Reviews from

in the past


vou voltar a jogar quando lançar o port


What's most impressive about Treasure's games is how they marry spectacle with variety. Their games are comprised of front-to-back exceptional set pieces that end as quickly as they appear, being replaced by a moment even flashier than the last. A Treasure game never content to say in one place too long.

This is absolutely the case of Radiant Silvergun, whose huge bosses are rendered in such painstaking detail and scale, buttressing each stage with an encounter as tense as the ride to it. More manageable than Ikaruga but challenging no doubt, I really enjoyed my two days grinding story mode. The approach to difficulty here, allowing you to accumulate both power and knowledge between attempts, helps to stem the frustration of being forced to complete the campaign with no continues. Having now done it, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Shmups are games where you move around the screen and shoot at stuff. Shmups/STGs are often seen as an overly-simple, "disposable" genre among many in the gaming world. A relic of a bygone era where games were confined to "simple" genres, where games were fated to be nothing but "quarter munchers", unlike the "enlightened" AAA Everything-Game Life Simulators of today.

Radiant Silvergun heroically rejects this notion, introducing gameplay mechanics that are inherently and obviously deep, engaging and complex even to complete newcomers to the genre, while still capturing the raw appeal of intense shmup gameplay for those experienced in the genre. Not just that, Radiant Silvergun is a game that asks a lot of the player, perhaps even more than its successor Ikaruga. There are 7 weapons in your arsenal, more than any other shmup I know of. And all of them have their situational advantages and disadvantages that you must become familiar with in order to progress. In order to stand a reasonable chance against this game's many, many bosses, you must level up your A, B and C weapon categories, and to level up your weapons you must chain and go for full boss destructions, and collect secret Merry dogs, because simply put, your score is your experience points.

No particular part of this game is really all that hard in isolation, at least on normal difficulty, but it's the process of putting it all together, chaining through each section just like how Treasure wanted you to, not just destroying but dominating the bosses, utilising and leveling your weapons in perfect harmony, and accounting for every single hazard and niche interaction that might get you killed. If you show that you have what this game asks of you, it's an extremely rewarding and satisfying experience, a feeling that is boosted further by Radiant Silvergun's excellent presentation, the bloodrush "Treasure pacing" I love which just constantly throws new boss fights and setpieces at you every minute, and riveting story with existential themes.

I also wanna shout out Radiant Silvergun's story mode as well. It's such a clever use of the game's weapon levelling mechanic and is an excellent compromise between a "pure" 1cc and carelessly credit feeding through a shmup, which many other shmups suffer from in terms of their popular reception of being "quarter munchers". You must 1cc story mode in order to clear, but you can save your weapon progress and earn extra starting lives between runs, basically gradually rigging the game further and further in your favour that just about any player can win with enough dedication. But here's the kicker - even with those extra level ups and lives, you still have to learn the game, and take the stages and bosses seriously. This is one of the main things that makes non-shmup players more aligned to this game, and RS' story mode is absolutely something every other shmup developer should be looking towards for inspiration.

Radiant Silvergun is a real videogame, shooting at the soul of man with guns of silver.


after months of playing on and off finally 1CC'd arcade on normal difficulty. better than sex.

"The 11th born son of this world shoots at the soul of man with guns of silver."

Some background on this game for me. When I was at the end of my high school years, Sega Saturn emulation started reaching major breakthroughs, and Mednafen was our new saviour. I've always been more of a Sega fan than any other console developer, but the Saturn was a massive blindspot to me. So one fateful summer, I went on a binge through the Sega Saturn's library while focusing on its major exclusive, discovering one of my new top 3 game systems.

Ever since I was a young child, Treasure games had truly blown me away. Dynamite Headdy had the inventive setting and powerups to really make the player feel like a wacky action hero. Gunstar Heroes had the weapon combination system and truly out there stages like the board game level. Astro Boy Omega Factor was perhaps the most ambitious GBA game of all time with amazing love for the source material. To say they were always my favourite developers would be an understatement. Naturally, when I discovered they made 3 games for the Saturn, those were my top priority.

