Strider is a cool looking action game—the sprites and backgrounds are excellent, and Strider's animations as he flips or attacks looks cool as hell. However he doesn't feel as agile as he looks—it can feel a little awkward handling him. The way you run through levels while things explode around you reminded me a bit of Gunstar Heroes, and the way Strider builds momentum when running down hills felt a lot like playing the first Sonic game. Like most arcade games the challenge here is a combination of skill based action and memorizing when and where enemies are, and where to go; the most frustrated I felt playing this game was at the end of one of the levels, where you have to jump on a floating ship in the right-hand corner of the map. It just isn't well communicated.

Really worth playing though, it's an interesting and novel arcade game, even if it doesn't completely work.

CAPCATHON, GAME 6: Strider (1989; Arcade, Megadrive)

Strider feels, in many regards, like a game five or six years ahead of its time. It is a landmark title, a trailblazer for platformers and action games alike.

The world of Strider is extremely colorful and, even more than 30 years later, still feels alive. Hi-tech ninja Hiryu will visit all sorts of locales around the world, from Eastern Europe to the Amazon, to leaving Earth altogether and fighting the wicked Grandmaster Meio in his space station. The backgrounds are colorful and detailed, and so are the sprites. Even though the animation isn't particularily fluid, especially considering future Capcom games, every motion is perfectly readable; in particular Hiryu's satisfying cartwheel jump and the extremely quick blade swings only a top-rank Strider can pull off are both memorable and dazzling.

Hiryu's controls take a bit to get used to. He reacts realistically to slopes, speeding up while running downhill and slowing down while running uphill. His jump physics are very realistic as well, in that he can't change directions in midair; this lack of course-correction will spell the loss of many lives. To compensate, he can cling to walls and ceilings and move smoothly to and from almost any type of surface. Hiryu can also slide to dodge certain attacks, and, most importantly, can swing his Cypher about as fast as the player can mash the attack button. Hiryu can also find some powerups that summon robots helpers that can aid him in defeating enemies from a distance.

The level designs are intricate and, in true quarter-muncher fashion, require both skill and memorization to traverse safely, but perservering players will be rewarded with exhilarating sequences, such as the second stage's mad scramble down the mountain as bombs explode behind you, followed by a leap of faith.
Most of the game's enemies can be dealt with easily, but others are more annoying to defeat, be they more heavily armored, faster and thus harder to hit, or placed in awkward spots. Some cheap hits are sprinkled throughout the game, with no way around avoiding them the first time they are encountered. This is especially true for the last stage, a gauntlet filled with the game's hardest challenges, along with a boss rush.

While the game does have good music, expect to remember mostly the first stage's theme, as that's the only memorable track it has. It's not that they're badly composed, it's just that they lack the catchyness of other game music. However, the game's sounds are all excellent- of particular note are, along with the Cypher swinging sound, all the game's digitized voice clips, which still sound extremely clear. I appreciate how each character speaks in their own native language- for example, Hiryu speaks in Japanese, Solo and the Grandmaster speak in English, Tong Pooh speaks in Chinese, and so on.

Strider is not kind to newcomers. It will take some perseverance and practice to get through its deadly traps. However, once the player understands what the game wants from them, Hiryu will soar through the stages, slicing the opposition left and right. It is a satisfying game to learn, one that I'd reccommend to anyone up for the challenge.

To everyone who hates this game all of a sudden, screw off! This is an innovative classic, and it's one of the most fun and exciting arcade titles that I've played. The controls take a while to get used to, but once you start to get them, you'll be having a blast. The attacks and jumps are extremely satisfying to pull off, and the vertical layouts of the levels here make it stand out quite a bit from its peers. Strider is also pretty challenging, but it's also not too frustrating like other arcade games from around that time. I've beaten this more times than I can count, and I still love it. I'll never understand the recent hate for a lot of these old Arcade classics. I mostly play the Genesis version, which is a fantastic port. Stay away from the PlayStation one. It's very lazily made.

