A nice TCG with a who's who of fighting game characters of the day. The game is unbalanced (some cards are just direct upgrades of others, etc) but that's what makes it fun, naturally. The music is nice, too, and the sprite art of the cards is great to look at. The overworld is fun to walk around and explore, it's not much but it's a nice touch. And the card players, I like them too.

Admittedly a bit grindy at times, like when the difficulty spikes vertically towards the end. Also sometimes matches can get drawn out, especially when still card collecting. And this didn't have to be two versions but anyway, I really do like this game.

Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I love when virtual card games have a little mini-rpg wrapper around them. I dunno, walking around an rpg map and talking to NPCs in between matches just makes me happy! Much like the Pokemon TCG gameboy game, Card Fighters is charming and mostly intuitive, with gorgeous pixel art. Some of the effect descriptions can be a bit confusing, but my main gripe is that the game is fairly stingy with card drops. You should expect to play against the same stable of opponents numerous times to earn some of the higher rarity cards. That wouldn't be so bad (I enjoy grinding every now and then), but because the drip of new cards was so slow, I never felt like my deck ever evolved past 'disorganized pile of the best cards I own'. There are legitimate card synergies present in the game, so it would have been neat to build into a specific archetype or strategy. Still, the game is full of life and joy, and captures a lot of what I enjoy about TCGs.

If you at one point in your life ever decided to play a Gradius game, but you just didn’t think that there was enough Japan in the game to please your needs, then Parodius may be able to satiate your cravings, while making you break your hands in the process of trying to beat it for yourself. This was close to the experience I had when checking out the original game, which was basically your typical Gradius game that came with all the sweet powerups and the insane difficulty that you would expect, but right alongside that was a whole bunch of charming oddities, which range from the enemies and the music, all the way up to the bosses, which made me have a good time with the game as a whole, even if the gameplay was nothing to write home about. Nevertheless, I assume that that original game was pretty successful back when it first came out, because it would then spawn its own series of games that would be released right alongside Gradius, starting with the sequel to the game, Parodius! From Myth to Laughter.

Out of all of the games in the series, this was the one I was most familiar with before going into it, not because I had played it before, but I had seen a good chunk of the game in a video I made a long time ago, and while I hadn’t seen the full thing in action, I pretty much knew what I was getting into. You know, aside from the fact that this was just another Gradius game, so it was probably gonna play just like all the others, and WHADDYA KNOW, that is exactly what we get here. However, once again, the insanity of the visuals and designs of the stages, enemies, and bosses present make the game wonderful to play, and aside from one or two issues that I have with the game as a whole (which you could probably guess), it was a really good time from start to finish.

The story is fairly simple, yet weird for a shmup like this, where the Great Octopus threatens to destroy Earth and all of the inhabitants that live on it, so it is up to Tako, the octopus from the last game, to set out to stop this from happening, right alongside his pals, Vic Viper, TwinBee, and Pentarou, which is pretty much exactly what I expected from the premise of one of these games, and I wouldn’t change it any other way. The graphics are wonderful, not only being very vibrant and colorful for most of the stages, but also having plenty of detailed, goofy, and insane designs for many of the enemies and bosses, which are quite bewildering to see in the best way possible, the music is just as weird as the visuals, with most of the songs either being remixes of classic Gradius tunes (I will never get tired of this track, no matter what game it appears in), but also zany remixes of classical music as well, which is oddly fitting for this game, and I ended up loving a lot of the tracks, and the gameplay/control has basically been imprinted into your brain to where you will automatically know what to do right from the get go, but you can play as a penguin flying in space that can get other penguins following him to shoot projectiles, which automatically makes this game a masterpiece.

The game is a horizontally scrolling shmup, where you take control of one of the weird and wonderful characters I mentioned earlier, each with their own unique movesets and configurations for the weapons, go through plenty of different stages through many varied and odd environments, shoot down every single living thing that you see on screen, because more than likely, that thing will try to kill you in one way or another, gather plenty of different power ups that you can equip and upgrade whenever you need to, or find bells that you can shoot to get different kinds of power ups that will give you plenty of different, temporary advantages, and take on plenty of silly and absurd, yet challenging bosses that will keep you on your toes, unless you have the laser ability with four options following you, in which case you can just blaze right through them in most instances. If you have experience with any other Gradius game released before this and since, you will know what to expect from this game, but if you love this style of gameplay like me, and you don’t mind a dash of weirdness sprinkled in there, then you will feel right at home when you play this title.

Like with the previous game, the main thing that makes this game stand out from all of the others is the odd selection of… things that you will be seeing throughout your journey, which a newcomer like me would look at and wonder what drug he took before he started playing this, while others may be used to this type of imagery and be completely fine with it. Most of the enemies you encounter will consist of penguins, along with plenty of other random animals like fish, crabs, hornets, and whatever else the game decides to pull out of its ass, like clowns that will shoot at you and lips that will shoot their own teeth at you. That’s not even getting into the bosses either, which are without a doubt both the most horrifying and wonderful aspects of this game, where you will encounter such creatures as a flying pirate ship with a cat head on the front, and eagle dressed like Uncle Sam, a puffer fish that will inflate to cover almost the entire screen while you shoot at it, a random sumo wrestler, and a giant naked woman covering herself with a sheet while deploying babies in bubbles to kill you. I can only imagine that this is all relatively tame compared to what other games in the series probably throw at the player, and I would question why the hell any of this is here, but at this point, I have just decided to accept the madness and ride along with it, and I end up having a lot of fun with that mindset.

Obviously, one of the things that holds this game back is that it is a Gradius game, so it does practically nothing to change up the gameplay or innovate on the genre as a whole, but that doesn’t matter so much to me in this case, given how fun the gameplay can still be, and how satisfying it us to fully upgrade yourself to where you can start to decimate everything around you. However, that in itself is a little hard to do, due to this game’s difficulty, because HOLY FUCK, they aren’t pulling punches this time around. I know, I know, I always say these games are hard, and that is never gonna change anytime soon, but I swear, this might just be the hardest Gradius game I have played so far. You need to have the reflexes of a god or the ability to slow down time in order to avoid some of the shit this game throws at you, and while you can get pretty lucky at some points, it almost never tones the difficulty down whatsoever, making it so that I died hundreds of times before I was able to finish it off. I have never seen so many dead penguins in one place before, and now that I have, I can say with great certainty that I don’t feel bad about killing that giant space octopus whatsoever.

Overall, despite a lack of change and the difficulty still managing to surprise me with just how unforgiving it can be, this is still yet another solid entry in this sub-series and franchise as a whole, providing the same fun and addicting experience that fans have come to love with this series, while also still providing enough weird and insane elements to where you wanna see it all out just to know what else the game will pull out of its ass by the end. I would definitely recommend it for fans of the Gradius series as a whole, as well as those who are big fans of other shmups or cute ‘em ups, because while this may not be as crazy or weird as others out there, it still managed to make me laugh and smile for most of the journey, and I’m sure the same can apply to many others as well. Now, if you excuse me, I need to go stare at the ceiling for like a good hour or so, just so that I can get all of the insanity out of my mind. Gotta be well-rested and prepared for the next time I try to play one of these games, y’know.

Game #551

Since when did turtles explode man???

This game doesn’t deserve a place on the shelf with the good Mario games.

I agree with brentalfloss on this one.

The quality dropped off like some kinda Mario knock off.