GG Series Collection Plus (DS), Part 2

Time for part two of the review of this colossal officially-sanctioned multicart, and this installment covers the "shooting" section.

Z-One
Piloting a ship that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Vic Viper, the player navigates tight space-tunnels and destroys stationary energy ball enemy things. The gimmick is that your shots are fired from two orbs on the front of your ship, and when you're not shooting, they'll turn to point in the opposite direction to the one you press. So you can shoot in eight directions. Although the lack of variety in the enemies does make the game feel cheap, it's still a lot of fun to play, and it's a shame the sequel is only available (as far as I know) on the Japanese DSiWare store.

Wonder Land
Feeling a little bit like a knock-off Touhou, Wonder Land is a simple, Alice in Wonderland-themed vertical shooter that does start to get a little bullet helly a few stages in. The player can shoot a slow, weak 3-way weapon or a fast, powerful narrow stream of bullets, and rather than bombs, there's a meter on the side of the screen that fills up when enemies are being shot. When the meter's full, the player can use a one-off attack that freezes time for a few seconds and turns all the bullets onscreen into points items. One cool touch is that damage done to enemies during the time-freeze doesn't actually happen until it ends. I saw screenshots of this before I'd unlocked it in the collection, and I have to say i was a little disappointed. It's a bit slow, the boss fights take far too long and are far too repetitive and though it's not a bad game, it's far from being the best shooter on this cartridge.

Dark Spirits
This one has a bit of an action-horror anime theme to it, and you control some flying guy with four familiars floating around him. The familiars can be made to focus all their fire straight ahead, or to spread their shots out either in front or behind your guy. This game's gimmick lies in the fact that there are a few different weapons to collect (and level up), and all four familiars collect power-ups individually, so if you choose, you can have each one firing a different weapon. When I first played this game a long time ago, I wasn't really impressed with it. Though it's one of the better looking games on the cartridge, I felt that the game itself didn't live up to that. Over time, however, I've changed my mind: it is actually pretty good, and one of the better games in this section.

D-Tank
It's safe to say that the "D" of the title stands for "Defence", as D-Tank sees the player controlling a little tank, charged with the responsibility to defend bases from invading enemy tanks. Although there's a fair few different enemy types, and a bunch of different power-ups to collect, this game just doesn't excite me at all. It's a bit slow, it takes a while to get even a bit challenging and it's just not very fun.

Score Attacker
This one is easily my favourite of the section. You have a power meter that can be filled up to five times, by shooting enemies and collecting the E items they drop on destruction. The meters can be spent either on a temporary shield that absorbs enemy bullets for points, or on one massive, super-damaging shot. The super shot is big enough to take out several smaller enemies at once, or do big damage to one (or two if they're right next to each other) large enemy. Furthermore, enemies that are killed with a super shot drop bigger E items, which not only fill up more meter, but are also worth more points. So it's all about the building and expenditure of meter to maximise your point-scoring potential and I love it. There's also a bit of a dynamic difficulty level thing going on, scoring more points on one stage means playing the next stage on a harder difficulty, which means there are more bullets to absorb for more points.

Shadow Army
Something a little bit different with this one, as it's a psuedo-stealth game, that sees the player infiltrating enemy bases and killing everyone they meet with a variety of weapons that all have limited ammunition and their own uses. It's got a few neat little touches, like having to reload, and being able to hide behind boxes and pop out to shoot. It's hard, and it can start to feel a little repetitive after a while, but it's not a bad little game.

Harisen Bon!
Last, and definitely least, is this game that's clearly inspired by Kirby and maybe also Starfy, about an orange puffer fish floating about collecting stars and shooting spikes at other fish. Though it looks nice and colourful, and it has pretty nice music, it's slow and boring and awkward to play. It's definitely the worst of the section, I wouldn't bother rushing to unlock it.

Itazura Tenshi (Arcade)

I've said before about how sometimes, when looking through lists of games, certain titles seem to jump out at you for no obvious reason. Itazura Tenshi is one of those games, and I'm glad it did. In the early 1980s, most games set in outer space would be sci-fi themed shooting games about spaceships, with maybe some greek mythological imagery thrown in, if the designers were fans of Saint Seiya or Ulysess 31. Itazura Tenshi takes a different route, being themed around a cosmic fantasy romance, and starring an angel instead of a spaceship.

