Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar

"OH HELL YEAH!"

Intro: Back in the golden days of 16bit, shooter games were pretty popular with gamers. 1992, as street fighter 2 was dominant but motal kombat was starting to grasp, would be considered as a big year for shooters, the SNES had a whole bunch of shooters ranging from Axelay, Space Megaforce, and Parodious, but the Sega machine had a whole collection from 2 yrs before, Gaiares was king, but its most popular series was none other than Tecnosoft’s Thunder Force series, no one knew what happened with the 1st one, in fact many players have never played it or seen it. Never came out in a console, TF2 was launched along with the MD/Genesis and was praised well, 1990’s Thunder Force III was the icing of the series with its spectacular graphics and great gameplay…or so we though. At the 1992 Tokyo Game Show tecnosoft unveiled Thunder Force IV for the Sega 16bit. Launched at the same time as the rare and great Gleylancer from Masaya/NCS. We never got Gleylancer and bids begin as $120 USD, it’s a great game don’t get me wrong but Thunder Force IV is God to the shooters of that era.

Story: 9/10 honeslty there isn’t much of a story,“You must help to protect several planets from total destruction at the hands of a mad alien race looking to conquer the universe!” yeah yeah you’ve done this before, but let me tell you how this game got released in the US, TFII was published by Sega during the Genesis launch, however HOT’B, an old Japan based publisher in CA brought over TF3 in 1990 still endorsing the Tecnosoft name. I don’t know who asked for the rights but in 92 it was Sega who got the rights for TF4, but in the US they called it Lightening Force. Thankfully no one got confused with the name, but my guess is that some SOA exec’s got tongue-twisted by saying Thunder Force IV 10 times in a row.

Graphics: 10/10 Man, you’re not gonna believe the graphics in this game, they are awesome, the opening stages have some great visuals, and their environments truly reflect on it. Everything is well designed and animated. The city stage is cool and so full of night-life, the parallax in the space colony is sweet, the desert storm stage is great with its winds and all, I can go on and on. Unlike the SNES games, this one didn’t rely on rotation and zoom effects, instead it used all the scrolling and parallax the system could have provided just as it did with Sonic 2. I wonder why Sega didn’t promote this game with their “blast processing” marketing campaign.

Gameplay: 9/10 The TF series have been good with gameplay and this one is no exception, this isn’t just another shoot n fly game, this one provides you with awesome weaponry and challenging tasks. The weapon system is as in the previous installments but more powered up, the “craw: option now has a super weapon that when charge can wipe out most standard enemies on screen. There are many patters to take during these fights and strategy is fully needed for bosses, the controls respond great and quick with little to hesitate on selection.

Difficulty: 10/10 ONE HARD GAME!!, don’t be fooled, this one looks hard and plays hard, you’ll lose lives in the 1st stage and expect to get hazed and reamed in the latter stages, bosses are tricky so as I said before strategy will be key. Nevertheless if you survive, the ending is long and enjoyable for a shooter, there is a code on this game that allows you to have about 99 lives, but I think only the US Lightening Force has this code intact, the Japanese version which I have does not so its been a rough ride for me.

Sound and Music: 9/10 AWESOME SOUNDTRACK!! Its been said that the TF series has some of the best music in shooters and they weren’t kidding. This game truly rocks. The ambient music flows well with stages and the jazzy tunes are cool, but its all about the hard rock and riffs of synthesized heavy metal. All I can say is that Funky Surrounding must have had inspiration from none other than Metallica! I sweat to you that the opening theme fully resembles “master of puppets” to the core. Christmas 1992 was forgiving for Sega 16bit in the sound department, If Yuzo Koshiro’s Bare Knuckle II soundtrack was the pinnacle of house, hip hop and techno music. Then Funky Surrounding’s TFIV soundtrack was the master of hard rock and heavy metal in videogames.

Overall: 9/10. This is a great game, a true gem to your Sega collection. TFV came out in 1997 for Sega Saturn and the Sony PSX and that was just as awesome, I don’t know what happened to tecnosoft and I sure wished they were around, it would be great to see this game on the PS2 someday, with Gradius, & R-Type making comebacks, it would be nice if someone brought back Thunder Force

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/03