Keio Flying Squadron 2 (Saturn)

Developer:

Victor

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Release Date:

1996

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Systems:

Saturn

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about more Keio Flying Squadron! The alien bunny girl adventures continue.

The first Keio Flying Squadron is a shoot 'em up on the Sega Mega CD that by some miracle got a release in Europe and America. I already showed that one off last week. Then Keio Flying Squadron 2 came out three years later on the Sega Saturn and somehow also got translated to English, though I'm not sure it ever made it to the US. Finally there was a side-story party game on the PlayStation called 蘭未ちゃんの大江戸すごろく慶応遊撃隊外伝. That one never made it out of Japan.

Out of curiosity I checked the Japanese version of Keio 2 and it turns out that the title text completely obscures the background in the original game as well. Someone spent ages drawing that!

Here's some more exciting trivia for you: Victor Entertainment got out of game development in 1996 so this is one of the last games they ever made. I'd tell you about their other games, but I've never heard of most of them. Banana, ROM² Karaoke, UltraBox 5-gō... oh Legendary Axe, that sounds familiar. I have no idea what it is, but I recognise the name.

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The game starts with an anime intro, just like the first game, but this time the video quality's good enough to actually see what's going on!

Plus it skips the history lesson and the narration and gets straight to a scene of protagonist Rami eating with her grandparents in their reconstructed house. She apparently earned back her food privileges by the end of the previous game, plus she owns a Sega Saturn now! Going to be a bit hard to put discs in with a TV sitting on the lid, though they can worry about that later as the first Saturn game won't be out for another 130 years.

Unfortunately their feast is interrupted by a stranger bursting in through the floor (and through their dinner table) and then swiping that glass ornament with the star in it from off the top of the cupboard.

Well that's one way to put English subtitles on top of a video I guess.

The text's just there to tell us who she is though, as the rest of the time the intro has fully dubbed, fully unsubbed English dialogue, and it sounds like they've got the same voice actors back from the first game. Works for me.

Now that she's got what she came for, pompous snow globe thief Yamatai Himiko blasts off in her tunnelling vehicle, doing to the walls and ceiling what she'd already done to the floor. So that's the second time someone's stole one of their family treasures.

This means it's time for someone to get into the bunny suit and give chase! Again!

Granddad decides it's going to be him this time and his wife retaliates by smacking him around the head with a fan. She hits him so hard he's left embedded in what's left of the floor, with his legs and his little cotton tail sticking out.

By the way, that can't be Rami's outfit he's wearing as the colours are wrong, it's way too small to belong to the grandmother, so that means it must be his old costume from when he used to be the one saving the day. They should've totally made a prequel with him and his wife kicking ass in matching bunny suits.

Rami does the Hyper-Cutie Bunny Change herself to get her own bunny suit on, then leaps into action! 

But she doesn't have to go far, as Yamatai's rocket is intercepted above the house by an air galleon. It's Dr Pon, the villain from the first game, and he's come to grab the treasure for his own collection!

Our hero yells up to him, demanding that he give back the treasure. Pon says no, but he offers to give her something much better instead, which seems like a fair deal to Rami and she gets a huge grin on her face in anticipation.

It wasn't all she hoped for though.

Come on, hasn't the house suffered enough already?

Fortunately the heroes are flung clear and manage to activate their anti-air defences with a mid-air phone call, which bombard Dr Pon's ship with flak, causing him to drop a scroll with a map on it. With this in their possession they can find all of the snow globes... which will make them rich!

They're not on a mission to protect the secret treasure of the ancestors and save the world in this game. This time they're just in it for the money.

Huh, the intro's over already? Screw the game, I want to watch three seasons of that.

Wow it's like I put the first game on by mistake. It's got the same blinking severed head floating next to red menu text in the same black void. But they did change the menu to English this time instead of just writing translations underneath the kanji, so there's something I can appreciate.