The angel in question endeavours to win the heart of his celestial love by touching the stars in the sky and turning them into constellations. He doesn't perform this task unopposed, however, as various obstacles stand in his way. There's UFOs flying around randomly shooting, other angels who not only chase our hero around, but also try to undo his hard work, and for some reason there's also crabs casually wandering about and getting in the way. Oh, and every now and then, a wizard in a green robe will give chase, shooting bolts of magic along the way.

The game only uses the joystick and one button. The button does serve two purposes, however: most of the time it just makes the angel flap his wings and fly faster, but on collection of a bow, it also shoots arrows for a limited time. The bow power-ups work slightly oddly though, as picking one up while you already have one won't extend the time it lasts, so for more shots, you have to wait until your current bow runs out before collecting another.

There's also at least two bonus sections in the game, too. The first happens when the player completes half of the constellations in a stage, and compares the number of stars still unmarked to those the player has touched, and offers a bonus if the player has done more. This is a bonus the player really has to work for, since getting more than half the stars in this way means deliberately ignoring the simpler constellations, and also partially completing some, all while avoiding the various things out to kill them (which is hard enough already). The other happens after a whole stage has been completed and is a lot easier, simply having the player guide the angel into the arms of his love as they run towards each other from across the screen. Success sees the two embrace, with a points bonus and the message "I LOVE YOU FOREVER!", failure awards no points, and "A BROKEN HEART!".

Itazura Tenshi is a game I recommend giving a go, as it's very pretty and has a nice theme that was fairly unusual at the time, and still pretty unusual today. I do warn though, that the difficulty level is merciless right from the start, and the experience of playing it is a mix of fascination and frustration. There's an idea that I've seen attributed to Yu Suzuki (though I don't know how legitimate that attribution is) that while great console games are like classic novels, great arcade games are like works of poetry, and I think Itazura Tenshi is a great example of that idea.

Andorogynous (MSX)

Obviously, the title is a mistransliteration of the word "androgynous" from English in Japanese and then back again. But since there's no obvious gender-related themes in the game, I'll just assume that the developers were just going for a word that sounded sciencey and biological and this is the one they went with.

Anyway, the game's a vertically scrolling shooter with two twists: the scrolling goes down instead of up, and the player can only shoot to the left and right. The incongruity between the shooting and scrolling axes serves two purposes: the first, and most obvious is the mechanical purpose. When your enemies mainly come from above or below, having to maneuver youself to shoot them from the sides puts you at an automatic disadvantage. The second purpose is one of atmosphere: the player character's shooting range is ill-suited for their environment. Coupled with the fact that they are some kind of humanoid slowly floating down a hostile, biological pit, this helps create a feeling that the player is a fish-out-of-water, a soldier behind enemy lines in every sense.

Atmosphere is one of Adorogynous' strongest points, and the developers ( and more specifically, the artists) have really played to the MSX's strengths and weaknesses. The graphics are just detailed enough that you can see that everything around you is a living organism, including the walls and the shots your enemies fire at you, while at the same time are just vague enough to allow the player's imagination to fill in the blanks. What this does is give the impression of descending and being surrounded by a pulsating and oozing organic hell, even though a more detailed and more animated depiction of such would be beyond the host hardware.

The game itself is fun to play, though it is also brutally, unforgivingly difficult. I've completed Mushihimesama Futari on a single credit, but even after hours of play and dozens of attempts, I've yet to even see the second boss of Andorogynous. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that it's a testament to the game's quality that I even bothered to try so long and so hard before giving up. There's a couple of specific flaws that make the game even harder than its level design intends, too. Firstly, the power-ups tend to appear in the same places, but whih power-ups appear is totally random. In one particularly absurd case, the game started the second stage by giving me two extra lives. Secondly, there's an old bugbear typical of a shooting game this old, the "slippery slope" of losing all one's power-ups on death as well as being sent back to a checkpoint, meaning the loss of one life makes progress incredibly difficult. Finally, there's a weird bug I found. The best weapon power-up is the 2-way/3-way shot offered by a white letter L. Collecting once gives you 2-way shots, collecting twice gives 3-way.Collecting a third, however, demotes the player back to a single stream of shots.

In conclusion, I can only really recommend Andorogynous if you're looking for a true challenge. It is a good game, that' high in quality in most respects, but like I said, it's brutally, insanely hard.

Pop Breaker (Game Gear)

Pop Breaker is an odd game. It feels a lot like an old computer game in a number of ways. The first and most obvious way is that the game's protagonist is the female driver of a futuristic tank, and that the game contains various (clean) pictures of her looking cute. (The pictures themselves are also fairly cute, being limited to the colour palette and very low resolution of the host hardware. The second computer-like trait might not sink in immediately while playing, but it is the most important and is the trait around which the entire game is built: the stages were clearly constructed using some kind of simple level editor program (which, unfortunately, has no in-game version).