I decided to play Strider tonight because I saw multiple people leaving reviews on it lately and the How Long to Beat time was about an hour, so why not check out what everyone's talking about? And I gotta say that by the time I rolled credits at about twice of said time, the main thing I had to say was "Wow, that kinda sucked".

Look, I can see plenty of reasons to like this game. The art, especially for a quite early Genesis title, is very well done. This is probably most epitomized in the Siberian Wilderness stage in the segment with power outages (where the darkened, silhouette look broken by crackling electricity is pretty badass), the ending sequence and city shots, and the detailed sprites on enemies along with Strider himself. It has the clear intent of a neo-futuristic, 80s anime style setting (given Moto Kikaku's involvement on the manga this seems particularly fitting), and there's some pretty rad boss visual designs. The music's pretty solid and the sound can be good too, although I do feel the need to note two things. First, Stage 4's Amazon enemies seem to have some oddities going on with their sound, because a lot of times I'd have them play their attack sounds on loop a LOT when they were on the fringes of the screen in a way that was outright annoying. I thought maybe this was just a glitch of some kind, but when I checked a random Longplay on Youtube and it seemed to have the same issue so IDK. Hiryu's sword swing also makes a LOT of sound when you spam it but that was probably more frustrating than when it'd be designed due to listening with headphones rather than a crowded arcade or CRT or w/e so I don't hold that much against it.

I just couldn't jive with a lot of the gameplay though. The game feels like a bad, peanut butter mashup of Ninja Gaiden's speedy action with Castlevania's jumping physics, with the end result being a game that demands precision and speed that feels stiff and, in my opinion, unresponsive. You can definitely get used to it, sure, and it is consistent (even if Strider tumbling with the horizontal jump is at first maybe a bit throwing off), but it isn't particularly fun to play. It's like a bad version of a Metroid-style two-different-jumps mechanic. I also felt like some consistent hitbox and physics dissonance was on display here, largely with any kind of moving platform, which was absolutely PAINFUL in the final level. I died at least 10 times to the run up to the final boss because you have to stay on a moving platform that will cause you to flip off if you don't grab and/or jump with the right timing, and there were plenty of times I just grabbed on and then instantly fell off or fell off for seemingly no reason and so on. There's also a bizarre inconsistency to the game: I streamed a good chunk of this with a friend on Discord and we both noted how I'd run through the same area, often times doing the same thing, and yet have enemy spawns vary for reasons that were esoteric to us.

This is particularly notable because Strider is HEAVY on trial and error gameplay, it loves to put enemies just off screen or in spots where if you don't react immediately after entering a new area you'll get hit. There's also plenty of "gotcha" moments in the game. If you don't know a trap is coming up right when you beat the first boss, for example, you WILL get hit. Boss quality varies heavily but most are unimpressive in execution, one of them felt particularly odd as it seems like it has unavoidable damage to hit it and you basically have to mash and have full health to win before you die. When I looked up other runs, I never saw them avoid the damage either. It's likely possible but I couldn't figure it out. I'd probably enjoy this more if the game's physics felt more free, because then I'd be able to memorize myself into a nice rhythm of jumping, attacking, and so on.

It's not as though gameplay is without any merit. The idea of Gradius style Options as power-ups is underexplored but interesting. The game's got some classic ninja wall jumps and ceiling clings and platform grabs and tends to mix these in quite well: If the jumping didn't feel so bad for me the actual level design seems solid if very difficult (you can definitely tell this was an arcade game!) to me albeit with way too many gotcha moments. Some of the Options do seem to sometimes work oddly, mostly just kinda going wherever they please off screen, but it's pretty cool conceptually and fun to use. Plus I love how it fits hard into the cyber-ninja theming, he has a robot dog!

Overall, Strider might be pretty fun if the way it controls and the physics hit for you, but those things just never hit for me and it just dragged down the experience and kinda devolved into a frustrating effort by the end of things. I respect the influence it had over gaming and Strider Hiryu himself is cool, but it was just a miss for me.

I am trying to get the site achievement for five reviews in a day and can feel myself slipping into madness as I near the end. It really doesn't help that the last game I am reviewing today is Strider for the Sega Genesis. Not good, this game!

