You just can't keep the space shooter genre down, can you? There's not a console in the world without an entry, it seems. It must have its fans, as it keeps cropping up on this 1001 list time and again. But how does it fare on the PlayStation 2, in the form of R-Type Final?
This isn't the first R-Type game I've played, thanks to an earlier entry on the list, R-Type Delta. What has another generation of consoles allowed the developers to achieve? Where can you push the genre without compromising on the gameplay? Will this waffle end and the gaming begin already?
Yes. Yes, it will.
Fun Times
R-Type Final starts similarly to R-Type Delta, showcasing some of the ships we'll get to pilot throughout the game, as it reveals a little of what's going on.
Some type of... biological thing... synchronising with something, while ships gather together and blow the crap out of... asteroids?
And then we're at the menus, in the sea somewhere. Nothing makes sense. Well, apart from the ships. I've worked out what they're doing. Everything else about this game is a mystery.
The story mode begins with you picking a ship and customising it according to your tastes, both cosmetically and functionally, depending on what you've unlocked or what the ship is capable of carrying. Missiles and bombs and floating things that will do something for me... it's a space shooter, alright - stuff that makes sense immediately and stuff that doesn't.
Let's learn as we go. Hopefully, we're good enough for 'Human' here...
And here we are, in the grey interior of a ruined something or other, shooting someone or other in the back, for some reason or another. I really don't know what's going on, but we're trained to just shoot everything that moves in this genre, right?
That's achieved by pressing either Square, Circle, or even R1. I'm not sure on the differences of either button, but they all seemed to shoot lasers out the front of my R-9A Whatever It Was.
As the scenery sweeps around us - most of which I can barely make sense of - we're pulled along for the ride, locked to our 2D plane. I don't know what was coming out the back of these ships, but it probably wasn't good, and I promptly shot it until I knew otherwise.
It wasn't long before a big mech-looking dude made his presence known as the first enemy to actually look at us face to face. Holding down Square, I charged up my weapons for a more powerful beam attack. I'm not messing around. Neither is he, it turns out.
Frustrations
So one shoulder tackle from a giant robot is enough to kill us. Gotcha. Let's try again.
Two minutes in, two failures at the first mini-boss... well. This is looking promising, isn't it? Third time lucky. Dodge the shoulder this time.
Dodging was about all I could do, with my target going everywhere across the screen. I felt mostly helpless on the offensive, so just did the best I could to slowly move out of the way. You can change the speed at which you move, but that sounds like a recipe for disaster, as I picture myself immediately running into my opponent...
The one overriding feeling I had of this was that I was just a passenger, waiting for the ride to finish and transition to the next bit. I didn't feel like this was an epic encounter with a ticky foe. I felt like I had to survive, and try to chip away at his health, sure, but it was all so flat and dull.
There was no point at which I was excited at seeing what was going on, or for what might happen next. It was just a slow trudge through the motions, and then he disappeared at that was that.
No, really. Where did he go? I don't think I blew him up. He just left, and I was left to dangle at a weird angle over a city? I don't even know what I'm looking at. Black and grey and dark, dark blue. What's going on? Why must I go on? Are we saving the world or is this just the daily commute?
If that mini-boss wasn't anticlimactic, dying to another unknown foe sure was. R-Type Final is slow and dull, and I'm about to hit continue to give it a final chance.
Well, that's unexpected, given the rest of what has happened so far. I can't make heads or tails of it, or where I am in relation to the floor, and which way gravity is working, but this at least looks menacing, threatening, and challenging to deal with.
Which means I then proceeded to die to something - no idea what - and give up.
No, R-Type, I'm not ready for you. Maybe I need to be a Baby. Perhaps I need to care about the genre, or your story some more. Maybe I need to not be so cranky and enjoy what's in front of me, regardless of quality, or previously held beliefs.
Well, while I work on that...
Final Word
I wasn't pleased with my time in R-Type Final. I wasn't feeling it, I wasn't enjoying it, and dying from unknown, unseen hits was a letdown. The restarts were fairly snappy, I suppose, but if I don't know what to look out for and avoid, those deaths start to feel a little cheap.
But that's the game, right? You make progress, you fail, you learn for next time, dive back in and push forward a little further. You make more progress, you fail some more, and you get better.
I wasn't in the mood for that, and the first look at R-Type Final didn't convince me that I could be. I read that the story is a little grim, with nods to previous entries making sense only to those who have played. Then it gets more epic and grandiose and no doubt difficult as you save the world again, I guess.
Apparently, the designer deems it to be the final word on the world of R-Type, despite there being sequels. This is it. This is the ending to the story. Whatever that story was...
I am sure that, if presented in the right way, I could be as on-board with an R-Type story as an R-Type fan, but the start to this game just sucked, and I've got no desire to find out what I'm missing.
I did go back to find out what I thought of R-Type Delta, though, and it's almost the complete opposite. What went wrong between the generations? Where did I go wrong?
Based on this, it's unlikely that I'll revisit R-Type Final again. Maybe I see what the fans think of it and reconsider. Maybe I've just noped out of your favourite game. Sorry. It happens.
Fun Facts
101 ships and multiple endings? I mean, that's gotta be a lot of content for a fan of the genre, surely. It's certainly given me a bit of pause for thought over my final words...
R-Type Final, developed by Irem, first released in 2003.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2004, via emulation.