Keio Flying Squadron (Sega Mega CD)

Developer:

Victor

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Release Date:

1994 (1993 in Japan)

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Systems:

Sega Mega CD

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a shoot 'em up on the Mega CD!

I haven't really written about a Mega CD game since Popful Mail six years ago, and it's been a while since I've played a shoot 'em up as well. The trouble with shoot 'em ups, is they're either really hard, in which case all I end up writing about is the various ways I got my dude exploded, or they're really easy, in which case all I write is "I'm still shooting at things," and "I'm kind of bored now."

But I figured I should give you at least one proper old-school side-scrolling shooter this year, so I went with the game where you play as a girl wearing a 1960s Playboy bunny suit in 1860s Japan. I checked a list of games I've written about so far, and it's an under-represented sub-genre.

Oh here's some trivia for you, straight from Wikipedia: the December 1994 issue of Sega Pro CD magazine included a demo disc for the game that ended after the first level. But you can use a level select cheat to skip past the part that sends you back to the title screen and keep playing it to the end, because they secretly included the entire full game on the disc.

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The game begins with a history lesson, illustrated by a terrible looking slide show. I mean the actual images aren't bad, probably, but some kind of film grain effect or early 90s video compression has left them looking like they're infested with ants. Funny thing is, these are just still shots, so there was no need to use video here.

I was wondering if the game was going to have Japanese voices with subtitles but no, the narrator here is speaking English as he explains that we're in Japan during the eighth year of the Keiō era. He then goes on for a while talking about the shogunate and the anti-government movement, until he gets to the part where the US delegation was called in to help because America "had established a unique scientific technology by combining its own Native Indian shamanism with alchemy from Europe." I'm not a history buff by any means, but even I've noticed that something's a little bit off here. I mean the Keiō era only spanned four years.

The narrator soon gets bored of history and changes the topic entirely to talk about the descendants of the ancient gods currently protecting their ancestors' secret treasure: a giant key. There's only three of them left now: an old couple and their granddaughter Rami, but they still bow dutifully whenever the key gleams. With proper anime animation too!

One night a flying wooden ship drops by their house to swipe their key, so the one in purple leaps into action!

But while they're busy jumping around and kicking fish the other pirates are able to grab their key and fly off with it!

Rami feels guilty that she wasn't around to stop them and uses her Hyper-Cutie Bunny Change to switch into her bunny suit and pose next to the charred ruins of what was once her house. 

Because I guess that helps somehow?

The one in purple is curious why she happened to be missing during the attack, and she explains that she got hungry and went out to the mini-mart to buy something. 

But she couldn't decide if she wanted a burger or...

The one in purple interrupts by taking her lunch and starts trying to smack her around with it, which I guess is understandable. I hope Rami gets it back afterwards though as the poor girl clearly needs to eat. She's rake thin in this shot!

I left the title screen on for a bit afterwards and got some info on Rami, her dragon Spot and Dr Pon, the 3000 year old super intelligent racoon who stole the key.

Hang on, Rami's a descendant of aliens now? Not gods? Well I guess aliens could pull a Stargate and appear as gods. Hang on, Rami's 20 years old? Ain't no way she was that old in the Japanese game. Her ancient grandparents maybe, but not her.

Here, have a picture of the menu screen as well, just because I like the way Rami's decapitated head keeps blinking.

They've gone with an unusual 'stick the English text on top of the original graphics' approach to localisation, which works I reckon. Though it does have the side effect of making it come off like one of those Japanese-infused games European developers were making in the 90s, like Apidya or Elfmania.

They've also misspelled 'buttons', but I'm not going to start nitpicking an options menu that actually gives me the option to adjust the position of my character's hit box! I can either move it a little higher, or a little lower, or just leave it alone because to be honest I've no idea why I'd want to change it.

I don't know why I've got a 'Change speed' botton, so I'm leaving that alone as well. Not sure I'll be using 'Kamikaze' all that much either, especially with only two lives. I could raise them up to five, but I always leave the difficulty settings on their defaults when I'm writing about a game. Until it beats all the hope and enthusiasm out of me at least.

Starting the game gave me an additional animated cutscene, but it's not video this time so it's crystal clear with no dithering or ants! Much better looking.

Rami feels her grandparents are overreacting a bit, seeing as it's just a key, so her grandma reveals that... wait, the one wearing purple is her grandma? Anyway grandma reveals that it's the key to something called the "Ark" and Dr Pon wants to use it to turn the planet into a raccoon world!

