Horizontal shooter. SNES version removes some opening scenes from the original X68000 version but offers a more enjoyable game by allowing you to cycle between weapons and movement speed, also has a different soundtrack which is just ok. Gives you a health bar and weapon powerups will also add to your health. Some backgrounds and good mechanics that allow different weapon types, missiles, and sacrificing weapons as different types of bombs can be strong options at different times but it can take a long time to see a particular kind of weapon drop again and some of their bomb features are very lacking compared to others. Dull enemy and boss design with little animation to them, overly long, and full of fairly repetitive sections where the same patterns of enemies can keep coming at you two or three times more than is normal for the genre. Apart from stage five which has you destroying a ship where the screen only scrolls based on your movement and you can blow up parts of it and its guns to enter little passages to get to three openings that lead you to mini boss fights, it's a fairly generic shooter (and apart from the US box art that they chose just to confuse people into having to look at a generic shooter).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1676111806455255040

Quite alright shmup, but pretty bog standard. Slows down a lot, as SNES shmups tend to do, although sometimes it helps mitigate the difficulty in others while here it kind of just exists. I do quite like how it looks, especially in the first and last two stages. It's nothing spectacular, but I'd recommend it for an easier shmup.

There is no banjo player in the game. I remember being recommended this once a long time ago and was very confused by the cover. It's pretty much entirely unrelated and exists for marketing purposes.

Update 02/11/24: Grew on me upon replaying, love the presentation in particular. The reddish-brown enemy bullets throughout the game are kinda hard to get used to at first, but I found myself accustomed to it eventually. I dunno, I had quite a good time.

Phalanx is a perfectly average SNES shoot-em-up, so utterly unremarkable and lacking in personal identity that they famously had to put a banjo playing grandpa on the cover to catch people's attention. I'll admit, I had no idea what this game even was until just a few years ago, but the cover always stuck in my mind, so mission accomplished!

I barely remember playing this thing. There's just not much going on here to differentiate it mechanically from other shooters, and a lack of memorable set pieces make this game entirely too forgettable. Then again, that also means there was nothing so offensively bad about it either. Graphically it's very nice, and I think the only reason I can recall any of this game at all is because a few of the levels just look really great. Even then, I don't think I'd say it's the top of its class. R-type III is far more aesthetically pleasing and has a more stylized look to it, for example.

I wish I had more to say about this one, but unfortunately the cover and the story behind it is far more interesting than the game itself. Just one of those cases where the one thing people latch onto is really the only thing to latch onto.