Honestly, a pretty sick Virtual-on esque action arcade thing that has left me in complete awe of its final boss. Every battle that comes prior is designed to force the player to make full use of their land and air traversal abilities, dodging and dealing damage, all the while the adversary's high speeds make them very difficult to keep on-screen. During my first playthrough, this struck me as a detriment; I barely know anything about the Saturn controller and was honestly under the impression I didn't bind the buttons correctly, on top of simply feeling that the game wasn't all too well designed.

The game has a "M.I.S.S." navigator function that acts as a boss lock-on, which could turn out to be completely missable because you need to find and pick them up on the map physically. This is where the replayability factor comes in. Each navigator has their own abilities, different designs and personalities on top of cute unlockable artwork based on overall score-based performance. Each stage has one unique navigator - and if you want to challenge yourself, you can choose to play through almost the entire game without a lock-on to unlock a later navigator. This is..... kind of genius!!!! What a great challenge and way to bring the game's clunky controls to the forefront with a mindful nudge and wink to the player as a reward for toughing through it! I love anime pics!!

Anyway, after realising that the game is all about maintaining focus on a slippery enemy, I come to the final boss. Instead of doing everything it can to outmanoeuvre you and attack from your flank, this boss is fucking BOLTED to your nose. You can't avoid the guy no matter how hard you juke and jive; they even increase in size and ferocity as the overbearing fight goes on. The ability to switch between land and air used to allow the player to feel as though they had a sense of control over the way the boss needed to approach you, but now you're in the lion's den. I love it so much it's terrifying and exhilarating and already one of my favourite final bosses ever.

The rest of the game is alright, too! I love that it shakes up the rulebook every couple of stages with different clear conditions and level design ethoses. When these controls finally clicked, I found myself replaying on max difficulty purely to revel in a rare sense of mastery as what was previously clunky and abstract is now second nature!

J'adore the presentation too, chunky mechs and chunky explosions with some of the 2D charm of like, Pilotwings.