"Red, blue, yellow. This is not Romania: it's Radiant Silvergun!"

The year is 2006. Games nowadays look and play great. We're in the era of the Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, Call of Duty 2 and the like. I had some extra cash, and always heard Radiant Silvergun was a great game. The best shooter of them all. The holy grail of video games. Well, I played this game, and it completely blew me away.

I had never been a fan of shooters before playing Ikaruga. I liked Salamander on NES but besides that, never cared for the genre. Ikaruga came and stayed in my mind for a long time. How could a game be so perfect? So simple, and yet so damn difficult? Surviving was one thing, but chaining whole levels? That was something else.

The weapon system in Radiant Silvergun is incredibly well done. Six different weapons, six buttons on the controller. If you prefer, you can use many combinations of the same 3 buttons to access to all the six weapons. Really cunning! A+

The story? One of the best ever, for any video game. I don't speak Japanese, but I read the translations. They can be found on the internet... If you're into anime, there is no reason you wouldn't like the way the plot unfolds. I cannot really comment on the voice acting, but it sounds good. A

Sometimes slow due to the obvious abuse in level design and effects, the game is never broken. I have never seen a game that good-looking on the Saturn.... ever. For a console that was not the best for 3d programming, that game is really (and I mean really) well animated. A+

So, in the end, is it worth the 180-200$? Well, I have played the game about 50 hours so far, which makes it 3-4$ an hour. This is by far the greatest amount of time I have spent on a game since Final Fantasy II on the SNES. If you're remotely interested in the shmup genre, get this game. Yeah, it's hard to find, and yeah, it's not cheap, but you will never enjoy a game that much I assure you. If you don't like it, well... keep it a couple of years because this is sure to become a real collector's dream in a couple of years. If you're not a shmup fan, this game will turn you into one. Go to on-line auction sites and order from a Japanese shop. Oh and get Batsugun, too, because it just plain rocks, and you can get it for 40-50$!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/06