Also there are two new interesting new options there: 'Continue' and 'Extra'. I've got nothing to continue yet, but there might be something extra I can check out.

Nope, all extras are locked until I can get more points. Or less points it seems, as some of the unlockables require a negative score. That's new, I don't think I've ever seen that in a game before.

I get the impression these are all pictures as I can't see anything like "Interview with lead designer" or "Iron man mode" in the list. It doesn't seem like I'm getting a hidden LCD minigame to play this time either. I'll check out the options menu instead and see if there's anything interesting in there.

There's a "How to run" option? You don't see that in many games either. For some reason they've got it set so that I have to hold the direction button down to speed up, which only ever works in games called Sonic the Hedgehog. Double tapping a direction is also an option, but I'm going to map run to a shoulder button like a sane person.

The first game let me choose how many lives I got each continue but that's been denied me this time. Though to make up for it the game's defaulted to Easy mode. I always leave games on the normal difficulty when I'm writing about them, but do I play this on Easy because it's the default, or Medium because it's medium?

Easy is really tempting, but I'm not a baby gamer so I guess I have to stick it on Medium.

CHAPTER 1: LOOK MA, THERE'S SUMO STADIUM

SCENE 1: THE FOREST

Man those are some pretty late 90s 2D platformer pixels. I'm loving the abundance of animation frames as well. It's a shame games like this had gone out of fashion by this point in the 90s as the Saturn was really good at them.

It's weird that that game's a platformer though, seeing as the first Keio Flying Squadron was a shoot 'em up. It didn't feature a squadron but it did at least have flying and now this won't even let me have that!

This is so much a platformer in fact that it starts on a forest level and has me collecting golden floating rabbits while stomping on raccoons. Well I mean it didn't TELL me to do that, I just kind of… did it. It's giving me +1 point for every stomped raccoon though and I'm considering that to be positive reinforcement. Only 48 points left to collect and I can find out what "Saturday Night Fever" is in the Extras menu!

I found a giant pink hammer so now I can kill raccoons by hitting them as well! I love the sprite rotation effect on the raccoon corpses. Though it's starting to dawn on me that I should've left this one alive so that I could hop on him to reach those bunnies up there.

Actually it doesn't seem like I can get that much height even after bouncing off their heads, so I'm a bit confused now. It's lucky I don't have to collect all 100 rabbits in the level I guess. I mean I assume I don't.

Here, have a hypnotic GIF of Rami's very purposeful walk cycle so you can see the abundance of frames they've given her. I wish I could make a GIF like this for every move, if only to show how it's nearly impossible to get her to close her mouth, but I need to be considerate of readers whose internet is as bad as mine.

Agh, a bird swooped down out of nowhere and knocked the hammer right out of Rami's hands! I was just minding my own business trying to smash the bird nest to see if it was a threat I could interact with and... oh, hang on, maybe there's a connection there.

Rami's still alive though, so I guess I have at least one hit point, and I was able to run over and pick up the hammer before it flickered away so I'm still good for hammer violence.

12 GOLDEN RABBITS LATER

Oh no, I got bird murdered! I really need to be more aware of when I'm getting close to a nest as I would've been able to dodge that bird swooping in from the trees no trouble if I'd been ready for it.

Now I've been kicked back to the start of the level. Plus I've lost five of my hard earned points! Apparently the life of one Rami is worth that of five raccoons.

I've found Rami's pet dragon, Spot, but she's not jumping on and flying away on her. I figured this would be the start of a shooting level but nope, they're just having a blinking contest. And I'm losing.

After a short walk into the danger zone Rami ran into her arch nemesis Yamatai Himiko as well and the two of them had a bit of a chat, with actual spoken dialogue! It's funny, I've played lots of games with voice acting, it's not exactly a new concept to me, but whenever I hear characters having conversations in a pixel platformer from the 90s my brain does a double-take.

Uh... what just happened? Did I do that, or did Rami do it on her own? I was pressing all the necessary buttons but the timing felt wrong.

