Raving Rants From A Nintendo Madman: Axelay And The Death Of The Dread Beast GREED

Let's talk about shmups. Side scrolling and vertical scrolling. Shmups and I have a rocky relationship. I've mastered many a hard game domain in recent years, but the shmup remains something just beyond my grasp. Mastery of the shmup requires a focused, all-encompassing view of every single thing hurtling towards your space fighter or airplane or cute anime girl. Failure to do this results in a penalty more severe than most games; let us call it the Nigh-Impossible State. The Nigh-Impossible State really only exists in the console shmup. In the land of the arcade? The very stomping grounds of the Dread Beast GREED? Your entire existance is a Nigh-Impossible State. The deck is stacked against you because money is on the line. That mentality led to the console shmups of the Nintendo age. It led to things like Gradius, or Image Fight. Things where death is the most severe penalty. You don't just go back. You go back and lose all your progress, thus making success about 10 times harder than it was when you initially fucked up. It makes it so the only way to clear these things reliably is to no-death them. I spent an afternoon learning Gradius on the NES. By about 1:30 or so I had mapped out the optimal way to fly through each stage. It still took me three hours to do it because I literally had to do it no-death. There was just no other way to survive the onslaught of the latter levels. Something had to change. Something had to evolve. This just isn't working.

Enter 1992. Enter something we shouldn't even be talking about proper on a blog for the NES. Like it or not, the Super Nintendo existed in tandem with the NES. It's a free day and the emperor's on holiday, so let me tell you about this shmup. Let me tell you about Axelay, because it may just be my favorite shmup of all time. First of all, it is very very good. It is a Konami game, and they know their good games. They also know their shmups, having made Gradius... which makes this all the more interesting. Axelay is almost an atonement. A final exorcism of the arcade mentality. It was already weakened by the release of Gradius III on the SNES. That game's arcade embodiment was notorious for being utterly ridiculous. The dread beast GREED at his most powerful... to say nothing of that little punch-and-kick game that Lady Capitalism and Capcom were cooking up. Still, when it came time to plop it on a console, they learned. They toned things down and in the process made a Gradius game that's actually pretty damn fun. The Syndrome still exists, but for the first time in forever the dread beast was restricted. This space was toxic to the dread beast GREED, and Axelay contained the red dust which would kill it. The experimental compound, MODE-7. Axelay is riddled with it, a curved horizon that beckons the player.

Axelay hits all the right notes. Good gameplay, good music, and it looks lovely. The single best innovation, however, is its complete and utter subversion of the typical shmup dynamic. Usually in these things, you start off weak as butter and collect powerups from fallen foes. The powerups help you kill more things, and let you do it without much fuss. A death results in everything being lost, and you are now weak as butter again... but still facing the difficult hordes of foes. Death after death will rack up, and you are now in the Nigh-Impossible State. Axelay's genius in this regard. There are no powerups. You select three weapons at the beginning of a stage, and you can cycle through them at will. All three have their uses and are generally very effective against killing the hordes of enemies. A hit from an enemy projectile, however, will destroy your current weapon and leave you with a dinky pea-shooter. You are forced to switch to a new weapon, and it may not be the one you were hoping for in that segment. Things have become more difficult for you, but not impossible. The true wonder comes when you finally do mess up again and your ship is destroyed.

You respawn with all of your weapons intact. The Nigh-Impossible State, reversed. Your terrible situation has been averted. The only cost? A life of your life bar, and this game has limited continues. Axelay understands. It knows that a lost life is enough of a punishment. Lose too many lives and you're done, but it doesn't need to drain all of them for one mistake. The dread beast GREED isn't here to lust for pretend quarters. It can sit there and be a challenging game without smiting you where you stand for daring to err, as humans do. There's hope for the future yet.

God, do I love Axelay.