Hiryu's acrobatic leaps, twirls, and flourishing sword strikes might deceive you into thinking this is an elegant game to play, but Strider is one of the clunkiest pieces of junk I've played for the Genesis, and I beat Ecco god damnit! This is of course among other early Genesis titles, which I've lamented before on having a sort of cheap feeling to them. In Strider's case this is mostly relegated to game design as the sprite work is pretty good, easily the game's most stand out quality. There's still areas where the color pallet seems very washed out, almost pastel, which was a hallmark of this era of Genesis games, but the sprites are very richly detailed and nice to look at.

It is also very short, which is a blessing considering it ain't no fun to play. Your main impediment to a low clear time is how frustratingly difficult it can be at times, which is just as much a consequence of game design philosophy at the time as it is being poorly made.

You don't need to play Strider, and by all means you shouldn't, but if you do then perhaps give one of the other dozen ports a shot. I haven't messed around in any of them so I really couldn't tell you if Strider plays better on anything else, but at the very least I would suspect the arcade version would be preferential to the Genesis. You could also go outside and smash all your toes with a hammer. The cool thing is you're in control of your own destiny and can harm yourself however you wish. That's the most important thing Strider taught me, and now I pass that lesson on to you.

I was pretty excited to start this game since it's status seems to be one of solid praise. The game itself is an absolute mess. Visual overload, chugging framerate, unfair difficulty spikes, unnatural movement and physics, horrid sound and music design... I managed to get to the final stage but it gets to the point of being so unbearably mean in its design with an absurd boss rush after a brutal platforming section. I can't think of anything I actually liked in this game, which is unfortunate given it's legacy. Is the Genesis version my problem? Researching, it seemed this was the one everyone refers back to. If not, this is probably another Battletoads situation for me where I simply can't get on board with the product offered. 1/6

Strider is a hell of an odd game. I remember I utterly loathed it back in May when I first gave it a go, then declared it was garbage, and suddenly an avalanche of similar negative reviews came down. I eventually started to feel like I didn't give it enough credit, and then some evil spirit possessed me to replay this at 4 AM seven months later. I still think it kind of sucks as a whole, but I didn't really have much to say the first time so I might as well go a little more in depth now.

I've talked about how setpieces and cinematic flair can amp up the enjoyability of a game as a whole when I replayed R-Type III, and the same pretty much applies here. There's a handful of games on the Genesis that play out like a little action movie or OVA, such as Battle Mania Daiginjou or maybe El Viento, and this is a really early example of that. The atypical stage design further amplifies this, feeling more tailored to the setpieces rather than just playing like the average platformer at the time, if that makes sense.

Actually playing through the stages is...really bad. Strider controls kind of miserably, a lot of enemies are a chore to hit and there are various sections of the game where it is actively impossible to slip by without taking damage. There is a lot of this in the final stage in particular, and above all else it just makes me wonder: why? Sure, a lot of arcade releases around this time are insane with their quarter munching, but why wasn't the opportunity taken to sober up a little for this port? Even if unlimited continues were provided here, there's no satisfaction in slowly mastering the levels because for some of them, you can't! It really boggles my mind, and I think it's a big reason why I held such intense vitriol on my first playthrough.

This port was awarded Game of the Year by Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1990, which at first utterly baffles me, but really at the time there wasn't much if anything quite like it, even if the end result is shoddy. I can kinda see why some people have a soft spot for it today, especially if they grew up when it was newly released, but I have to wonder if even one playthrough is all it might take for someone in that position to reconsider. There's some pretty obscene design flaws here, as cool as the game may look.

Innovative, challenging, varied, ahead of its time. Strider is one of the unsung heroes of gaming for many reasons. It was one of most influential arcade games of all time, if not one of the most influential video games period. The atmospheric level design, cinematic nature, surprising home port quality, extremely fast-paced action, variety of setpieces, and competent adaptation from its native medium all helped in forming one of the most unique games of the 1980s, one which would receive a fair share of imitators in the decade to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b-0XeU-6-A

Our journey begins with a screen of Hiryu slashing Grandmaster Mayo in half, foreshadowing events to follow. After pressing start, the player is greeted to a symbolic opening of Mayo holding the world in the palm of his hand, giving the player an immediate idea of how much is at stake even without reading the manual. As soon as the player leaves their glider, they are subject to a dozen enemies coming from all sides, and these villains are willing to sacrifice their lives for Mayo by suicide bombing the legendary super ninja in their desperate attempt to stop the last obstacle in Mayo's path to global domination.