Anyway Rami continued on and entered a house, which then got shoved down a mineshaft by a mischievous statue. Just as I planned.

SCENE 2: THE CAVERNS

What? Jumping on these miners gets me minus points? I tried it again to double check and yeah I'm losing score here. I guess these guys are just innocent workers doing their job, completely oblivious to the evil raccoons and golden bunnies all around them. Rami still gets hurt if she walks into them though.

Love that in-between frame I caught her on.

I'm not entirely loving having to jump up this mine shaft with boulders being dropped on my head the whole time though. By some miracle I made it to the top, but I lost my favourite hammer along the way.

The good news is that I just collected my 100th rabbit and earned an extra life! The bad news is I met some raccoons floating down another shaft holding umbrellas, accidentally collided with one from the side on the way down, and lost it again. Back to the start of the level. But on my second time through I found an umbrella myself and it turns out they protect me from the boulders!

Unfortunately I lost another life by colliding with those umbrella raccoons again. Even on normal mode this feels really laid back and easy, and yet I keep screwing it up.

I DON'T LIKE THIS!

Though I suppose it's not really obvious what's going on here from a screenshot.

There was a statue blocking my way with a wooden post next it, so I (eventually) figured out I could jump onto the post to fling the statue into the air for a second so I could slip underneath it. I was feeling pretty smug about how clever I was, so the game decided to punish me by giving me three statues to run underneath this time. And that third one's with the purple headscarf's just leaping up and down on its own, so I have to hope I got my timing right or else I'll be crushed.

But hey I made it through all three on my first try, so now I get to be smug about that now as well. I also found a I found a secret invisible passage through the wall leading to treasure boxes full of rabbits! I've found a few side paths actually and it seems like they're worth investigating.

SCENE 3: EDO RIVER

Fun fact: Edo is the old name for Tokyo.

Another fun fact: I've reached a shooting stage! It's just like a zoomed in version of the first game as I'm holding down the fire button to obliterate every cute animal in my path; it even has the same music. Though the change in scale gives it a different feel.

When you compare them like this Rami v2.0's sprite is only 40% taller and wider than the one from the last game, and that's offset to a degree by the sequel having 30% more pixels on screen, so it shouldn't make that much difference, but it does.

Plus it doesn't help that Spot flies unbearably slowly now.

Was that… was that an armadillo? An armadillo jumped straight into the air into the path of my vehicle!

Oh hang on I just noticed that there's two dudes in the background firing the giant armadillos from a fairly regular sized cannon. Well that all makes perfect sense then.

Thankfully I just continued on from where I was sunk without getting sent back to the start of the level like I usually do. I guess that makes sense though, as when I meet my dragon in a level she works as a checkpoint, so when I'm flying her it's like I'm bringing the checkpoint with me. I think I lost her upgraded mouth-blasts though.

I've reached a boss fight!

These pigs keep pacing back and forth and I have to dodge the fans they toss up into the air. I need to shoot them so they'll grow into giants and spin off into the water, but the homing mini dragon power ups I grabbed earlier don't deal enough damage for proper pig inflation so I need to swoop down to their level to get the job done. Thankfully I figured out (by looking at the manual) that I can change Spot's speed during gameplay by tapping a button, just like in the first game, so I've got her set to maximum manoeuvrability right now.

Miraculously I finished the pigs off without taking a single hit... and then the level kept on going because they were only a mid boss. The stage has given me a massive boost to my score though so I'm not complaining. I've actually reached the double digits!

SCENE 4: SUMO STADIUM

Now Rami's forced her way into a sumo ring for whatever reason.

One of the wrestlers tries to tell her that only men are allowed (and giants apparently) but she tells him she's busy looking for treasure and jumps on his head, knocking both him and the referee out in one move. I should just let her handle all the boss fights from now on, she's so much better at them than I am.

But then an egg with a moustache jumped down and spat out a smaller egg with a smaller moustache and a plant pot on his head! And I totally failed to avoid being hit by it! That's -5 Points, plus I dropped my favourite umbrella.