At the time I played Radiant Silvergun, I was still a while away from getting into 1cc culture. I would credit feed shmups to just take in the aesthetic. So, I focused all my time into Silvergun's story mode. Everything about it was simply stunning in how it perfectly blended RPG elements with a shmup. The story emphasis, the hidden dog collectibles, and of course the weapons which level up. It was all so much to take in. In a genre where the player usually has to choose between a set of powerups, Radiant Silvergun instead threw in one of the biggest toolkits out there at all times. There's so much to master and I always felt so accomplished discovering new strategies for killing bosses. For example, the lock-on spread shot racked up crazy points against Nasu while allowing the player to dodge.

Story mode was a real crowd pleaser in my eyes. I felt so accomplished for bashing my head against a wall so to speak, restarting a million times with stronger weapons until finally I killed the Stonelike. And for years, that was good enough for me.

However, this year with the release of the PC port, I decided to get into 1ccing the arcade mode. After ~50-60 hours of practice, I went from being overwhelmed by chaining the first area in the game to achieving a truly impossible run where I chained almost every area except the train, finishing with 3 spare lives. Radiant Silvergun is not a forgiving game in the slightest, but it really makes the player feel like a badass.

The usage of leitmotifs for the soundtrack is amazing to boot. The story about how the characters are stuck in a time loop really helps the tone, for it's almost like a dark parody of the shmup genre where the whole joke is about how much the player needs to continue endlessly to achieve their goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGWHANcOnY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVuWvEXS8Es

Over the last 3 or 4 years, I've gone from never 1ccing any shmup in my life to 1ccing roughly 40 games. Silvergun perfectly characterizes my growth and realization that routing is god in this genre. Anything is achievable if one perseveres enough.

All in all Radiant Silvergun is a very special game to me that represents just why Treasure was top dog. In an era where 2D games were slowly being phased out for a while to make way for 3D, Treasure made a game that felt like the ultimate love letter to its genre full of countless homages to other shmups and even tokusatsus like Ultraman and Gamera. This game will make you its bitch, and I'm all for it. It's the kind of game only the Saturn would have, the kind of game only Treasure could've made.

Not as great of a videogame as Ikaruga but if you're looking for an entry point to Treasure shmups this is definitely the better place to start. There's still a lot of depth to the mechanics but it's a lot easier to manage than Ikaruga. The "story" mode added for the Saturn port isn't perfect insofar as what it sets out to achieve but as an experiment in translating arcade game design to home consoles, it is incredibly cool and a great way to ease into playing shmups for a beginner. It's longer than an Arcade playthrough, with more stages and more bosses, but in return, you maintain your weapon upgrades after death and gain more and more credits the more you play. What you get is a mode that's more punishing in the beginning (since your weapons also level up much slower than in Arcade mode) but gradually opens up to you as you get better at the game in general. The problem is that Story mode makes it very easy to push through the game without having to learn the chains and bonuses you basically need to know to get decent weapon levels in Arcade mode, so it's better treated as its own separate version of the game than as an easy mode to practice in before playing Arcade (considering all the Story mode exclusive content this seems to be Treasure's intention for the mode as well). If you've played ZeroRanger, which is one of the best games of the past decade, some of this probably sounds familiar. It's clear that Radiant Silvergun was a big inspiration on that game and from the story mode to the bosses and weapons it was cool to see all the stuff ZeroRanger was referencing. I couldn't grasp much of the actual story here since I've been playing the untranslated Saturn port but from the little bits I picked up on, it seems to have influenced ZeroRanger's story as well. I do really need to play through the story mode again on a translated version, I only just started to notice some very cool metatextual stuff during like the last stage and I'd like to see what it actually meant. Outside of that, while I'm not the sort of person who commits to 1ccs in shmups (usually I'm happy if I can clear the game at all), I think I'll stick with Radiant Silvergun a little while longer, at least to check out the Arcade mode some more. It doesn't have the level of depth and complexity you'll get out of Ikaruga but it's still challenging, fun, and incredibly well made.

