"An excellent shooter that deviates sharply from the shooter norm"

As of right now, no other game gets close to as much running time on my Sega Saturn as this game. Made by the elite and oft-idolized video game development company, Treasure, this game exceeds in nearly every aspect, creating an amazing game that turns the familiar vertical 2d shootin genre on its head.

In terms of graphics, this game is unrivaled. Einhander? R-Type Delta? Eat your heart out. And they say the system can't do 3D. From a technical standpoint, the game is a marvelous feat of programming; transparencies are used to create clouds through a night sky, polygon heavy bosses collapse into themselves to create incredible explosions, and high resolution backgrounds roll by as all of this takes place. Sure, there's slowdown, but with the game's difficulty level, it's necessary. What about the style of the graphics? Wonderuful...wonderful! Your ship rises straight up into the sky and finally meets with a boss for the first time, framed by a bright full moon. A snake boss slithers into view out of attacking range just as the music changes the mood. The final boss? Amazing.

The sound has been criticized by some people. Attacking weapons are not quite as full as in other games. Explosions sound nice on a decent stereo system. Other sound effects do their job well, especially the ubiquitous "boss charging up for super powered shot" which sounds quite menacing. The real treasure of this game for me is the music. Composed and sequenced by Sakimoto Hitoshi (who also worked on the much acclaimed Final Fantasy Tactics soundtrack and is the composer for one of Square's next projects, Vagrant Story), this soundtrack is a grandiose collection of Wagnerian tracks. The main and secondary themes he has created, which are employed all throughout the game, are absolutely wonderful. His implementation of these themes into all of the in-game tracks is quite amazing. As a matter of fact, I'm tempted to call this soundtrack the finest video game OST ever created.

And what of the gameplay? Radiant Silvergun is not a twitch shooter. Rather, you have to use your smarts in order to get a high score, thereby making your weapons more powerful. First of all, you start with all seven weapons already equipped. By gaining more points by using your weapons to destroy the enemies, your weapons will level up faster. However, the point system is different and quite clever; all enemies are colored either red, blue, or yellow. By eliminating these enemies in a certain order, you can get many more points. For example, destroy all blues in a certain level and avoiding the few occurences of reds will get you many more points than shooting everything that pops into view. Chains of single colored enemies go up with every three enemies shot down. There is another type of chain that exists and it's simply called the special chain: by following up a red with a single blue enemy, then continuing with only yellow enemies, you will get an exceptionally high number of points; every three yellows will earn you points that start at 10000 and go up in increments of 10000 or more as you continue. As you can imagine, one wrong enemy hit can really ruin what could have been an extremely hefty chain.

This is a very difficult shooter; even on the very easy setting, it is an amazing feat to go through the game on a single credit worth 10 lives, even moreso with the default three lives. Thankfully, as you play the game, you can earn more credits and extra options will open up, allowing you to further increase your survivability.

This is probably one of the most satisfying purchases I've made in my entire gaming career and has strengthened my faith in the incredible skill at Treasure. If you can pick up this game, by all means, do so! This is a wonderful game to add to any person's collection.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99