Indeed, it takes only a minute to understand the sheer state of the world Hiryu inhabits. Major cities are overrun by terrorists and nigh-indestructible robots ranging from Ivan Drago lookalikes to giant mecha-monkeys. Even the demo screen makes it clear the player is the last ray of light in the world, through their control of Hiryu.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790816265148694579/1014128664885080194/unknown.png

The player will need to harness every tool at their disposal to save the world as well as come to grips with Hiryu's physics. The Cypher swinging, sliding, wall climbing, and jumping are all very deliberate and flashy. Every animation from the player has vastly more frames than its home console platforming contemporaries of the NES and Master System. The spinning jump in particular is very reminiscent of ninja theatrics seen in martial arts cinema, to say nothing of Hiryu's recovery roll; even when the player is damaged, they take damage in style. When enemies are sliced, they go down in a fiery hot explosion of their own blood and a mini tokusatsuesque boom. It truly gets across the feeling of slicing everything in Hiryu's path with an unstable 1000 degree knife.

In a way, realism is what Strider is all about. Hiryu will slant across surfaces in a way few action-platformers would bother with, allowing for the player to build momentum and make last second jumps across minefields in the vein of an action movie star. Guards will patrol platforms by walking left and right periodically, which allows some to be stealth killed in true shinobi fashion. Voice clips weren't invented by Strider, but it had much more of a cinematic element than contemporaries by featuring fully voice acted cutscenes spoken in several languages depending on the character's nationality, with Mayo's iconic "STRIDER HIRYU WILL NEVER LEAVE EURASIA ALIVE" being the highlight for certain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3y0aFDkGUs

One interesting detail I was always iffy of was Solo. I found it rather peculiar Solo was built up as Hiryu's rival figure only to be mercilessly shredded in half by the player with no fanfare, but in hindsight it makes sense. The player recognizes Solo as the grandmaster's Strongest Soldier, but to Hiryu's knowledge he's just another obstacle in the way for your friendly neighbourhood super ninja.

The music can and will change at the drop of a hat within the same screen, something that was also rather unheard of at the time as platformers such as Mario would reserve this for occasions like going down warp pipes. The Genesis version of Strider in particular had brilliant music cues, such as the first stage playing a triumphant melody after notivandrago's death only for it to be shockingly cutoff by an ambush the instant the player could realize they were surrounded by enemy turrets and guards. Without a single word, Strider could express that the player wasn't safe no matter where they went.

And that's just what made Strider so special, the style and subtlety. The player could strike a fair amount of poses for an end level screen, sometimes to hilarious result. Airships could be pushed up and down depending on where or how the player landed on them. Capcom even included a special game over screen for the final boss fight to put into perspective how badly the player failed the earth, something unheard of for its time. There would be no game over jingle, as if the world was uninterrupted by the death of one more insignificant individual who dared oppose the grandmaster.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790816265148694579/1014131649895735366/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/790816265148694579/1014131861313830922/unknown.png

All of this combines to make Strider a very memorable game for me and many other fans of 1980s arcade games. However, it is also a flawed game in several aspects. The powerups are rather weak compared to say, Ninja Gaiden's as they do not really give the player a new skill so much as simply add more objects on the screen to interact with enemies. Compare Strider's ninjutsu simply making him intangible or having a longer sword to the sort of ninjutsu Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi would provide the player to increase combat options. There are also a couple attacks in the game which are nigh-impossible to dodge, most notably the quadruple laser and the gravity core's thrusts; it is quite telling even with a turbo button I was never able to defeat a single gravity core without taking damage. However, these encounters can still ultimately be damage sponged so I do not believe they ruin the overall experience.