 The game sees the player controlling their futuristic tank around various stages, with the aim of each stage being to destroy a stationary device, kind of like the Cores that appear in the Bangai-O games. The stages also contain various obstacles: breakable and unbreakable blocks, arrows that push the tank in the direction they point, triangular blocks that change the trajectory of enemy and player shots (interestingly, the player and enemies fire the same kinds of shots and all shots are treated equally when it comes to destroying blocks, enemies, and the player's tank), and several kinds of enemies who all have their own distinct patterns of behaviour.

Pop Breaker plays something like a hybrid of a shooting game and old-school tile-based action-puzzle games, Because of this play style, on first glance, movement and scrolling will seem jerky and awkward, but this is a necessary part of the design: everything in-game is measured in tiles, and a lot of the game is about being in the exact right position to shoot something or avoid shots or trick enemies into shooting each other. Most enemies are two by two tiles, the player's tank is three by three, while walls, shots and most other objects take up the space of a single tile.

The fact that the player's tank is three tiles wide ties into another odd quirk: before starting a new game, the player chooses whether shots will be fired from the middle, left or right tile. I strongly recommend against choosing the middle tile, though I don't see any specific advantage that left or right might have over each other.

Yeah, Pop Breaker is an interesting game. It's far from being essential, but it's one of a few slightly quirky Game Gear games from smaller developers, and it's definitely not a bad game.

As a little extra note, I've recently started a Patreon! If you pledge two American dollars a month, you get to see all new posts two days before they appear here, and I'd really appreciate the support!

Leucistic Wyvern (X Box 360)

Looking at this game's logo, and the dragon the player controls in the game, you'll probably think the same that I did: that it's some kind of flagrant no-budget Panzer Dragoon "homage". That's an innaccurate thought, though: while the creator was obviously a SEGA fan (the fonts used in-game are also really similar to the fonts seen in AM2 arcade games in the mid-90s, particularly bring the Virtua Cop games to mind), it actually plays more like Space Harrier.

There's none of the locking-on seen in Panzer Dragoon, it's all about flying around (while travelling in a straight line, obviously.) while shooting enemies and trying your hardest not to collide with them, their bullets or any of the bits of scenery jutting out of the ground. The scenery is the only real bad point of the game. It's hard to describe, but for some reason, it's really difficult to judge the positions of the obstacles and the player in relation to each other. It's worst of all in the bonus stages, which have points bonuses floating in the middle of large rings, and despite them being bonuses stages, the player can still lose health during them.

I'd also like to talk about the presentation: the graphics are a strange mix of low poly models, with the sharpness that comes with modern HD console games. There's a minor problem that's actually similar to the SNES game I recently covered, Bishin Densetsu Zoku, in that there's a kind of sparseness in the environments, compared to its SEGA-produced inspiration, and being in 3D makes the stages look like completely empty, incredibly vast wasteland stretching out for hundreds of miles. The music and sound effects are a bit of a weak point, though. The music, though inoffensive, just seems to be there, while the sounds effects seem to have been recorded at different levels of volume.

Though Leucistic Wyvern has a few problems (and it's definitely no contender for Chieri no Doki Doki Yukemuri Burari Tabi's XBLIG crown), it's a fun game to play, and it's definitely worth the 60-something pence it costs.

Zangeki Warp Trial (PC)

So, I thought I'd try out something different with this post: rather than talking about a game that's already been overlooked, I'm going to talk about the demo for a game that isn't out yet, and of which my readers might not be aware.

So, some of you might be aware of the Japanese PC developers Astro Port, with their catalogue of shooting games, as well as the awesome Assault Suits-alike Gigantic Army. And I'm sure that most of you will know of the recent Comiket 87. Astro Port didn't release a new game at C87, but they did release this demo of their upcoming game.

It's a shooting game, and in keeping with Astro Port's other shooters, it's of an old-fashioned, pre-bullet hell design, ala Gradius, R-Type, Darius, and so on. It also has a really cool, fairly unique gimmick, though: as well as the fire button, there's also a warp button. When held, the warp button freezes time and gives the player a cursor to move around the screen. When the button's released, the player's ship warps to wherever the cursor was, hitting any enemies between the two locations with a slashing attack, and ignoring any walls or other obstacles in the way. There's also no power-ups in-game, but instead a more RPG-esque system of putting points into different stats, with more points being rewarded between stages.