Our hero fails to see the problem in that, as a raccoon world sounds pretty fun, so grandma explains that until she brings that key back she's not getting any more food. No key, no dinner.

So a pissed off Rami wakes her sleeping dragon with a high-heeled kick to the face so they can go save the day. The cycle of abuse continues.

Wikipedia defines a 'squadron' as being a unit of 4 to 24 aircraft, but in this case all we're getting is one hungry woman in a bunny costume on a sleepy purple dragon.

Man it's weird to get a loading screen on a Mega Drive game. Even weirder when it's of some kind of robot smacking a drowsy dragon over the head. The folks in this game need to let their dragons get enough sleep in my opinion.

Alright, this is what the actual gameplay bit of the game looks like, with Rami flying around the screen on her... wait, I thought her dragon was purple. Well now I'm just confused.

Anyway, Rami's on a dragon, murdering raccoons coming by the other way in their flying row boats. They don't bail out with a parachute or fall off screen as a scorched silhouette; any raccoons I hit are straight up dead. On a happier note, I can hold down the fire button so there's no need for me to tap anything! But I'm going to let go for a few seconds first as I've noticed that baby dragons materialise around me as option pods when I'm not firing.

Okay it seems I can only have two of them, but I'm halfway to having an actual squadron now! I can also upgrade my shots by collecting power ups dropped by a dude riding a cloud. There's a bomb power up on screen right now in fact.

I didn't get to the bomb power up in time before it transformed, but that's fine as it turned into a spiky mine-launcher power up instead and I think it's this is probably better. They're launched in the opposite direction to the last one I pressed, so if I tap backwards she'll start firing them forwards at this mini boss sub that just surfaced from the water.

I'm too busy tapping up and down though as I've got torpedoes to avoid. This would be a lot easier (and fairer) if they'd given me any time to react, as we're basically nose to nose right now.

Hey it's getting brighter. Also the game likes to go from a mini boss, to waves of enemies, to another mini boss, so now I'm being attacked by a giant doll sitting on some kind of modern construction vehicle, lobbing fish at me from its box.

Oh crap, I can't move out of the way of the missile! I didn't realise I'd drive into the airship if I backed up, I figured it was in the background! Look at poor Rami, it's like she's spotted it herself.

Blasting the doll's box and head seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that he's throwing spiky discs and shooting homing missiles from his neck I'm kind of regretting it.

And our heroes are both dead in one hit. Well at least they went out looking adorable. Wait hang on, that's not Rami... they've blown up Lisa Simpson!

Rami and Spot immediately flew back onto screen, flickering with invulnerability. They've lost the weapon power upgrades they've collected, but the game has thoughtfully spawned a pair of power up boxes on the other side of the screen so that I don't have to kill the truck with a level 1 laser. In fact I don't have to kill him at all, as he just drove backwards off a cliff.

Oh man that's a cruel trick. The little red cats on these boats keep tossing deadly coins into the sky, so I ducked down to ground level to avoid them and got instantly killed by a raccoon jogging on screen from the left. There was no warning, just the immediate loss of one of my very limited lives.

It's bad game design, plain and simple. Mostly because there's no way a dragon's going down to a surprise attack by a raccoon like that, I don't care how many cats it's got equipped.

This time around I grabbed the power ups at the wrong phase of their transformation cycle, so now I've got a painfully slow firing spread shot instead of an upgraded laser and bombs instead of spiky mines. It's not been working out so great for me.

Also I got myself a little bit trapped up here and accidentally threw away my final life by driving into the diagonal shots from those huts down there. Nice dolphins though.

I don't know why games even bother asking if I want to continue after I throw all my lives away on the first level. Quitting and restarting is going to have the exact same effect right now, except restarting isn't going to cost me one of my three precious continues!

Apparently normal and hard difficulties both have three continues and easy mode bumps it up to six, but I'll be leaving the difficulty as it is. I'm putting my lives up to five per continue though, as ideally I'd like to survive long enough to get you some screenshots of level two.

Oh here's something else I found out in my exhaustive research (I read the manual): the 'Change speed' button changes the speed that Rami flies around the screen and the 'Visuals' button in the menu turns off the cutscenes.

4 MINUTES AND 15 SECONDS LATER

Damn, what even got me this time? I didn't see anything! Man, that's annoying, I finally reached the end of level one and got taken out five seconds into the boss fight by imaginary bullets that don't exist. Game over.