Strider's influence can be seen in many of my favourite games. The Mega Man games would borrow multiple gimmicks, including Gravity Man's stage in 5 having similarities to the Battleship Balrog or the wall crushers in Mega Man X2 borrowing from a certain segment in Strider's 3rd stage. The Ninja Gaiden series would go on to give Hayabusa a proper wall climb in 2 and even copy Hiryu's Cypher in NG3. Flatout imitators such as Run Saber, Osman (by the same director no less) and Hagane would come out in the years to follow, and while they would expand the combat options of Strider, they never became as iconic nor had the amount of sequels. Strider has even been cited as an influence in the hack n slash genre.

https://www.eurogamer.net/strider-1-2-review

Furthermore, Strider demonstrated what a licensed game could be, adapting only a few elements from its source manga to create a digestible experience for those who were unfamiliar with the original story. This was in stark contrast to the NES game which had a condensed version of the manga's story which did not click with the North American market it was aimed for. In an era where licensed games were generally seen as low quality, Capcom did a great job pumping out games such as this and Disney's titles which could stand on their own merits.

If I had to choose one version of the game as my favourite, I would say the Genesis port. In the early years of the Genesis' lifespan, Strider was a system seller due to breaking new ground in the public eye as to what an arcade port could be. The first stage was reworked to make the turret ambush more surprising, enemies were altered to render machine gunners or spiked wall enemies less annoying, stages became more approachable as there were now more ways to clear obstacles such as the first vine in stage 4, the ceiling being removed from the laser boss resulted in an actually dodgeable attack which no longer obscured the player's view, the doomsday weapon was given a darker atmosphere with muted colours replacing the bright pallet of the arcade, and even the music was slightly reworked to make the fall of Balrog more intense. Some sound effects were compromised (mainly during the cutscenes) but I simply can't pass over a version that gave the game an actual ending sequence with a whole ass cast roll to boot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7iWY3quVLM

In the end, I don't believe Strider is the greatest ninja action platformer of all time. I would argue it was far surpassed by the original Ninja Gaiden, as well as Shinobi 3 and Hagane. However, it still has its place at the table as it brought one of Capcom's most iconic characters into the public eye worldwide. Marvel VS Capcom 2 just wouldn't be the same without the blessed Hiryu/Doom power couple, now would it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cREri3qeKc8

I actually had Strider on the mind for a while to play, because for a bit it felt like this thing was constantly showing up in my friend activity feed, it only took me a few weeks to finally join the conga line like the slow brainless lemming that I am.

People who hate this game will probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I have zero nostalgia for this thing, because I think I may have put a grand total of ten minutes into it on the old Capcom Classics Collection compilations that were released on PS2 and PSP as opposed to the hundreds I put into Mercs or getting my ass kicked in Varth. So why did I barely play this game? Well let's find out. For the purposes of this review I played both the Genesis port and the poorly emulated CCC version on PS2.

Right away, the control feels like Capcom went "hey that Ninja Gaiden game is pretty neat, let's slap some shitty Belmont movement onto it. I'm sure it'll age very well down the road." No doubt said right after putting on their clown shoes, and honking their big red noses at each other like they normally do when they make poor decisions. The stage design reeks of "lmao got ya bitch" and "where am I supposed to go?" style Famicom awfulness, with many setpiece-style explosions just suddenly ragdolling you right after killing easy bosses or getting instantly shot at offscreen by some shithead with a chaingun. It's not helped by the fact that the hitboxes on the Genesis version felt absolutely abominable, many times it felt I got smacked by the blunt corner of a box around an enemy as opposed to somewhere on their visible person. I dunno if it was because I was more familiar with the stage design before moving onto the arcade version, but it just felt a bit better there as opposed to the genesis port. Not that it super helped my enjoyment, though it was nice not having those little "loading" freezes, or have the game chug like a shitty IBM computer all throughout the jungle stage with those fucking amazon ladies who never shut the hell up.