Fortunately I don't need a weapon to inflict pain on eggs, so I leapt into the air ready to crash down upon plant pot hat's head. Sadly the bigger egg had also jumped into the air, so we crashed into each other and I lost a life. The fight was over before I ever knew what happened!

Losing a life meant restarting the whole fight from the start with no umbrella, and I didn't even survive my first encounter with the plant pot guy this time. Unfortunately my second try also turned out to be my final try as I was out of lives.

There's something really off about the shading on these pictures, but I'm not sure what it is. Also I wish they'd make up their mind what colour Spot is. She's purple outside of gameplay in the first game, blue in this one, and whenever you fly on her she's green.

Anyway I chose to continue and the game thoughtfully put me back at the start of the last scene, not the entire chapter… though I did have to sit through the cutscene with the sumo wrestlers again.

Death can come incredibly fast in this, especially as I don't seem to have any hit points now for whatever reason, but I eventually started making progress against the sumo egg. Once I even got to the phase where he where he starts spinning around the ring on a pencil in his ass like those other Daruma dolls in the first game. But I always made that one mistake that ended it and I'd soon burned through all my continues.

Well I gave it eleven attempts, can't ask more of me than that.

Funny thing is, I'm still enjoying the game! If I was able to instantly retry the fight as many times as necessary I'd still be entire minutes away from rage quitting right now, but I'm not interested in replaying the forest, mine and shooting stage every time I run out of continues. It's bad enough that I had to watch the sumo cutscene like four times!

Hang on, if I can't get past the first proper boss in the game, then that means... I am a baby gamer! I can put the difficulty down to Easy after all! Alright, let's give that a go, from the start.

CHAPTER 2: THE LOST UNDERGROUND KINGDOM

SCENE 1: RODENT KINGDOM

I figured out the secret to victory! First, choose easy mode, that always helps, but second, keep hold of a weapon! The weapons in this are like Sonic the Hedgehog's rings: I basically get a free hit point whenever I'm holding them and I can pick them back up after they're knocked out of my hands if I'm quick. So that explains why my weaponless Rami was dying so unusually quickly in the boss battle.

Also I'm riding a tiny train driven by tiny mice! It used to be a bigger train, but some idiot put the track under this block of rock so the roof got torn off (and the top of the passenger carriage went shortly after). I don't have to be on the train the whole way, but this section of the level is scrolling along with it, so I need to keep up and not get lured into dead ends by ladders leading to the promise of treasures.

I'm done with the train for now, but I've found something else to play with. Turns out that I can pick up these kappas and use them like springs to get to high up areas. This is what I was supposed to do to reach those rabbits in level 1!

I can pick up signs as well, plus statues and all kinds of stuff, and that's in addition to the weapon I'm already holding. So that's basically two extra hit points and all it costs me is the ability to climb ladders. Because climbing a ladder while holding a hammer and a turtle is really hard even for an alien girl in a bunny suit.

It's also hard to make a cave level look good apparently as these graphics look kind of ass compared to that pretty forest from earlier. It's like we've taken a brief detour through 1988.

SCENE 2: FELINE SHRINE

And now I can barely make out what I'm looking at.

Man, what the hell does it want me to do here? I'm locked inside this tiny bit of level full of friendly mice in cat suits, with a sign saying “HIT! TARGET” above me but nothing to hit the targets with. I can't jump up high enough to reach them, I don't have a weapon, and the cats aren't doing anything but creeping me out. I'm really stuck here.

OH! I can pick the cat statues up and lob them at the targets! Well that almost makes sense.

Oh c'mon, things were almost making sense! Why'd a giant enemy crab have to come down and steal my treasure and also me? I don't want to be taken into the sky! Rami doesn't sound keen on it either.

SCENE 3: GAUDY SPACE JUNK

What?