Oh wait, I know what it was! I've figured it out. The big gun on the bossmobile fires shells that explode in the sky, and I assumed that as long as I dodged the explosion I'd be fine. It never even occurred to me that the fire would linger in the sky as a lethal hazard for two whole seconds, so I flew right in without registering it as a threat.

Though I did recognise that cat.

Seems there's some kind of cat-raccoon alliance going on here, as it's been showing up all over the level. I suppose they must have been promised a place in Dr Pon's glorious Raccoon World.

Well we'll see how that works out for them... because it doesn't look like I'll be stopping Dr Pon any time soon. The level's not hard exactly, but it's really easy to throw away lives for stupid reasons and I'm always finding new ways to do it. 

8 MINUTES LATER

This time I got trapped in front of the boat and dragged over to the artillery hidden inside a hut. Rami wasn't even shot by it, she was killed by the gun lifting into the air... a few pixels behind her. She may have a tiny hit area but the hit box on that gun must be huge.

I should just reset the game every time I lose a life this early in the level from now on, it'll waste less time.

NINE MINUTES LATER

Man, I'm always impressed by the way shoot 'em ups can make nine minutes feel like ninety.

Though I'm finally back at the bloody boss fight and this time I've brought three lives! I've also brought shit weapons, as I've a got a level 1 laser and I'm throwing bombs. But now I know how to lure the gun to fire its shells at where I didn't want to be anyway, so I can position my pea-shooter to deconstruct this contraption one weapon at a time. I also know to watch out for that sneaky bull as he's got a three-way shot hidden in his harness.

The boss fight dragged on for so damn long that I started losing all my lives to carelessness, but after two eons/minutes it finally got bored of me shooting at it and blew up. That's level one finally done with! Only six more to go.

LEVEL 2

It's a bit hard to tell the difference with all the trees and mountains in the background but I promise you this is level two. This time the cats in sacks have been joined by dogs on rugs. Also there's that guy on a cloud I mentioned earlier, the one I have to shoot down to upgrade my weapons. He seems pretty harmless so I'm feeling a little bad about it to be honest.

Whoa, sudden shift in direction! Now the screen's scrolling downwards as I have to swerve around and shoot these suicidal raccoons. It's actually a nice change from dodging bullets, as I can relax a tiny bit.

Just ignore that fish by the way, he's irrelevant.

Well my break's over, now I'm back to getting my ass kicked by a mini-boss.

I can't even tell what this thing is, it looks like some kind of blobby potato with a bow on it and an elephant trunk. OH it's an octopus in a pot! It's so obvious now.

Also there's a dude in a fish suit standing on top. He's the reason I lost my last spare life as I tried flying over his head and got hit by the death field that radiates 8 pixels around him. Or something. Despite what the hit box picture in the menu implied I really can't afford to even touch the empty space around these enemies. Though I'm still flickering with invulnerability and I'm very tempted to dart through him to get to those power ups over there before the laser upgrade changes into a double shot.

I'm going to be sensible and wait though.

Oh c'mon what? He was exploding! He was exploding and then suddenly leaped backwards into the air at me! And I was still flashing with invulnerability! This all seems kind of unfair.

That was my last life so now I've just lost a continue and I've been kicked back to the start of the level. I was just about to grab that homing dragon missile upgrade over there as well!

I made it past the octopus pot with more lives this time and I got my homing dragon power up! But now I have to dodge incoming fire from a dozen enemies all shooting at me at once in this tiny bit of airspace they've given me! I guess that's my own fault for not shooting them all when I had them in front of me, but in my defence I wanted to get out of the way of the boat as quickly as possible because I never know what scenery is instantly lethal to touch in this.

The game's definitely not a bullet hell shooter, so even with a dozen enemies targeting me I'm not exactly dancing through raindrops, but it'd be fair to say it gets busy sometimes.

Alright I've reached the level two boss, so it's me vs fish dude round 2. This time he's started spitting his own head at me, three of them at once in fact, which isn't cool. I think I can take him though.

1 MINUTE LATER

Man, how has it only been a minute? I'm bloody exhausted right now.

I've gotten Rami killed so frequently that there's two sets of post-death power ups on screen at once right now. And I wish they'd turn into laser upgrades already so I can pick them up. If you're wondering where all the bullets are in this screenshot, I'm holding off until my baby dragons have re-materialised. You can see the outline of one in front of me.

I lasted 1 minute 30 seconds in the end but I was caught out when one of the red spider-things leaping out of the boss's mouth got bored of its arcing trajectory and suddenly darted horizontally at me. It's my own fault for being distracted by the power ups I suppose.

