threw in a million enemies and said “yeah, that’ll get us a few more quarters.” normally i’m not one to say “just slap some screenclear bombs into it” but this is a case where i feel they could’ve helped the gameflow. spawning in after death in the later levels is like being fed to the crocodiles, some bombs def could’ve assisted in giving the player a way to gain their bearings.
despite this, i’d be lying if i said this ruined the game. normally i wouldn’t be so lenient but goddamn man aesthetically and tonally this shit owns. couldn’t help but get pumped up smiling my ass off when transitioning into the black spacey abyss of stage 2 as the stage’s title ‘CRY FOR THE MOON’ slides into view and the most unhinged otherworldly tune fades into the scene. the highs really do outway the lows in this one, frequently thinking “this is so raw” in my head, specifically when you get your super mega laser™ charged all the way up and shoot that shit out to blast everything on screen to pieces. my only gripe with it though is that it’s your only method of attack outside of regular shooting and it gets completely depleted when you die. at least it led to greater things (dariusburst uses a similar gimmick to a more convenient affect).
the profundity of the imagery and mechanical creativity in each stage is truly a sight to behold, heavily entice anyone who’s even just a bit into shmups to try the game out simply for this aspect alone. at least listen to the soundtrack if you don’t plan on playing it. from a gameplay standpoint i don’t think i’ll ever be revisiting metal black anytime soon, but sometimes style over substance can work in this genre. have to respect this on behalf of it being made in a few months with a dev team of only a handful of people.

A weird fucked up concept album of a shmup. After escaping a decaying Earth, you drift through space, confronted by twisted hallucinations of apocalypse and war, finally culminating in a battle against a deformed, almost phallic alien that sensory assaults you with surreal imagery of peace, evolution, mankind and tragedy. The alien falls, and Earth splits in two. Even space can't drown out the anguish of humanity.

It's a one-of-a-kind game that would later pave the way for the mechanics and aesthetic trimmings that defined Darius Gaiden and G-Darius, some of the best horizontal shooters to date. Though in saying that, it's a hard recommendation as a score/no-miss game because of how rough it is - especially when you have its successors as a frame of reference. If anything, it's more like a console shmup, in how its emphasis is less on the gameplay loop and more on how its mechanics serve its greater universe and themes.

It also would've been served better if it was kept as a Darius game post-development instead of becoming its own thing, because there are dozens of situations where the game wants you to use drop bombs to hit enemies coming in at diagonals, but you just don't have any bombs. And what the fuck is up with those bonus stages? But the game's imagery and setting are so striking, that alone more than makes up for the janky game design.

Cry for the moon...

Entering the infinite void of what's beyond the thermosphere of our planet, we gaze upon her majesty. That moment we take in the supposed sanctuary of our mother goddess is where our unknowable enemy launches their sneaky surprise attack at the start of the round, we don't even notice there's two moons until it's too late. The imposter of our beautiful rock in the sky slowly approaches from the background as warning sirens blare through your speakers. I hope you're prepared fellow pilot, because it's only downhill from here when it comes to questioning what lies in front of your eyes.

The mechanics of your ship are shoddy and experimental at best, just as rough and rugged as the scenery you'll be digesting in your next trip through your shmup smorgasbord. The unknowable enemy will not make things easy with their positioning and method of approach, and your ship may be ill-equipped to deal with their lunacy and onslaught of Space Mambos. Persevere through it all and your Black Fly getting inevitably crushed and sandwiched between the ceiling and floor by a funny rascal, and you may just find yourself in a fight against a phantom phallus utilizing your own kind's history and imagery of what may be your childhood pet cat to drag you deeper into it's method of madness.

Once all is said and done, you will be led to wonder, were you dreaming or was it reality? Perhaps it's time to wake up...you were born to be free....

Wake up.

I was feeling quite sleepy, and fell comfortably into infinite crediting my way through an old shoot 'em up. Gameplay's fine. Picking up atomic pellets to charge up your big laser is fun, and there's a nice risk/reward dynamic in how long you hold out to use your biggest attack. The levels occasionally introduced interesting new ideas, and the bosses are dynamic enough to be fun, though they often drag on for too long.

The real hook here is in the presentation and artistry. Metal Black's a stunning showcase for Taito's artists, and it's a great example to point to when someone asks why developers got so excited about parallax scrolling in the early 90s. Gorgeous, surreal, and frequently fucked up. The giant space dung beetle who rolls a spinning turret ball up a hill was a big highlight. A deep exploration of the threat of the unknown, and the incomprehensible things that could be lurking in the depths of outer space.

Play it, or watch a playthrough. Whatever. Probably not on YouTube, though. The compression's bound to be brutal.

The companion piece to Darius Gaiden, although it's not quite up to that level in terms of actual gameplay - the lack of a proper bomb or any way of shooting behind you without using your charged beam really hurts in a game that throws this much shit at you. It's extremely satisfying to push back a boss' beam with your own, though!
Presentation is where the game really shines, and where the similarities with DG are most apparent. A haunting, almost lonely atmosphere pervades as you float past some nifty parallax scrolling trickery to run up against all manner of weird animal simulacra bosses (special shoutout to the dung beetle, we will never see its like again). Not sure I've played many other shooters where passing a damage threshold on the final boss throws up an image from human history in the background. It's cool!
Also happy to report that this became another example of me hearing a track in-game and going "Oh, this was in Taiko" (last happened with Rastan III). Maybe not a shooter I'd be in a hurry to revisit, but one I appreciate!

