After I beat Bravely Default, I wanted to play a quick arcade platformer in celebration of beating a 90 hour RPG, so I beat Strider. No, not the one I have on Steam; the first one:

and no, not the Arcade version or the Genesis/Mega Drive version (or even the Playstation version that came with Strider 2), but the one for the PC Engine CD. To hell with the fact that I don’t know Japanese; this version has an extra level that isn’t in any other version!

…and it can be toggled off. I guess they weren’t too proud of it. Oh well, at least I still got to experience the CD-quality music and new cut-scenes. I really enjoyed the music, although the voice acting during levels sounded very compressed (it sounded like the samples could fit on the cartridge ports). Also, the continue music sounded rather compressed as well, though I guess it would’ve been more jarring to use default PC Engine synth. Lastly, there are times where the game will pause for a moment before shifting the screen forward, presumably to load the next part of the level when you reach a checkpoint. Also, each checkpoint resets your time back to 3 minutes.

Anyway, the main game-play consists of climbing up and around walls and ceilings as well as using your super-long-blade-of-death to destroy everything in your path (and sometimes, you jump across platforms). Also, I wasn’t kidding about the game being fast-paced; your character may not move very fast, but all enemies go down in just a few hits (with many being defeated in just one hit). Even bosses don’t escape this. You thought Mario bosses were easy? The majority of bosses in Strider go down in only a few seconds! You don’t even really need strategy for most of the game despite your three-hit HP bar; just go in swinging and victory will be yours (then again, I played on Normal mode; maybe it’s different on Hard). Plus, the game has infinite continues, so if you do lose all your lives, you can try the stage again.

Some less appealing things to note is that the game has NES-Castlevania jumps: once you’re airborne, there’s no way to control your direction. This can get you killed if you’re not careful. Also, your invincibility frames don’t last too long; you can’t get combo’d to death, but it can still be difficult to get your bearings back after being hit, especially in the later stages. Lastly, I don’t know if it’s just this version, but the collision detection seemed off at times. This is visualized by the fact that, when you turn around, the protagonist seems to jump forward a bit:

Moving on: The first level has you climbing over and later going inside a giant building. You’ll also encounter little drones that can give you items if you defeat them, and they appear throughout the game (but be careful, since you get hurt if you collide with one). When you make it to the end of the level, you see a crowd of people, and they jump together and fuse into a snake-like thing (no other boss in the game has an intro like it).

The second stage (a desert) is the one that’s exclusive to this game, and it shows. This level is much more flat with only the occasional platform/hill. Also, the bosses are notably inferior as well, with the first boss being a sand-thing that spits sand at you (the sand doesn’t even deal damage), and is only vulnerable when it jumps up, thus interrupting the flow of the rest of the game and making the player wait. For goodness’ sake, the sand’s graphic doesn’t even have transparency:

The boss at the end of the stage is a tank, but since it doesn’t have any collision, you can go behind the gun and be safe. This boss also has a weak point that can only be attacked at certain times: the soldier inside the tank occasionally looks out, and you attack him to defeat the boss. If you play another version of this game, you’re not missing out on much.

The third level (a snowy area) has what might be the cheapest shot in the entire game, because as soon as the battle with the cyborg-thing begins, it shoots at you, and if you don’t do a forward-jump right when its intro cut-scene is over, you get hit.

The part afterward requires you to run down a slope and jump at the end, which may be too fast for people to react to (I know I missed it the first couple times). When you’re done with that, you have to climb a tower that blacks-out the platforms and elecric-things occasionally, which might make it hard to tell what is shooting the electricity at first, but ultimately just amounts to a detail that doesn’t affect game-play:

Once you climb to the top of the area, you have to jump up moving platforms, and this is the first part where the jump mechanics become an issue. You see, you also get shot at during this part, but if you jump straight up, the platform will move away and you’ll fall and die.

The fourth stage takes place inside an airship. It has faster moving platforms that move in a conveyor-belt pattern, and there are also little foothold things that will push you off the ship if you get caught in them (there are similar, nonlethal ones in one of the 2D Sonic games, but I can’t remember which one). There’s also a brief part near the end where gravity flips over, but not much is done with it here (it’s the same small room you just went through, except you’re on the ceiling now).