I've played to a little over halfway through stage two, and not only do I love the gimmick itself, but the stage design perfectly compliments it. The first stage is an introduction to the use of the warp, while still managing to be a pretty robust challenge, while the second stage is totally merciless, expecting the player to have mastered warping around and all the little nuances of the game's controls.

I definitely recommend getting this demo (from here), and I look forward to the full game being released. The only issue I have is a very minor issue: It would be cool if there were some kind of points incentive for destroying or damaging enemies with the slash attack, rather than shooting them.

Hi no Tori Hououhen (MSX)

I'll admit something here before I start: despite all the critical acclaim it gets, I've never read or watched any version of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series, upon which this game is based. In fact, before playing this game, the most contact I'd had with it was the cameos in the excellent GBA game Astro Boy Omega Factor. But from what I gather, the series is some kind of great philosophical work. Though none of that gets through into the game, which is a vertically scrolling shooter, it's still pretty unique in its own right.

The unique factor is that Hi no Tori adds an element of exploration to the mix. Exploration in a scrolling shooter might be hard to fathom, but it does work fairly well. The stages only scroll upwards, but they do loop vertically, and there are exits to the left and right at certain points, essentially making each stage a collection of interlinked sub-stages.

The player spends each stage seeking out stone tablets, each marked with kanji, which open gates marked with the same kanji, until one of those gates leads to the stage's boss fight. Boss fights take place in their own seperate, non-scrolling stage, a cool-looking cave made of skulls. The game looks pretty great in general, easily one of the best-looking MSX games I've seen, up there with Aleste 2.

It's technically sound, too, with your shots coming out pretty much as fast as you can press the fire button and Takahashi Meijin-esque displays of button-hammering prowess are a skill worth developing for this game, as a fair few of the enemies are mild bullet sponges, while others might be weak, but attack in thick, aggressive formations. Most of the power-ups are typical of shooting games of the era: improving the range of the player's shots, increasing the player's movement speed, etc., but one odd point is that there's two different kinds of invincibility item: one that causes enemies to die on contact while in effect, and one that doesn't.

Hi no Tori is a pretty good game, that's unique and it looks great, though it is very difficult. Not to the sadistic level of Evil Stone, but its difficulty definitely lives up to the stereotype carried by late 80s shooting games. I'd say it's definitely worth a look if you're curious.

Winged Gear (PC)

So, Winged Gear is a freeware shooting game, made by a guy named ZAP back in 2006. Unlike most doujin shooting games, it isn't a bullet hell-style game, nor does it feature any little girls. It's actually a very old-fashions single-screen shooter with elements of various games such as Smash TV and Raimais (though, the similarities with Raimais are pretty much entirely aesthetic), as well as a few modern twists, mainly in the fact that it has a scoring system, life system and weapon system tied to the same high concept.

That high concept is that bullets, whether they came from the player or an enemy, shrink as they get further from the source, becoming less powerful. The bullets have three sizes, and the player has three hitpoints for each life. Bullets at their largest are instant death, medium bullets take two HP away, and small bullets one. This ties into the scoring system, through use of a multiplier applied to destoryed enemies based on what kind of bullet was the last to hit them: x4 for a large bullet, x2 for medium and x1 for enemies killed by small bullets or bombs. It's nice how all these things tie together into a single system, isn't it? There's also yellow triangles dropped by destroyed enemies which are worth points, but aren't specifically tied into the bullet-shrinking system. They do, however, lose value the longer they're on-screen, though, so you're more likely to get more points from them if you were near the enemy when it died.

Aesthetically, the game is okay. It's very functional in its looks, with very little flair, though everything about those looks, from the sprites to the backgrounds to the colour palettes used would allow it to fit in perfectly among similar games from the late 1980s, with a lot more authenticity than most modern games claiming to have a "retro" aesthetic. There's also something about it, possibly the designs of the enemies, that makes it really feel like an Amiga game, in fact, when I said earlier that it had a similar look to Raimais, it looks like an Amiga port of Raimais might have looked (though obiously, this is also if Raimais was a shooting game rather than a maze game).

Winged Gear isn't anything amazing or special, but it is a fun game that's fairly addictive, and the aesthetic authenticity it displays is pretty admirable, too. Also, it's free so it's not like you have anything to lose by trying it.

