"Radiant Silvergun could have made the Saturn a contender"

For years Sega's propaganda machine, fueled by Sega loyalist's, tried to convince the public that the Sega Saturn could be, with adequate coding skill, a more versatile, more powerful 3-D gaming machine than Sony's Playstation. This was despite the fact that ALL of the Saturn games, even the amazing ones, had inferior texture resolution and color depth (Wipeout), and almost all Saturn games had lower polygon counts(Resident Evil, Toshinden-Which are both impressive translations considering.) When you add to that the fact that a lack of in hardware special effects made coders use resources that should have been utilized to pump out polygons to simulate those effects (fog, particle effects, lighting) You had a crop of 3-D games that visually, were never going to be able to keep up with the competition. The Saturn Flopped.

What Sega should have had was a first generation game that was a tech-demo that pulled out all the stops and displayed every possible trick that the Saturn could do.

Enter the very end of the last generation of Saturn games. Long after the Saturn was a viable contender on the console market, Treasure released a game that was the ultimate Sega Saturn tech-demo. It was also one of the best playing games and it was definitely the most fun game on the system. Radiant Silvergun is a game that, had it been launched with the Saturn, could have destroyed any questions of power and capability. It would have repopularized the classic shooter in the US. It would have rerouted the path of the console wars. Hurray for wild speculation. That notwithstanding, Radaint Silvergun is a fantastic display of the rare combination of style and substance.

Presentation:
The style is cinematic, urgent, dramatic and over the top. It's the classic shooter formula cubed. The presentation is hyper slick. The game is presented as something of a playable anime. It opens with a movie, that sets the story and throughout the game there are scenes of spoken dialog matched with the speakers picture, shown over scenes of in-game action. The music in Radiant Silvergun is, as a whole, my favorite game music of all time. It's big and romantic (in the compositional sense) and URGENT! I love games that pace like this(Burning Rangers.) The actual scrolling moves at a variety of paces, but there is constantly…stuff, beautiful stuff flying at you. This coupled with the beautiful music makes you feel like your trying to beat the clock to save the world. And then you have the graphics.

Graphics:
The artistic design is awesome, but the technical tricks are unbelievable. This game does every cool thing that you've ever seen the Saturn do and then says, “Oh, you think that's cool? Check out this.” The Saturn's VDP 2 chip is warping and stretching fields like Reed Richard's body, while simultaneously generating insane parallax. These effects are melded almost seamlessly with a few expertly placed polygonal background elements and polygonal bossed to create an incomparable illusion of 3-D. By the by, those bosses are amazingly designed. They have clean, sharp polygonal forms and are covered with some of the cleanest textures to appear on the system. Their weapon effects are a sight to behold . In the last level of the game you have some boss fights that, in that generation at least, are visually unequalled. The sprite based objects are equally beautiful, and wonderfully, intricately detailed. The best part is that it is all in super-high resolution at 60 fps.

Gameplay:
The substance is...substantial. Treasure creates games with kinetic, dynamic gameplay and unprecedented character play control. This game is no different. Your ship (the Radiant Silvergun ) has six different types of shots that you have at all times. They allow you to shoot at anything, anywhere on the screen from wherever you are. As the game progresses each weapon gets more powerful, depending on how much it's used. When you get them all up to 33(the highest level )you feel as though you could take out the Death Star! For specific, close up attacks your ship has a sword, which you can wield in any direction. You can also use that sword to swipe at and load up on specific pink shots that certain enemies shoot. These charge your hyper sword, which is basically a graphically nifty screen clearing bomb. This also gets more powerful as the game progresses. The fact that you have to constantly interact with this game on many levels as opposed to just holding fire and dodging is the thing for me that moves this game from being great to being "the greatest shooter ever made!" You have some very approachable twitch action, but with a level of interactivity approaching a good fighting game.

You can play the game in a special console mode that allows you to save your progress in powering up you ship, which is pretty nifty in itself. There are also “Merry the dog” icons scattered throughout the game. You can only find these with your lock-on shot, but they open up a variety of extras. Additionally, there is massive scoring through color chaining for the hardcore long term player. See…Substantial.

This game is rare and expensive, but if you are a Saturn fan, or a Shooter fan, or if you just really love spectacular games then you must have this game!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/26/03, Updated 01/01/08

Game Release: Radiant Silvergun (JP, 07/23/98)