Back to the very start of the level then.

Oh I just remembered that I have a kamikaze attack move to try out! It uses up one of my option pods and sends five baby dragons across the screen to wipe out all opposition in a wave of annihilation. Seems pretty handy, especially as I can regenerate the pod by not firing for a bit, but I bet I forget to ever use it again.

EVENTUALLY

Sadly my run came to an end before I even reached the boss this time as I was ambushed by a swarm of homing Pickle Ricks thrown by this dude on a cloud. Weird thing is, I didn't even know this was coming, so I guess I must have blown the guy up too soon on my earlier runs.

That's it, I'm all out of continues now and I have to stop playing.

Thank fuck for that.

But now I have to play the secret Super Catch Game accessed by pressing Left, Left, Right, Right, Down, Up, Down and then Up on the menu screen!

It's a flickery LCD-style minigame starring that red cat that keeps turning up, where you have to catch falling items by getting under them in time. They're leaves I guess. Miss three and you can finally stop playing it.

It didn't seem right though, giving up on level two, so I put the difficulty down to easy and steamrolled right through those first two levels like they were nothing! You're able to get some momentum going if you can avoid dying all the time, as you can hold onto your pick ups and max out your laser and homing dragon attack. The more successful you are the easier it gets, and easier it gets the more successful you are. But that's life I suppose.

SOME FIGHTING LATER

The game's really trying to trip me up though, with things like these pencil mushrooms springing out of the ground without warning. I was lucky to be on the left side of the screen when they appeared and fortunate to figure out that I had to shoot the blue ones to open a path before they all flew off to the left and crushed me.

MORE FIGHTING LATER

So now I'm fighting the US Navy, who apparently signed a treaty with the raccoons as well as the shogunate. I figured that a giant boat that filled the whole screen had to be safely in the background, so the first thing I did was fly right into it and lost a life. But it turns out that only the nose was deadly and the rest of it is safe maybe? Who even knows with this game. All I know is that when I use my kamikaze attack it makes all the shots on screen disappear so I can survive when the screen fills with pipe-smoking sailors spitting bullets everywhere.

I got up to level five or six I think in the end, with more than half my continues left, but I'd just had enough of it by then. There are very few games in the world addictive enough to persuade me to run a gauntlet of boss fights over and over and over again and this isn't one of them.


CONCLUSION

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Keio Flying Squadron is a side-scrolling shooter where you shoot things that are shooting at you. Plus it has graphics! And cats!

I feel like I've sabotaged myself here by describing the game in too much detail under the screenshots, so all I can do now is repeat what I've already said. Actually I don't think I mentioned yet how it was a nice change to see an anime intro that wasn't just clips of characters posing in the breeze while a J-pop theme played, even if half of it was a scruffy looking alternate history lesson slide show. It's funny how much better the animation looked when the video ended and it switched to regular 16 bit cutscenes.

The catchy CD soundtrack, voice acting and loading times just wouldn't have been possible with a boring ordinary cartridge, but this is a pretty typical Mega Drive shooter underneath. It's a fairly pretty one too, with a lot of imagination, humour, variety and stuff. Maybe not entirely fair though. It likes to occasionally screw you over with enemies coming in from the side of the screen without warning, boats shoving you into certain death, and inconsistently deadly scenery. Plus the game becomes easier for players who are already doing well as the longer you survive the more dangerous you become... unless you accidentally collect the wrong pick up and swap the levelled up weapons you want for low level weapons you don't. That's going to drastically reduce your combat effectiveness.

I didn't really get into the game to be honest, but then I didn't expect to as shoot 'em ups aren't really my genre. And whatever enthusiasm I did have was given a good kicking whenever I lost a continue and had to replay the entire level again from the start, as the stages in this are bloody endless. Well actually that's not true, they don't actually take all that much time at all really. If you're good at shooters (or put it on easy mode) it's the opposite of a time sink, as you could be done with it in an hour and then move on to a different, better game! But it demands your unrelenting concentration if you don't want to be shot, which made minutes seem like hours to me. Especially during all those boss fights.

Not that this is a bad game; it's fine for what it is and I wouldn't talk anyone out of giving it a try if it looks like your kind of thing. It's far better than, I dunno... James Bond Jr. But "It's fine for what it is." would be a terrible quote to put on a box.

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Thanks for reading all that, I hope it made your day better. If not, I dunno, maybe you read it wrong? Either way you should leave me a comment! Perhaps you could even guess at what next week's mysterious game is.