But then you make it to the boss, which I say is the worst part of the game. It’s a circle inside of a circular room, and whenever you get near it (or it gets near you), you’re caught in its gravitational pull orbit for a few seconds before being launched away, taking damage when you hit the ground/ceiling (the gravity mechanic prevents you from falling from one to the other). Not only does it require less strategy than any other boss since that’s all it does, but I’m convinced that it can’t be defeated before it launches you away, meaning it can’t be defeated without being forced to take a hit. In other words, if you make it to the boss with only one HP left, you’re as good as dead.

It still goes down fairly quickly, though.

The fifth stage is in a jungle, and this is where the game starts to get difficult. It introduces platforms that fall shortly after you stand on them, but they’re introduced over a bottomless pit, so you’ll almost certainly fall in (and those platforms are never used again). You also climb trees instead of buildings and fight natives instead of soldiers, although there’s a small issue with the graphics:

Later on, there’s a part where a giant rock falls down and rolls down a hill. Presumably, you’re supposed to be chased by it, á la Indiana Jones, but the rock falls as soon as the trigger is on-screen, meaning you can just wait for it to fall so the boulder ends up being the one that’s chased.

The last part of the stage is notable because, unlike the rest of the stage, there’s background details instead of that flat green color. Also, there’s one pit that you can’t jump over, so you need to ride a rhino across (they spawn every few seconds during this part). Also, if you fall down a pit here, you end up sinking in water and getting swarmed by piranhas, which I thought was a funny detail. The boss is a giant dinosaur-like robot that can’t really hit you if you’re on the ground.

The sixth and final stage apparently takes place in space, but the background still depicts an evening sky at first. This level is a rather huge difficulty spike, even compared to the previous stage. It starts with lots of bottomless pits and enemies firing bullets at you, as well as drones that fly in from the top or bottom of the screen to shoot at you some more. There’s a part here with a guy firing bullets nonstop down and left, and when I defeated him and went to jump up onto the platform he was on, a drone came from above and hit me directly.

After this, you infiltrate the base and reach a flipped-gravity part where you have to navigate across moving spears that never sync up the same way twice:

This part wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the game’s off collision. For example, I’m not getting hurt here:

Also, there’s no ceiling, so if you hit a spike, you get knocked off the floor, then fall upward and die.

EDIT: As annoying as this stage is, it also has what I believe to be the most clever part in the game: instead of forcing you to fight the three kung-fu girls again, you only have to fight them if you fall in a pit just before the spikes (the blue room in the left of the above screenshots). Not only is the battle somewhat optional (you can still get knocked into the pit if you’re not careful), but you fight them in flipped gravity (which differentiates itself from the previous battle). Plus, if you defeat them, you get rewarded with a 1-up and continue with the main stage. If a game is going to force the player to fight bosses again, this is the way to do it.

After this, you have to fight most of the game’s bosses again, starting with the circle from stage 4. Scratch what I said earlier: this is the worst part of the game. Not only does it have all the same problems as it did before, but there’s still half the level to go afterward! Plus, when you defeat the boss, you have to go down a shaft, then go right to avoid a bottomless pit. However, since you need to be in the boss’s gravitational field to harm it (and you keep spinning around until it’s done exploding), there’s a chance that, when you beat the boss, you’ll just fall into the pit and die.

It looks like I should be able to grab the left wall to save myself, but I can’t because I’m not right up against the wall, and I can’t move toward it because of the way jumping works.

I swear, I got so many game overs just from this first half of the level.

After this, you fight cheap-shot cyborg again before moving on to a giant gorilla robot that was in stage 3. In stage 3, there was a ceiling you could cling to so you could attack its face, but here, you have to attack it on the ground, and even though its arms have a fairly far reach, you can’t damage it if your attack is to the left of its head.

Any further left, and you’re too far away. Any further right and you take damage.

After defeating the robot monkey and the dino robot from stage 5, the stage 1 snake-like boss appears, but you have to ride it over a pit at first before attacking it. This part is a bit finicky since you’ll walk through the segments moving upward and have trouble clinging to the segments moving forward.

After this, you fight the final boss who flies around quicker than you can move, and stops occasionally to summon portals that shoot out enemies. The arena has a large bottomless pit at the bottom, so it’s easy to get hit once and knocked into the pit. Don’t forget that if you die here, you have to go through the entire stage again, annoying boss of stage 4 included.

Overall, this is a pretty good game, despite how frustrating stage 6 can be. I recommend it for platforming fans, but it’s a fairly short game, so don’t pay too much for it.