Panic in Nakayoshi World (SNES)

This is a game I'd encountered way back when I first had access to emulation, before I even owned a computer, and was running a dreamSNES disc I'd got from one of the local software pirates in my village, with ROM discs burned by my friends. Panic in Nakayoshi World was on a disc sent to me by an internet friend, who described it as "this weird Bomberman-type game with Sailor Moon in it", which, to the untrained eye, seems like an accurate description. Definitely better than describing it as a puzzle game, which I've seen one person online do, at least.

But I recently got a physical copy of the game from ebay for a few pounds, and playing it again, I can see exactly what it is: it's Battle City with a pink and yellow makeover! (And long-time readers might remember when I reviewed Tank Force, the arcade-only sequel to Battle City, a couple of years ago.)

It has all the main features of Battle City: destructable blocks, enemies spawning from three points at the top of the map, a target at the bottom of the map that has to be defended from enemy fire. Your weapon is even powered up by collecting stars! But of course, instead of controlling a tank, you're controlling Sailor Moon or one of three other characters from comics being published in Nakayoshi magazine at the time, none of whom I'm familiar with. And instead of enemy tanks patrolling an occupied city, there are enemy rabbits and teddy bears patrolling cute fairytale forests and the like.

The one, singular problem I have with the game is that the addition of boss fights means losing a life can put the player at a massive disadvantage: since all power ups a lost on death, dying before a boss fight can be disastrous. At full power, bosses are easy, going down in a few seconds. With no power-ups, you have to play almost perfectly just to defeat them within the time limit. It's only a minor problem, and it's nowhere near as pronounced as it is in a lot of other games, but it's still mildly annoying.

Really, whether you like this game or not depends on two things: how much you like Battle City and how comfortable you are playing a game that is themed with such femininity (and that really shouldn't be a problem with anyone in this day and age, should it?) Panic in Nakayoshi World probably isn't as good as Tank Force, but it is still worth playing, and if you want to play it on real hardware, a copy shouldn't set you back too much.

Aurail (Arcade)

Aurail is an arcade shooting game made by Westone in 1990, with a bunch of interesting gimmicks. It also has a pretty interesting setting  and visual style, taking place in a world that seems to combine old-fashioned ornate design with futuristic technology, giving the game a slightly more unique look than the semi-steampunkish style usually used when a setting combines fantasy and sci-fi or the past and the future. A lot of love actually seems to gone into the game's visual design, with some nice big pieces of splash artwork use at various points, like the titles and continue screens. It's a shame there'll probably never be an artbook showing some more insight into it (although I'd love to be proven wrong on this. Even if someone just dug out a lavishly illustrated article from an old issue of Gamest or something, that would be nice!)

The easiest to explain out of the game's gimmicks is that there are two types of stages in the game: typical vertically-scrolling shooting game stages, and the less common first-person shooting stages, that take place in long, straight tunnels. A little more complicated, though more prevalent, since the first person stages are only occaisional distractions, are the control and power-up systems.

Along with the joystick, the player has three buttonswith which to control their walking tank. The first is a fairly traditional fire button, which when held locks the tank in place, allowing the player to shoot all around them. Before explaining the other two buttons, the power-up system must be explained: there's a power meter going up the left-hand side of the screen, which is filled a small amount when a "P" power-up is collected. There are also "D" power-ups that summon an attack drone that hovers around, following the player. The second button puts the drone into attack mode, causing it to fly around the screen, shooting enemies until the power meter is depleted. The third button activates a forcefield around the player, using a fairly hefty chunk of power. The player can have up to three forcefields active at once, each protecting from a single attack.

So it looks good, and has interesting controls, but it Aurail actually a good game? Well, it's alright. The pace is a lot slower than you might expect from an arcade shooting game, as there's no forced scrolling, and the player does need to be careful, almost tactical even, when approaching enemies, especially since the walking tank isn't really fast enough to quickly weave between oncoming bullets: it's more effective to seek positions where safety can be found for a second or two, shoot from there and then move again. It's also very, very hard. Those three shields can be worn down quicker than you might expect, and when death does come, the distance between checkpoints is truly punishing. There's harder games from this era, but Aurail is definitely not a forgiving game by a long, long way.

HIGH-MACS Simulator (PC)

So, HIGH-MACS Simulator is a freeware game made by a fan of the Gun Griffon series, which unfortuantely, I've never played. But they're a series of military-themed 3D mecha shooters very much in the "real robot" style. I don't know anything about the plot of the games, but HIGH-MACS Simulator's missions take place in real countries and cities, in what looks like the late 20th/early 21st century, but with giant robots.