A primeira vez que toquei nesse jogo, fiquei de certa forma decepcionado. A nave se movia muito devagar, os tiros eram fracos e o jogo não tinha bombas. Isso acabou dando aquela sensação de que ele era muito superestimado. Mas eu decidi jogar mais um pouco e entender suas mecânicas, então aí que o jogo acabou roubando a minha alma e me viciou nele... peak demais.

Por mais estranho que pareça, além de um shoot 'em up, RSG também compartilha de um sistema de RPG dentro dele, permitindo a evolução de sua nave enquanto você vai jogando. Ao invés de ter aquela clássica tela de selecionar uma nave, a daqui é só uma e ela possui 6 tiros diferentes, que são muito úteis em várias situações específicas, tendo 3 tiros principais, o tiro reto padrão, o tiro teleguiado, e o tiro mais forte que se divide para dois lados na diagonal. Os outros 3 são combinações desses mesmos 3, o raio que possui um sensor para perseguir o inimigo, o tiro para trás e o radar que atira em todos os inimigos dentro de sua área. Todos eles são úteis de sua forma, nenhum vai ficar de lado a não ser que tu saiba se virar muito bem com outros. A nave também possui uma espada, capaz de anular tiros roxos, com a recompensa de coletar vários tiros sendo um grande ataque capaz de dar um dano imenso. A organização desses recursos muda de acordo com o modo que você joga, Saturn ou arcade.

O modo Saturn te dá fichas limitadas, mas quando você morre, aparece uma opção de salvar o progresso de sua nave, agora tu podendo reiniciar o jogo com o mesmo nível em que estava na última jogada. O empurrão maior ainda é o aumento da quantidade de créditos, dando mais aquela sensação de evolução e cada vez você indo mais e mais longe (minha forma preferida). O modo saturn também adiciona um estágio extra, novos chefes pra te fuder- e te obriga a ir em todas as fases do game.

O modo arcade por outro lado, te dá infinitos créditos, mas agora você não consegue salvar o progresso de sua nave, tendo que zerar o jogo inteiro na raça. Pode parecer mais chato, porém o modo arcade é mais curto, pela seleção de duas rotas e menor quantidade de chefes comparado ao de saturn. O que mais brilha nesse modo mesmo, é a estratégia de evoluir a arma e a diferente forma de aumentar os pontos do jogador, por conta de um sistema chamado "chain". Chain funciona pela divisão de cores que ocorre nos inimigos, sendo elas vermelhas, azuis e amarelas. Quanto mais inimigos você matar da mesma cor, mais pontos você ganha, mudando a forma agitada de tentar sobreviver, para uma forma de se focar à jogar de uma maneira calculada, ao invés de focar em sobreviver. Outro método bobinho de pegar pontos, é usando a arma de radar para achar cachorros escondidos pelas fases, ajudando bastante na pontuação também, no modo saturn anotando quantos cachorros você pegou. Por último, os pontos (e xp) também se desenvolvem pelos chefes.

os chefes em si, não são uma grande massa para atirar, e sim uma máquina com vários pedaços responsáveis pelos seus ataques. Logo, em uma luta de chefe, o foco não é matar ele, e sim cortar cada pedaço do seu corpo, para ganhar xp ou tirar perfect com o intuito de ter mais pontos... você também pode só matar ele pelo ponto fraco, mas lá pra frente tu vai acabar se prejudicando. Seus ataques são bem variáveis e cada boss se diferencia do outro, não são apenas naves na parte de cima da tela atirando, são maquinarios te cercando com paredes, inimigos de grande tamanho se movendo tendo a fraqueza na cabeça, etc. São várias criaturas criativas que vão te pegar desprevenido. Claro, chefes comuns que apenas atiram em você ainda existem, mas ele também possui suas mecânicas para agitar a luta. Agora juntando isso com o sistema de espada e várias armas para serem usadas em momentos específicos, torna essas lutas bem divertidas.

O level design do jogo também se destaca aqui, não apenas te jogando inimigos, mas sim tendo um level design diferente em algumas, mudando aquela repetição de sempre ser uma linha reta, sendo sessões bem desafiadoras que vão te exigir atenção.

