Gonna be lost in R-TYPE goodness for awhile.

Already very happy with this entry. It's so *dark* in a very intentional way. You can still see everything, but the shadows are very stark. I love it. Atmosphere~

There's a part of me that still cannot believe this game is real.

It really is like having someone you were certain was dead and had finished mourning long ago suddenly turn up alive. Awkward baggage included. Just surreal.

I feel very self-conscious about the fact that I'm deeply emotionally invested in the Lore of an arcade game from the 80s which consists of a bee-sized pixel ship blasting blatant Alien-ripoffs with brightly colored laz0rs. But I am, and it appears perhaps I'm not alone in it.

Shmups typically don't lean too heavy on story, let alone continuity. You'd think they wouldn't need it, since the whole point is "blow everything that moves to Kingdom come."

But the oldest and most well-remembered series--R-TYPE, Gradius, Darius, for example--all have (and had from the start) not only a coherent plot, but incorporate visual storytelling into the gameplay, backgrounds, music, and even enemy behavior.

(Einhander gets honorable mention because while in never got a second entry [SQUENIX YOU CAN STILL FIX THAT YOU KNOW], it also did all these things masterfully and people still remember and love that game)

R-TYPE's stuck with me more than the others for several reasons. Part it was the artwork and ship design. Part of it was the superb SNES soundtracks--Super R-TYPE was the first game whose sound test I recorded to tape so I could listen to it elsewhere.

But the core of it was still about the atmosphere and implicit storyline (no one wants a ton exposition in their explosions), which 9-year-old me picked up on very quickly.

It had what I think was the intended effect of getting me to anthropomorphize the player ships without telling me to do so. Sneaky.

That never-confirmed-but-thematically-supported suggestion intensifies with each progressive major title, and while the offshoots don't necessarily add to it, they never contradict it, and sometimes reinforce it.

The nuances of having to communicate with/control and manipulate your Force pod--which often seems to have a mind of its own, the damn thing--add a lot to this impression. I still think it's the most brilliant companion fighter devised for the genre.

You really do learn to depend on it and sometimes part of that is just letting it go do its thing and trusting it to keep one half of the screen occupied while you focus on the other half.

And typically, you CAN trust it to do its job, as long as you understand how it "thinks." There aren't many algorithmically-controlled AI helpers you can say that about.

So as much as you can sometimes end up wrestling with a misbehaving Force pod, it's your buddy just as much as, say, Agro from SotC. You yell at it a lot and you're always telling it to "no no come on, get, no, wtf, get back here, jackass," but it gets you where you need to go.

Anyway, this idea was already pretty cemented in my brain when R-TYPE III (after a painfully long delay) was released, and boy did that game grab hold of it and run.

Everything about that game, beyond it just being *really good,* felt like it was pointing directly at me and saying "yeah, I see you."

Which, for 11-year-old me, was a very rare and precious feeling. It felt almost supernatural. I mean, no way the developers had any clue what some American kid thought about a SNES game, right?

I did not understand the concept of implicit worldbuilding (or confirmation bias), so that near-perfect execution of "fandom homage" worked very well on me.

They incorporated imagery from the previous games which
1. Told a bit of story
2. Were things the players liked, remembered and directly associated with the series and
3. Made them more impressive and added something surprising, while keeping the elements that made them good.

All that together is a difficult thing to pull off. It usually doesn't happen by accident.

(this thread may stop and start a lot)

R-TYPE III was really the first game to try to tell a slightly more complicated story, and it placed itself as one of the later points in the timeline to do it.

The R-90 was a wildly advanced version of the familiar R-9, there were three different Force pods to choose, each with their own personalities and behavioral quirks and functional strategies (Shadow Force or bust!).