So obviously, you take on the role of a mecha pilot, usually as part of a small squadron, and you go out on various missions shooting down the enemy's tanks, mecha, and other vehicles. You get four weapons which, as far as I know, are always the same: an anti-tank gun, a machine gun, some kind of mortar-type weapon, and lock-on homing missiles. All except the machine gun come with limited ammunition, and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting more during a stage, though it's unlikely you'll run out of ammo for your anti-tank gun, at least.

The controls are a little awkward to set up, sine the game doesn't seem to acknowledge the right stick of an X-Box 360 controller, mapping "Analog R" controls to the triggers instead, but using a combination of the in-game options and JoytoKey, I managed to put together a comfortable little arrangement. Also, this game should run on pretty much any modern computer: it runs perfectly on my laptop, which can't even manage a decent framerate in Minecraft. Although, it mysteriously wouldn't even open up on my other computer, despite that computer fulfilling all the requirements (actually being more powerful than the laptop too). The only reason I can think of for this is that the other computer is running on Windows XP, though it's listed as compatible on the game's website.

There are two kinds of stages, missions and survival stages. Survival stages are self-explanatory: in them, the player kills enemies and tries to survive as long as possible. Missions have various objectives, like securing a series of points on a map, or killing every enemy on the map. Unfortunately, I've so far been unable to pregress further than the third mission, in which enemy units must be hunted down and wiped out in Kiev under the cover of night, with a pretty strict time limit.

Despite the game's difficulty, I still definitely recommend it: controlling the mech is nice, and even little things, like the satisfying animations for enemies getting hit by your shots make the game a little better. Plus, it's free (from here), so it's not like you have anything to lose. 

Sorry this post's kind of short and unprepared, I had intended to write about PC Disc Station Vol. 18, but I could barely get any of the contents to co-operate with modern computers. Hopefully that won't turn out to be an ongoing problem.

Toyrobo Force (Game Boy Advance)

For some reason, shooting games seem to be something of an underrepresented genre on handheld consoles, especially on post-2000 handhelds (though having said that, the PSP has a pretty strong line-up, even if it is mostly ports). So obviously, when I found out there was a GBA shooter that I hadn't played, I had to give it a try.

I'll be kind, and talk about the positive parts of the game first. Most of the game's positives stem from its presentation: in-game it looks great, with a very friendly, colourful pallette that's somewhat reminiscent of cartoons aimed at the very young. Everything's well-drawn and very detailed considering they low resolution of th GBA screen, and there's cute little touces, like cows in fields that run away when the player shoots at them. The TV cartoon presentation continues between stages, with eyecatches appearing before and after each stage. The character designs are all okay, though a little bland, and unfortunately, most of the enemies are pretty generic.

As for the game itself, it's a vertically scrolling shooting game, with the inclusion of a Xevious-style bomb weapon, which is actually a pretty rare thing in modern shooters. The player controls a police robot on a flying motorbike, and they fly upwards, shooting the generic enemies, and bombing turrets and tanks on the ground. Sometimes during the stage, a criminal will appear, in the form of a mini-bossfight, after which the defeated perp will be left lying on the ground dazed for the player to pick up. The coolest example of this is actually in the first stage, which takes place in a town centre, and has the criminal running around on the ground, avoiding and hiding from the player's bombs and so on.

This all sounds pretty good, right? It's okay, but there are some massive flaws in this game. Firstly, the player only gets limited ammunition for each stage, which can leave no onther choice than just commiting suicide since obviously, having no weapons in a shooter makes things pretty much unwinnable. Secondly, the stages don't just flow into each other, but between them, there are sections in which characters talk to each other, and the player has to go to different buildings to talk to characters in the right order to be able to go to the next stage.

Although the fact that I can't read Japanese makes this more of an exercise in trial and error than it would be for someone who could, even if the game has Englishtext, I'd hate this. I've spoken before, ironically at great length, about how much I hate games that interrupt the player's fun for lengthy sections of usually terrible storytelling. If a game is exceptionally good, or in very rare cases, if the story is actually interesting or entertaining, it can make sitting through these parts worthwhile, but Toyrobo Force definitely doesn't fulfill the first condition, and though I can't read the text, I feel confident that the story is no great saga for our times, either.

If you really want to play a shooting game on your GBA, you'd be much better off going with Gradius Advance/Galaxies, a game that is better than Toyrobo Force in pretty much every possible way.