Ikaruga

"Best shmup ever?"

Ikaruga is not a game for impatient people. But I guess few games by Treasure are. Ikaruga is a game so simple, so conceptually basic, that one could get the hang of the controls in minutes. But somehow, someway, this game is blown up to epic proportions using only what it starts out with. I still can't figure it out. I've never hated a game so much on the first play compared to how much I love it now. I guess I just wasn't good at it, or maybe I was just frustrated by how I was losing to such a simple game. The concept is very easy. It is a shmup spaceship game akin to the kind of games you likely played in arcades when you were a kid, when they were still around. But in those other shmups, you likely had powerups and a health bar to worry about. Ikaruga is individual in that it is stripped down to as simple yet beautiful a core as you will ever see. Your ship can be changed between black and white colors at will. When your ship is white, it shoots white bullets, and black bullets when black. Infinite ammo, rapid fire. Your enemies are also of black and white colors. Your bullets will do more damage to a given enemy when the color of your bullets is opposite their color. Your enemies, ranging from tiny little ships to big gyroscopic cages of evil, also shoot bullets. If a bullet touches you of your own color, you you absorb it into an energy guage, the bars in which represent homing missiles that you can fire back at the enemies at will. If a bullet of the opposite color touches you, you die. YOU DIE. Period. You can't sustain damage, because if you get hit, you're gone. So keeping your ass alive is as much of a concern as shooting your enemies.

This should be as simple as I just explained it to be. It's not. It would be far too easy. There are three modes of difficulty. On the easiest mode, everything I have explained holds true. I'd like to note that I have only beaten easy mode without continuing once, and I busted my ass for days to do it. On normal mode, when you destroy an enemy of your color, they emit bullets of their own color. This seems good, because bullets of your color are absorbable, but when you are switching colors, that's a problem. On hard mode, all destroyed ships emit bullets, regardless of your color. This isn't enough. The first level is simple enough, and yet still abrasively challenging. But soon enough, enemy ships are elaborately zipping across the screen at ludicrous speeds, bullets are both colors are flying all over hell and gone, you are switching back and forth between colors feverishly avoiding inevitable death in a crossfire of adrenaline, and concentrating on not getting killed by the ever changing environment. This game is aggravating as all getout, it's really hard, and it's frustrating to play when you don't know it very well. And yet it's simple. There is no reason why you shouldn't be acing this game.

And yet that's where the real charm of the game comes in. The clash of simplicity and challenge make for one of the most hypnotic and enjoyable games I've ever played. At it's heart, Ikaruga is an arcade game. But you can't find it in any arcades outside of Japan, so the only remedy is getting one of the faithful ports either on Dreamcast or Gamecube. The way the game was intended to be played is in a dark food parlor in a corner in Japan somewhere, but it's simply uneconomical to be spending that many quarters honing your skills when you could play it at home. I remember when this game truly opened up for me. I was tired and pissed off, sitting in my room staring at my TV wondering why I sucked so bad at this game. But I just kept on playing and I didn't think about it too much. The TVs volume was way down and some relaxing music was on the stereo. I just lost myself. The next thing I knew I was three levels in and completely unaware of the fact that I was hypnotized, dodging the patterns of bullets and ships and not even thinking about what I was doing. And then I died and I got all pissed off again. That is the beauty here. That line between pure bliss and anger is extremely thin. This is a flatout gorgeous game too, and the background moves at a breathtaking pace using really good graphics. The soundtrack is alright too, not quite as good as some other Treasure games, but it's orchestrated enough to be exciting and well worth listening to. And to top the whole thing off is a simple yet endlessly testing combo system. If you kill three enemies of the same color in a row, you start a chain which breaks once you have not done three of the same color in a row. It's just the thing for real fanatics to expand on. I, for one, have enough trouble staying alive on easy mode, so I think I'll pass. It's a tragically beautiful game, and the absolute best of it's kind. Definitely worth whatever you have to do to play it, especially if you already own a Dreamcast or a Gamecube.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/08

Game Release: Ikaruga (US, 04/15/03)