It's a strange case, the Shubibinman series, in that thanks to a physical rerelease a few years ago, its best-known entry is a spin-off that was originally only released via Satellaview. And as great as Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman Zero is, it's not my favourite of the series. That honour falls upon this game, the last of the mainline games, and the only one of the series released on CD.
The game makes good use of all that storage space, too. There's nice CD-quality music, lots of voice acting, and more excitingly, a whole bunch of almost full screen animated cutscenes! It's a surprise that this game runs using the original CD ROM System card and not the Super CD ROM card, those scenes look so good. The plot, as far as I can tell, is about an alien princess who invades/crashlands on Earth, and also accidentally (?) opens a portal to a demon dimension where an evil king lives. And he also wants to invade the Earth. But there's no translation, so that's just my best guess.
Another interesting little thing, presentation-wise, is that the stages kind of flow into each other narratively, like in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but two whole years earlier! You start out in modern Japan, hitch a ride on a flying enemy battleship, then when that's destroyed, your escape craft is eaten by gargoyles so you fall down to earth in some snowy plains where you fight aggressive snowmen until the ground gives way to an undergorund mine, where a train takes you somewhere else, and so on. It makes the game feel so much more fast-paced and exciting!
As for how the game actually plays, it's fun. It's a pretty typical 1992 action platformer, elevated by its great presentation mroe than anything. You run around, hit stuff with your sword, jump about, all that stuff. There's a lot of cool little setpieces in the stages too, though, even in the very first stage there's a part where you get to pilot a robot and shoot lightning for a while (again, it should be pointed out that this game also predates Mega Man X by well over a year!), and there's stuff in later stages like running away from lava flows, jumping from aircraft to aircraft, and so on.
One interesting gimmick is your secondary attack: by holding the attack button for a second and releasing it, you can shoot a little ball of energy. As well as being a projectile, it also deals quite a few hits' worth of damage. On top of that, there's also a way to control it after it's been fired. Hold the attack button again, as well as a direction, and you can slightly influence the trajectory of your projectile. It's not really as useful as just shooting at enemeis when they're in front of you, but it's interesting that they tried something a little strange and different, at least. Also worthy of note is that there's no mechanical difference (as far as I could tell) between the male and female playable characters. And it's one of a very few PC Engine games with a simultaneous co-operative two player mode!
By 1992, the PC Engine was being left behind by the technical marvels of which the Mega Drive and SNES were capable, and it wouldn't get its second and third winds in the form of the CD ROM Super and Arcade system cards (well, the Super CD ROM card came out in late 1991, but there wasn't much that used it just yet). But Shubibinman 3 must have been a game that gave hope to the console's owners in that time, that there was life in the system yet. It's a great-looking game that's a lot of fun. And this is something I find myself saying a lot when I watch certain lesser-known kids movies from the eighties and early nineties, but it's the kind of thing I would have absolutely loved to have had access to as a kid!
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