A trilha sonora daqui é bem no estilo mais clássica, sem muito daquela animação sonora que tem em outros jogos do gênero. Por mais chato que pareça, ela funciona muito bem, principalmente combinando com a tensão gerada pela estética e pelos desafios do jogo. Com as mais especiais sendo as 3 últimas melodias do jogo, cinema total. Não recomendo escutar elas no YouTube, e sim jogar o jogo logo, seu fi de rapariga 😡. Assim como a história, infelizmente sofrendo por conta do jogo só ter lançado no Japão originalmente, então tu depois vai ter que ir em site de 2010 pra ver tradução de falas do jogo, não sendo muito necessário também, o jogo consegue explicar bem o que está acontecendo e o final te pega de jeito.

Por mais que esse tipo de jogo afaste muitas pessoas, ele tem 5 opções de dificuldade, indo do very easy até o very hard, com cada uma adicionando inimigos pela fase e dando mais uma habilidade para o chefe te pegar desprevenido, e também pode alterar a quantidade de vidas por crédito. Eu recomendo mais a versão de saturn por ser mais grudenta, por outro lado, o modo arcade não perde seu peso e ainda continua muito divertida.

Radiant silvergun agora tem meu respeito e tá na minha lista de jogos que tenho que obrigatoriamente rejogar a cada período de tempo, ele é uma grande masterpiece e vai te cativar com certeza. Mesmo o emulador de saturn sendo uma droga, caso não queria comprar a versão da steam, ele vale cada segundo. porra, mermão, tem como jogar de dois aqui, como tu deixa uma pedrada dessas passar? Agora irei chamar todos os meus amigos para jogá-lo... ah, esqueci de tomar meus remédios.

é peak, divertido pra krl e com um boss final mt foda

The best shmup I've played so far.
Loved progression, amazing music, incredibly varied arsenal and combat encounters. I adored the setting and well fitting anime aesthetic.
Biggest issue I have with it is that sometimes enemy patterns can get hard to read thanks to backgrounds, but it happens rarely.

PEAK FICTION
Radiant Silvergun es una experiencia tan única que ha resonado conmigo de una forma en la que muy pocos juegos lo han hecho, palabras me faltan para expresar lo mucho que amo este título.
Legítimamente una de las experiencias más originales que ofrece el medio del videojuego, un juego que aprovecha al máximo su propia simpleza para ofrecer un reto sin igual, en el cual gracias a su mecánica de 7 armas, da consigo un sinfín de difurcaciones a la manera de afrontar los desafíos que el juego presenta, haciendo que el jugador experimente con las diferentes armas y combinaciones, dando posibilidades infinitas a como se juega el juego; podría hablar mas a fondo de sus aspectos jugables tan únicos, pero la verdad, siento que todo esto se aprecía mucho mejor jugándolo uno mismo.
Un juego que definitivamente recomiendo ya no solo a entusiastas de los shoot em' ups, sino a cualquiera que guste del medio en general, una obra que desborda pasión en todos aspectos como muy pocos lo han hecho, un título difícil de replicar y que vale la pena vivir, un juego del cual estoy completamente agradecido de haber podido experimentar.
There is life everywhere...

Uma história incrivel de como os seres humanos irão sempre lutar para um futuro melhor e pelo o que eles acreditam mesmo apesar do fato de que talvez seja impossível, uma mensagem otimista que diz que apesar de todo sofrimento que passaremos nas nossas vidas, o resultado final sempre valerá a pena. Esse conflito se reflete no criador do jogo, Hiroshi Iuchi, que mesmo apesar da dificuldade que ele passou na criação desse jogo, vista nesse entrevista:

https://kotaku.com/1994-story-on-video-game-crunch-is-
brutal-reading-1846969165

Ele ainda lutou para a criação desse jogo pelo motivo de que ele acredita que a mídia dos vídeo games está num ciclo de destruição contínua de si mesmo, se transformando em "cultura descartável", Radiant Silvergun funciona como uma mensagem a todos criadores de jogos e jogadores para preservar o valor artistíco dessa mídia.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080419104927/http://www.emuxhaven.net/~silver/Link%20Stage%20Explanation.html

**** this game... in a good way.

I haven't even beaten it yet but it's my favorite shmup ever.