Com várias arestas que ficaram para aparar, mas ainda radical pra caramba. Um estilo visual que é uma mistura perfeita entre psicodelia e scifi, uma narrativa críptica e que não faz o menor sentido (e a torna ainda mais interessante por isso), uma soundtrack fenomenal e chefes bem criativos. Com tanta coisa boa dá para relevar a curva de dificuldade esquisistranha e os níveis com umas armadilhas injustas.

Uma das coisas que mais gostei foi do sistema de armas. Em vez de uma pletora de upgrades, você tem apenas o seu tiro básico que pode chegar até o nível 5 - algo fácil, dado o quão o game é generoso em te dar powerups. A ideia é que quando você carrega o tiro ao máximo, você pode soltar toda energia acumulada num laser gigante que vai destruir tudo no caminho, mas fazer sua arma voltar ao nível 1. Além disso dar um ritmo bacana ao game, o sistema é muito bem usado nas lutas contra os chefões, sendo possível até, de forma completamente orgânica, dar uma de Goku vs Cell em cabo de guerra com kamehamehas. É lindo.

Part 2 of a series reviewing Takatsuna Senba's games at Taito.

In Senba's retrospective on Metal Black and Dino Rex's development, he's especially cruel talking about Rex. He goes as far to call it Kusoge - which frankly, it kinda is. But whilst his tone surrounding it's twin game, Metal Black, is less harsh, it's still tinged with a strong sense of dissapointment, lamenting a troubled development and failing to live up to Gun Frontier.

And at first thought, it's kinda hard to get. Metal Black is probably the game of which he and the team is most known for and definetly it's most influential. And when you come from it from Dino Rex and the experience of getting beaten up by a fat purple sauropod's janky disjoints, the opening of metal black in particular is just such a drastic leap in quality it's kinda hard to see how it's creator couldn't be proud of it.

Metal Black's first stage, like many of Taito's games in the 90s, is an absolute treat. It's depiction of a dead earth, with the sun hanging low behind a dozen parralax layers, a giant hermit crab using an aircraft carrier as it's shell, and an eldritch abomination at the end of it - it's still beautiful. And all along Born to be free, one of ZUNTATA's best ever tracks, plays. It's a wonderful, somber start to the game that hints towards the surreal voyage that Metal Black takes off towards for the rest of it's runtime.

After taking off from the dead earth, you go on to face moons which are eggs for aliens, bizzare dream landscapes, some truly bonkers alien designs, kaleidoscopic backgrounds, and eventually images of human war and digitized cats in the background of the final boss. When you combine this with Senba's styling - thick outlines on sprites, use of digitized sprites, deep backgrounds with heavy use of pseudo 3d sprite scaling - Metal Black really resembles little else, and is often absolutely gorgeous to look at. Taito's own Darius series - of which Metal Black was originally intended to be an entry before being deemed "too dark" - is about as close as you're going to get, but it's really not very close. MB's aesthetic is way less refined than something like darius gaiden, and has a lot of rough edges like it's weird UI and a lot of asset reuse, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

Special mention also has to go to the soundtrack by YasuhIsa Watanabe, also known as YACK. According to Senba, he told an unnamed member of Taito's sound team he didn't think they would be able to fullfill the vision he wanted whilst during development of Gun Frontier (which was done by a non-taito composer) - with the aim of "Lighting a fire under them" for Metal Black. It seemed to do the job.

Metal Black's soundtrack is absolutely incredible - it's probably YACK's best work and really hammers in the dark, somber edge to Metal Black. It also is fantastically timed to be in cue with events in stages and boss events, and despite the darker, slower nature of the music compared to say, Darius - still carries an intensity when it needs to.

So, this all sounds amazing. And MB sometimes is. Stages 1, 2 and 6 in particular are brilliant audiovisual feasts. But the problem is that MB is kinda not a good shmup, and to an extent fails to bring together all it's incredible visuals and effects into the great whole it could be.

MB's gameplay is just not great. The beam system it uses, where firing your super laser diminshes normal shot power, is actually pretty interesting and future games it inspired have done similar things well, but the game notably only has a forward directional attack in a game which has loads of enemies coming from behind. Without warning. Yeah.

The level design in general is just generally uninteresting and full of pretty cheap enemies and ways to die. There's also just too many of them. MB's about 40 minutes long, with 6 stages, which could have worked, but around stage 3-5 the game sort of levels out on how far it's surreal visuals and stuff goes until the finale turns it to 11, and the game lulls a lot in this period. Stage 5 could probably have been cut outright for my money, and none of them in this period offer anything particularly interesting gameplay wise. This section really hurts the feel of MB, where it really just feels like it's spinning it's wheels.

Also, the less said about the bonus stages the better. They kill the pacing and just kinda suck.

So I get why Senba isn't happy with this game somewhat. The gameplay sadly brings down the experience quite a bit and it plays a lot worse than Senba's earlier work, Gun Frontier. It's a messier experience and compared to Taito's other vibe-powered shmups - Gun Frontier, Darius Gaiden, Rayforce - stages dont flow into each other well, and it's hard to put a finger on what the story of the game even is.

Nontheless, I hope he becomes proud of it eventually. This fucking mess of a STG, made by 4-6 people over a 6 month period whilst juggling another game and Taito's management being dicks, remains rad as hell and a massive influence to STG developers 30 years later. Taito's darius series in particular took massive influence from it, and refined elements of it's bonkers imagery into more focused, polished experiences in Gaiden and G. Ex-Taito staff later formed G.Rev and did years of contract work to be able to fund a spiritual successor - Border Down.

I do think Gun Frontier is the better game of Senba's, and if the aim of Metal Black was to exceed it, I don't think it does. And whilst it's attract mode labels it as "Project Gun Frontier 2", it's really something very different - and something that's influence in the genre and beyond will always linger.