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:: Ikaruga for GCN Review |
YES! HAHA! I LOVES YOU, TREASURE! This game. Awesome.
Ikaruga has a generic plot involving a generic anime fighter pilot belonging to a generic resistance force going up against a generic empire of doom. It’s not really the plot that gets you playing this game, though, so we’ll just pretend it doesn’t exist (which it hardly does).
Ikaruga is an old-school shooter with a major facelift and pure concentrated awesome. You go through levels, and if you get hit once by enemy fire, you explode, but there’s a catch: You have a ship called the Ikaruga (OH MY GOD THE PURE LOGIC BURNS), which has a nifty keen thing called polarity: it can be white or black. When the Ikaruga is white, it can absorb white shots, and when it’s black, it absorbs black shots. If your polarity is white, and you get hit with a dark shot, you’re screwed. HOORAY!
The graphics are amazing. The music is unbelievably awesome. The sound effects are great. Wow. This is helpful. But seriously, just trust me on this one. Your ship flies along a 2D course over a 3D rendered background which just looks gorgeous. The music is a powerful synth soundtrack which just perfectly suits you as you zoom along trying to hang on to your dear life. And it’s music that automatically associates itself with the game. Say you download a song off the net (YOU FILESHARING LITTLE PRICK, WE’RE GONNA GET YOU), and you listen to it. Assuming you have quite a bit of Ikaruga time under your belt, you can actually think of the level part you’re at when the soundtrack gets to each point of a song. I know that didn’t make sense, but let me try to elaborate: Let’s say there’s this part of Chapter 1’s song, Ideal, where the drums get really heavy. The game imbeds itself so deep into your mind that you know exactly what kind of enemy to look for, and what pattern of movement to follow, just because the game’s like, “HEY. I love you. I want you to remember me for all time. Please hug me.” But I digress… the MUSIC. It’s really fantastic. Super-so. Gah, it’s hard to explain. Lemme give you an example… this particular song, “Faith,” is from Chapter 3. Checkit.
This game is hard, though, which will probably keep the average gamer from getting within 10 feet of it. It is incomprehensibly hard, even on the easiest difficulty setting, with the maximum number of lives and continues set. Doesn’t fade me too much, but, gotta keep the other gamers in mind. Y’know, the more casual gamers. Y’KNOW. THE ONES WHO REALLY SHOULD GET THIS GAME SO THEY CAN SEE WHAT REAL GAMERS ARE MADE OF. YEAH.
The second problem with this game is that it’s too short. It takes a lot of work to beat it, but it’s still only got five levels. Overall, the game takes about 30 minutes to wrap. Disappointing.
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 I love this game with all my heart, and if I was looking at this game subjectively, it’s a perfect 5 out of 5. It’s one of my favorite video games of all time. But there are a lot of Gamecube gamers who constantly complain about Metroid Prime being hard. And I just can’t imagine them enjoying this game. It’s a lot of work to get good at, but when you do… It’s art. There’s nothing nearly as amazing as watching an expert nimbly dodge the five billion bullets onscreen and hit an 89 chain without breaking a sweat.
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| Reviewed by Shoshi Eggshell ::
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