I know this is considered one of the greatest shmups of all time but I just could not get into it no matter how much I tried. The 7 weapons with 3 buttons mechanic is very cool but the game feels clunky and complicated in a way that Ikaruga does not. I feel that it is a great step in the right direction but I could never play this when I could be playing Ikaruga instead. I suspect that this game's allure comes partly from the many many years after release when the only way to play it was to import it from Japan at incredibly high prices. I know my opinion of the game was higher before I got it and was able to really sit down and play it for a while. It is still a great shmup though.

Yo luego de probar este juego tras romperme el culo por emular la rom en Mame:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Ysa3A2WMU

Damn this game is GOOD. Are you thinking of a good game? Ok, then multiply this by 200. It's THAT GOOD.

The original Saturn version of Radiant Silvergun is the pinnacle of shmups. This is a game that somehow just hits differently on original hardware and a CRT, I have to admit.

For its age it had wild animations and a great combination of 2D sprite work with 3D backgrounds (yeah, Saturns strength obviously). The soundtrack from Hitoshi Sakimoto is an absolute blast. The greatest strength of Radiant Silvergun has to be the boss design though. It has TONS of boss battles for a shmup and these can be long and intense.
The player has a wide variety of weapon types, including a giant sword that functions as "bomb" when it is charged. I think this especially fits the 6 button layout of the Saturn controller.
Replay value of Radiant Silvergun is also off the charts. I finished it several times already ... and still can't get enough.

Gaming peaked with Radiant Silvergun, and it never got any better. If I could preserve a single video game for aliens to discover eons later, it would be this one. 

Gracias Radiant Silvergun por hacerme un adicto a los shoot em' ups.

Legítimamente es una obra maestra en muchos aspectos, pero vamos a hablar del mismo, me gusta esa mecánica de las 7 distintas armas, y sumado al tipo de situaciones variadas que tiene, algunas armas van a ser mas convenientes en ciertas areas que en otras, por lo que usar solo una durante el mismo no es algo recomendable, además, a diferencia de otros Shoot em' Ups, este juego también invita a ir grindeando las armas, ya que los enemigos no nos soltaran items para aumentar el nivel de las mismas, si no que conforme vamos eliminándolos o incluso atacando a los jefes con las mismas, el arma subirá de nivel, esto es importante ya que el juego va subiendo de a poco su dificultad, empezando con niveles sencillos y fáciles para luego ir aumentando su dificultad en próximos niveles, dando con sigo un reto bastante bueno y divertido, eso sin olvidar que si perdemos o acabamos el juego, podremos guardar la partida y al cargarla, desde el inicio las armas se quedaran en el mismo nivel que las subimos e incluso ir subiendo aun mas su nivel.
Gráficamente incluso a día de hoy este juego desprende magia, con un apartado visual bellísimo, independientemente de que te juegues la version de Arcade o la de Saturn (Como en mi caso), todavía se sigue viendo muy bien.
La banda sonora además de ser excelente, siento que combina muy bien con el juego y en algunos niveles hasta dando un toque épico a cada uno.
Los jefes es también otro punto que me gusta del juego, cada uno ofreciendo un buen reto, invitando al jugador a aprenderse bien los patrones de los mismos, porque un mínimo error te puede costar una vida.
Hasta en algo como la historia nos dieron un argumento bastante solido y bien trabajado.

Me es difícil encontrarle algo malo al juego, a lo mucho diría que puede ser algo complicado para los que no son fans de los Shoot em' Ups, pero no creo que esto ultimo aleje a la gente de probarlo la verdad.

En definitiva, es un juegazo en todos los sentidos, sencillamente espectacular.


I admit it okay, I "beat" it on Saturn Mode after hours upon hours of practice and multiple continues. You think I have a chance 1CCing this insanity? But god someday... Someday, I hope I can. Easily one of the greatest shmups ever made.