The crab took me up to a flying boat for more mild platforming, but now I've been locked inside a room again and the game won't let me out until I've figured out its latest weirdness.

Oh I have to pick the hand up! That's the answer to half the puzzles in this game it seems. I also have to mash my controller button to use it activate the button on the wall, which I'm not happy about. It hasn't been long since I lost my beloved Xbox 360 controller and I really don't need this one to break as well.

Also I'm keeping the hand. I'm taking it with me, it's mine now.

90 SECONDS OF PLATFORMING LATER

Man, now I know where Valve got the idea for interrupting Half-Life 2's gameplay all the time for a 'stack bricks on top of something' physics puzzle.

There's uses for the items lying around even when you're not trapped in a puzzle room as well, like you can carry a crate over to a ledge you couldn't get onto by jumping. But the game doesn't like littering, so throwing an item costs points. I've never had so much trouble keeping hold of my points in a game before!

BONUS

Hey I've reached a bonus level somehow! This should really help me accumulate some points... but it won't.

I'm ascending through this column of floating numbers by leaping from kappa to kappa as they go by on these rails. The red numbers raise my score, but the blue numbers subtract from it, so I've actually managed to end up with less points than I started with.

I've still got two thirds of the timer left here to turn my fortunes around by reaching the bigger numbers higher up, but I keep slipping and falling down into all the blue numbers I managed to dodge on the way up, so I'm mostly just making things worse.

I started this bonus stage with 11 points, but by the start of the next level I had 2. I got it back into positive numbers!

SCENE 4: THE UPPER DECK

Now I'm against a deadly toxic disposer machine!

This is a proper boss fight with multiple phases like the sumo egg, but weirdly the liquid it disposes isn't toxic. Instead it pushes me over to the wall of spikes on the left. There's some treasure boxes with items in there as well, because easy mode is considerate enough to give me a weapon to pick up at the start of every retry.

I took so much damage during all my attempts to climb the ladder and jump on his head, but it's fine because as long as I pick up the weapon again afterwards I'm still in the game. That bow down there is the third and final weapon type by the way, but I'm happy enough to stick with my umbrella. It lets me hit enemies like the hammer, plus I can float with it and keep the boulders off my head, it's awesome.

CHAPTER 3: RECREATIONAL FACILITIES OUT OF CONTROL

SCENE 1: AMUSEMENT PARK

I love that slick Saturn sprite rotation even if it does make everything look fuzzy. 

This level's giving me flashbacks to the mine cart level in Donkey Kong Country but really it's not so bad at all. I keep throwing my lives away, but that's just because I haven't got the hang of adjusting my speed to jump onto the cars coming up in front of me. Plus without a weapon in my hand one hit sends me back to the start (or to my dragon checkpoint).

SCENE 2: AQUARIUM

I don't have much to say about this swimming level except that they're really starting to mix up the gameplay now. Also I can collect air bubbles along the way, but they actually work as a shield because this snorkel already gives me all the air I need.

SCENE 3: HAUNTED MANSION

Wait, I can't be fighting the chapter boss yet, it's only scene 3! Bosses don't appear until scene 4!

I'm fighting a giant head by the way. The dude's eyes, mouth, nose etc. keep falling off but he's got no hands so he never quite manages to get them back on in the right place. I'm not exactly sure what I'm meant to be doing here so I'm mostly dodging facial features and then poking them with my umbrella whenever I can.

It's a lot like the last fight in that I'm rubbish and I keep getting hit all the time (that's why I'm at -122 pts), but as long as I get back to my umbrella in time he can't beat me.

Uh?

Oh it's okay, he's deflating now. Man, never go to a haunted house in Japan, they're bloody weird. Also by my calculations I lost 135 points during that fight, which means I got hit 27 times. Easy mode is both a total cakewalk and it's kicking my ass at the same time!

So long suckers! Ew she's showing them the inside of her eyelid!

