R-Type Final

"A game of contradictions"

To the best of my knowledge, my first encounter with the original R-Type was in a local arcade back in about 1989. You always hear people telling tales of that one arcade game that sucked up all their time and had them continually feeding coins into the machine, and for me, R-Type was that game. Brutally hard, but with an addictive twist: The force. An indestructible pod that can be attached to the front or rear of your ship and can be upgraded via pickups left behind by enemies. It's the series' defining characteristic, but some might say it's greatest weakness. It's presence demands a certain framework of game design, and Irem haven't deviated from it in the series' 18 years and 20+ iterations. Finally however, Irem have seen fit to bring the series to an end, and pooled their resources into one last effort: R-Type Final.

My initial impressions of the game were pretty unfavourable… Admittedly, it's done a lot to win me over since then, but the fact remains that it doesn't really come close to the lofty heights reached by Treasure's masterpiece (and king of the genre) Gradius V. And that's a shame; but to be fair, I get the distinct impression that Irem had some rather different goals in mind with this particular project. Whereas Gradius is all about extravagant twitch-gaming, R-Type Final seems more concerned with things like atmosphere and setting, and although it's not very explicit, there's actually much more of a story to the game than you might expect (and indeed, you need look no further than the game's title screen, and the background in the very beginning of stage 1 for confirmation). In the end, the game offers three endings to the R-Type saga, and all of them are bittersweet. Take your pick.

The game has a lot of neat touches like that. There is a clever network of branching paths through the game, with 7 or 8 levels being played from a total of 16, and it's capped off with some really novel challenges in the game's closing stages... Furthermore, there are 101 different ships to unlock and many of them are sufficiently unique that different tactics are required to make the most of them, lending the game a tremendous amount of replay value.

And that's a good thing to have, but unfortunately, the game suffers from one deeply engraved flaw that, depending on your patience, may well override many of its good points, and that is that the pacing is just all wrong... Some levels scroll by at a ridiculously pedestrian pace, and all too often they consist of long spells (sometimes minutes worth) of zero challenge, followed by a 10-second period of extreme difficulty, followed again by another long period of simplicity. This, combined with the fact that dying sends you back to a prior "checkpoint" (a big faux pas in shooters as far as I'm concerned) and that many of these checkpoints are awkwardly placed, ultimately makes progression agonisingly slow, and the game ends up being much more annoying and drawn out than it ever should've been.

And then on top of that, we have the levels themselves… They're not bad, really, I mean, there's a tremendously palpable and desolate atmosphere to many of them (try playing with headphones), and there are some truly memorable moments towards the end (indeed, stage F-A, with it's silhouettes of people having sex in the background is one of the weirdest and most wonderful final stages I've ever played) but the fact remains that too many of them simply aren't that interesting to play. Stage 3, with its massive battleship, should've been amazing, but there's just so much slowdown, and it's all so dull, and the checkpoints are so awkward, that it just saps the will to play sometimes.

And yet! For some reason, I keep playing. The game is full of contradictions like that. It's a shooter that has a story to tell, with levels that are interesting, yet also boring, and are hard, but also easy. It's a game that I started out hating, but gradually found myself liking. Its flaws make it an easy target for criticism (rightly so), but it's actually fairly enjoyable in its own quirky way, and unlocking all the stages and ships is actually incredibly addictive (gotta catch 'em all). In fact, the game as a whole becomes infinitely more agreeable after you finish it for the first time. By then, you've had enough experience with the game to understand the enemy patterns (thus making the checkpoint problem less of an issue) and the fact that many of the ships are unlocked on a time-played basis, means you can start to appreciate the game's slower and more atmospheric moments, and not worry about seeing the story to an end.

Honestly, while it's not the greatest shooter ever made, if you can find the game on the cheap (and that's not much of a problem) then you could do a lot worse than give it a try. There's a real wealth of content in the game, both in terms of gameplay and narrative, and it exudes a great deal of personality and character as well. Ultimately, while it's evident that their reach exceeded their grasp, Irem really reached for the stars with this one, and in the end, delivered a fitting end to a classic series.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/06/05