System Played: Arcade
Year Released: 1985
Year Reviewed: 2021
Gradius aka Nemesis is a horizontal scrolling space shoot ‘em up from Konami, originally released in arcades. It started life as a sequel to their 1981 game Scramble, and has since gone on to spawn its own long running series and spin-offs.
The fundamentals are similar to other games in the genre, with titles like Namco's Xevious commonly cited as inspiration. Enemies come at your little ship in increasingly tough waves to be shot at, whilst also shooting at you. One hit and you’re dead.
Gradius is remembered for its innovative power-up system.
By default, your ship, the Vic Viper, is very slow and the gun is a peashooter. When you successfully take out a full wave of enemies, they will drop a flashing orange power-up.
Unlike most SHMUP’s, this won’t give you an instant boost. Instead, you have a bar across the bottom of the screen with six sections, labeled: Speed Up, Missile, Double, Laser, Option and “?”.
As you collect the tokens, a section of the bar is highlighted, starting with Speed Up, and moving right one each time you collect another. When you get to the one you want, you press a button to “buy” it (essentially).
‘Speed Up’ is self-explanatory. You can stack upto 5 of these, which is frankly too many to actually control. You’ll just end up going straight into enemies or walls. One or two is enough.
‘Missile’ lets you drop bombs at the same time as your regular firing, useful for taking out ground enemies. Otherwise you’ve got to risk getting low to line up your horizontal shots, and it’s too easy to connect with terrain and die instantly.
‘Double’ splits your projectiles so they alternate between regular horizontal and an upward-diagonal shot, useful for taking out enemies above you. The big downside is your rate of fire becomes terrible.
‘Laser’ is a horizontal firing beam which can go through multiple enemies.
‘Option’ spawns these little satellites which follow you around and mimic your actions. Each time you fire, so do they, effectively multiplying your attack power. You can stack upto 4 of them for some serious offense. The Options are invincible, so can also be positioned to give you some protection, absorbing enemy fire.
The “?” (despite the odd name) is actually a temporary shield which latches on the front of your ship and absorbs damage, shrinking a bit each time. It’s only really useful for enemy projectiles coming straight at you horizontally (which most don’t).
Double and Laser are the only two that can’t be active at the same time, since they take over your primary weapon. Apart from a few instances where enemies are positioned in tricky spots above you, the Laser is more useful.
You can appreciate the power-up system for its originality and implementation. Managing it at the same time as trying to not get killed adds extra challenge, since you’ve got to keep an eye on which position the marker is at, while also maneuvering around. You might be desperate for a “?” and accidentally grab an extra one, resetting it back to Speed Up.
There’s also a blue coloured power-up which will appear every 15th time one is dropped. This is a screen-clearing bomb. Maybe it will help you out of a scrape, maybe not, it really just depends when it drops.
The first stage in Gradius seems difficult at first, but with a bit of familiarisation, you should be able to get through it easily. Enemies come in from the right of the screen, there’s some stuck to the floor and ceiling, but it’s not too bad. Then you face the Big Core for the first time.
This boss repeats through most stages, getting a bit faster each time. So named for the weak spot at its centre, it bobs up and down the right-side of the screen, firing large missiles at you. You’re on the other side of the screen shooting back. The core is protected by several barriers which break through, eventually opening up the core for direct hits.
The difficulty jumps from this point.
Stage 2 adds vertical scrolling in addition to the automatic horizontal scrolling, requiring you to navigate lots of rock obstacles (with enemies on them). The vertical scrolling kind of loops, so an enemy above you will be below you if you fly down the screen. You have to work out the best route through, so you can hit or avoid them, without them hitting you first.
Small enemy ships will fly by, and since they’re not in your direct path, you’ll not worry about them ...only for them to launch a quick moving projectile just before they leave the screen which just kills you. Other times, you won’t even see what it is that’s killed you.
Just before the second Big Core encounter, there’s a sequence where a swarm of ships appear out of nowhere and make a beeline straight for you. They come from all over, above, below and sides so that there’s not much you can do other than die most of the time.
The game does feature scaling difficulty. If you get to this bit at the end of stage 2 having not died yet, you will. When you start again, minus all your power-up’s, the number and speed of enemies is significantly reduced.
Stage 3 introduces the series’ famous Moai heads. They’re super annoying, shooting out waves of projectiles when they open their mouths. This is also the only time they’re vulnerable to attack, which is ok for the ones that are facing you, but a lot are on the floor or ceilings.
I suspect a large part of being good at Gradius is familiarisation and learning the exploits. This is another vertical scrolling stage, so there are different routes through, and sometimes you can position your Options to cover you, or arrange them so they’re “inside” the Moai heads sprites, so can destroy them that way.
Stage 4 was just more of the same.
Stage 5 introduces these strange pink brain/cloud-looking enemies, with these long arms made of circles, like a string of pearls. Each one is an individual sprite, which gives the arms a fluid motion, but the framerate takes a hit (to your benefit) when there’s a few of them onscreen. The arms can be destroyed by shooting a specific circle in the string. This stage is maybe the least challenging of them all.
Stage 6 has these alien flowers which home in on you. The boss is different, a purple “thing” that pelts you with bullets. If you’ve for the “?” shield or your Options well positioned, you will win, if not then there’s no room to manoeuvre around the swarm of incoming projectiles… so you die. It doesn’t feel well designed.
The final stage (7) just throws absolutely everything at you.
There isn’t really a final boss (as would become a series tradition). Manage to make it to the end, and you come up against a massive alien brain. It can’t really kill you. You shoot it’s “wires” off, and the game loops back to Stage 1, but harder!
Overall, Gradius is just bloody hard. It is an arcade SHMUP, so you may or may not see this as a negative.
You get 2 lives for your credit, earning an extra one at 20,000 points, and then every 70,000 after that. You don’t respawn exactly where you die, but tend not to have to redo much of the stage.
The big downside to the power-up system is that if you do ever die (and you will), your power-ups are reset, and this makes it too hard to push on. The default speed and firepower of the Viper is so poor, you will likely quickly burn through the rest of your lives in short order.
Each stage is made up of three sections, the first being “open” space, with incoming waves of enemies intended to make it easy to pick up a few power-up’s. Then more of an enclosed area, with terrain to crash into. Then the boss.
But in practice, this doesn’t work so well. If you restarted the stage from the beginning each time, then it might work. But with the checkpoints, you’ll start mid-stage when you die and have little chance to pick up many upgrades, before you die again soon after, from being pathetically slow and underpowered.
There are no Continues in Gradius. If you’re out of lives, even if you have credits, it’s Game Over and you have to start Stage 1 from scratch.
The music is pretty ”shrill”, not that you’d be able to hear it anyway in the arcade. The boss music sounds more like a theme for a bonus stage. It feels like an odd choice.
To call Gradius a hard game would be an understatement.
I found it very difficult. Too difficult in fact for my delicate console gamer sensibilities. Hardened SHMUP vets might disagree.
I can see that this might be a game you would come back to again and again over the years, and maybe that is the mark of a classic arcade game.
6/10
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