There's been pictures like this between all the chapters and despite Rami's voice over being dubbed the text never gets translated so I don't know what any of them say! Though it's probably the title for the next chapter I expect. Which means this chapter is done, and the game's (secretly) autosaved, so I can safely stop playing!

I'm not turning it off just yet though as I'm dying to see what extras I've unlocked with my -177 score.

Turns out that a negative score is used to unlock hints, and with -177 points I have enough to unlock all 20 of them... which I guess is an achievement.

I don't spend the points though. Instead I've automatically unlocked every hint with a number above my highest ever negative score and every bonus image with a value below my highest ever positive score. So with 77 positive score I've unlocked...

... a kappa dancing with Nega Kappa.

I could keep playing to see if I can turn my fortunes around and get the 500 points needed to unlock all the bonus images, but seeing as the top one's called "Centerfold 1" I think it'd be better if I didn't. It's either going to be another kappa, an underage girl in a bunny suit, or her granddad in a bunny suit and I don't want any of it.


CONCLUSION

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I love finding games like Keio Flying Squadron 2. Slick mid/late 90s 2D platformers from the era of total 3D domination with enough imagination and variation to give me some good screenshots and a reason to keep playing. I'm less keen on numbered sequels making a sharp genre change as it's not all that fair on the fans who liked the genre it was, but in this case that '2' in the title is only there in the English release so I'm giving them a pass. Plus it's hard to complain when the game shifts to a genre I'm more interested in. And doesn't stop shifting.

It's been more of an Earthworm Jim than a Sonic the Hedgehog, in spirit if not in gameplay, as it keeps getting bored of what it's doing and moving onto something else. The Saturn has the hardware to make daft things appear on screen and rotate all over the place and the designers have used that power to empty their imagination out all over the game. The controls are fine, I had no trouble jumping around and landing where I wanted to (with run mapped to a separate button), but the game's strengths are its creativity, variety and the fact it looks really pretty. Except for the times when it doesn't, but even then the animation is fantastic.

The core gameplay's nothing original, all the running and jumping has been done before in a thousand other games, but Keio 2 has learned enough from all of them to do it right. Or at least avoid a lot of the frustrating mistakes that earlier platformers have made. I didn't find a whole lot to complain about, which is kind of a shame as complaints are an easy way to fill up the blank space between screenshots.

I've noticed other reviews criticise the game for its lack of challenge and I can see where they're coming from, as it's fairly laid back and you're pretty much indestructible as long as you pick up your weapon in time (and you don't throw yourself into lava). But seeing as I had to switch down to Easy mode to get anywhere I'm not sure I can 100% agree. For me it's one of those games where everything seems pitifully easy but I've somehow only got one hit-point left and no lives. Plus even when I was making steady progress my score was terrible.

Though I totally would've killed that sumo Daruma on Normal if they'd given me a replacement umbrella! Or more continues! The only reason I gave up on him was that I ran out of retries and got kicked back to the start of the game. If you kill a boss and complete the chapter you can keep retrying from that point instead thanks to the autosaves, but I'd rather have a positive reason to replay a chunk of content instead of it being my punishment for failure.

But the biggest problem I've had with it is that it's so damn confined and linear. It's a ride you get on at the start and keep going with until it's done (or until you finish a chapter and let it autosave). It could've really done with a Super Mario World overworld map giving you access to a selection of different stages to play and replay. Seems that there's about 20 stages, including boss fights, so if they'd split the lengthy platformer levels in two there could've been enough to make it work. It's not like the story isn't set up for it, with the character hunting for different treasures by following a map on a scroll, and the points system and secrets provide an incentive to go back and try stages again. It just won't let you do it!

Would I recommend the game? If you liked what you saw in the screenshots, then sure! I wouldn't necessarily recommend paying the ridiculous prices to own a copy, it ain't that special, but there's joy to be found in playing it.

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Okay I'm done writing, now it's your turn. The comment box below awaits your opinions, whether they're about this game or what you think the next game will be (it's not Keio Flying Squadron 3).