Don't get me wrong, I can understand why people loved this game. No doubt it was impressive for it's time and probably looked even more jaw-dropping playing it on the Genesis. The art design is all absolutely exquisite and very charming, I lost my shit when I witnessed the entire Soviet counsel congregate into each other to form a robot centipede wielding a hammer and sickle. That's stuff's great. The stupid digitized voice acting in the arcade version is fantastically hilarious, and that laugh during the game over screen probably traumatized at least a few kids. The line where Hiryu goes "you're sending a toy into battle?" in response to a giant battleship is also fairly fucking badass.

I also got entertained during gameplay by the visual of Hiryu just facetanking a fucking battleship's cannon, then later getting thrown off the side by malevolent floor-sliding things straight out of Flying Battery Zone. That stuff was mean to me the player, but I got entertainment out of it since I can laugh that shit off very easily. Probably helped when I was playing with infinite continues in the arcade version, imagine being the sick fuck who set the dip switches to "no continues".

As always, it's a touchy subject for everyone over whether an older game has aged fairly well or if it is, to put it incredibly nicely, "a product of it's time". For me Strider was a nice product of it's time, but I don't think I'm going back to it anytime soon.

Re-played this bc holy fuck out of nowhere everyone started absolutely shitting on this game

It's sorta deserved????? Idk

Strider is kinda like Altered Beast in the way it screams cool factor over playability, on top of being a launch-era Genesis port with that dilapidated green/metal artstyle. It's short. and a lot of the opportunities for proper game design are sacrificed in order to justify its setpieces. But to be fair, its setpieces are really damn good, sloping seamlessly into each other (barring the freeze/loading on the genny version) and conveying a world and sense of verticality akin to an action movie. Strider actually debuted as a Capcom-funded manga a year before the arcade game - something that ultimately influences the game's direction for better or worse. Like, bosses have cool designs, but are either complete pushovers or bouts of luck. Platforming has Ghost-n-Goblins jumps, which works for the thematic weight its trying to communicate, but leads to a lot of annoyances and bumbling around. This game is a whole hodge-podge of 'ideas' that never get meaningfully expanded into assessable gameplay scenarios, but I don't think that makes the experience inherently 'flawed'.

Strider isn't good viewed under the same lens as other action game design testaments like Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania. I don't even know if I'd even say it's 'good' for the time, or 'good' for what it's trying to do. But I don't think the experience is mechanically taxing enough or long enough to take away from its concept and spectacle. I think the only thing that makes this game hard to stomach is that Genesis boomers spent DECADES online calling this the best game on the system. Not 'one of the best' - THE best. Better than Sonic 2 & 3, SoR2, Shinobi 3, Ristar, and Treasure's games. It takes an obscene amount of cope to rewrite history like that.

ADDENDUM: I only realized now that Sonic 2's Wing Fortress like, just steals everything from stage 3. All of it. It's insane

For something that came out in '89, this game is gorgeous. Your moveset is varied enough to feel fun, and well-animated enough to make you feel like a badass. These, combined with the nice variety of action set-pieces, make it very apparent why this game was an arcade favorite when it came out. The difficulty curve goes from 'manageable' to 'downright mean' to 'psychotic' in the half-hour-or-so runtime of the game, at some points requiring near pixel-perfect aiming and millisecond-perfect timing. It gets pretty obnoxious, but I guess it's par for the course for a port of an arcade quarter-muncher.

I could put up with that level of difficulty especially given the brevity of the game, but the game is often very poor in communicating what it is you're supposed to be doing. Some enemies flash when you hit them and others don't, turning some of the boss fights into weird guessing games. The game makes use of both horizontal and vertical space well, but doesn't always make it clear where you need to go; the worst offender is a large area full of platforms and enemies where you need to go to a specific platform and jump upwards to progress, with no visual indication that there's anything there. Then there are the bosses like the floating robot that you fight in a room where the gravity is turned off. The idea is great, the gravity effects are fantastic from a technical point of view... but I have no bloody idea what is going on. I float around and slash at the boss, and once in awhile I lose health without knowing what is even hitting me or how to prevent it. I've replayed that boss many times over and even watched videos, and I still have no idea what is causing me to lose health.

The poor communication exacerbates the unforgiving difficulty, and while I appreciate a lot about this game, I have to file it under the "good for its time" pile.