| paleface [sys=PCCD; cat=Shooter_Vert; reg=JPN] |
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"Spriggan and Spriggan mark 2 are quite different beasts, both excellent."
The romanization of the Japanese name is "Seirei Senshi Spriggan."
A highly impressive and innovative vertical shooter from Naxat Soft and Compile, impressive in terms of sprite activity, framerate, and character/stage design, and innovative in the unique weapon system.
The setting seems to be a sort of steampunk mix of technology and mysticism, indeed the Spriggan armor itself seems to be powered at least as much by willpower or inner strength as by any sort of chemical power source. Big floating cannon barges float by, flying armor knights fly up with laser guns, drone ships shoot past in long formations, bosses hold lazer bazookas in place of lances, and so forth. Cool stuff.
This game cranks--Naxat knows how to get lighting performance out of the PCE, and they put that knowledge to good use here: even with dozens of good sized sprites zipping around onscreen over an animating background, the framerate stays lickety-split. Sprite flicker, on the other hand, shows up fairly regularly, but usually not severely enough to prevent you from seeing what's moving around you.
As in the sequel Spriggan mark 2 (see entry 577), your friends and allies come in from time to time to fight by your side. They don't stick around long, generally, and they don't talk as they do (and how!) in the sequel--they're all business here. Story, in fact, is pretty much limited to the intro cinematic and then short little slideshows between stages and, well, it's generic enough so far that I can't really tell what's going on. Somebody did something, that's for sure, and now you've got to kick a lot of ass.
And kick it you will with the help of the fantastic weapon system. The Spriggan armor can hold three power balls, for lack of a better term. These come in different colors from kindly hot air balloons, and maybe from some dead enemies. Anyway, you collect 'em, and the combination of the three most recent, whatever it is (blue blue blue, green blue red, orange blue red, etc) determines the form of your attack. Bloody freaking brilliant, and it allows for such variety! Also, you can have less than three power balls equipped, and the weapon is again different but generally weaker. Three-ball attacks without fail cover a goodly portion on the screen with mean energy.
Now, say you have three balls, and here comes another one that you want to collect. You could just pick it up, losing the oldest ball in your armor, but you can do better than that: jettison the old ball as a bomb, then pick up the new one. Free bomb! Brilliant, simply brilliant.
The bosses are huge and although the first two went down very quickly under three-ball power, the third stage (before the boss) kicked my buttcakes. And that was on Normal--you gotta respect a game whose difficulty can be cranked up to "Unbelievable." I'm scared to try that one, actually.
Not only do you get all that, you can also do "Challenge" modes: Time Attack and Score Attack, quite similar to those seen in Naxat's "Summer Carnival" shooters (see Alzadick, entry 543, and Nexzr Special, entry 534), which themselves were cribbed from Hudson's "Soldier" series (see Soldier Blade for instance, entry 527). In fact, Spriggan came out the year before the first Summer Carnival, so it is really Naxat's first major experiment in the tournament shooter mode. And it does fairly well, with a new, long point and tile-filled level level for scoring nirvana. It doesn't have all of Soldier's score combo systems, it's more of just a blast-fest, but a fun one. |
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| | | "Seirei Senshi" means "Spirit Soldier."
ImgBurn (see entry 1741) was hanging while analyzing track 3--an audio track--of my Seirei Senshi Spriggan disc--and that occurs before read errors, so setting ImgBurn to ignore read errors was useless; but PowerISO (see entry 1877) seems to have ripped it successfully! It popped up a dialogue asking if it could ignore read errors, I said sure, and the resulting iso is running okay so far in Mednafen. Nice! The ripping procedure is also a bit more straightforward with PowerISO; might switch to using it as my go-to over ImgBurn, not sure yet. |
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| | | | This is currently the one PC Engine shmup grabbing me. Compile's own Sylphia from two years later is outwardly similar but lacks the ridiculous energy of this game. |
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Checking out the "Challenge"--aka caravan--modes and then playing through the main mode of Compile's shmup "Seirei Senshi Spriggan" for PC Engine, in the emulator Mednafen in Windows, on the default "NORMAL" difficulty!
There are no continues and I'm not very good or patient so I used an infinite lives cheat cheat, 0x1F0CE0:5, from gamehacking.org.
I was pronouncing "Seirei" like "sere eye" whereas Google Translate, now that I check, says it more like "sere ay."
Game rules. How did they do this much great sprite work and animate it this fast? I wish maybe the music--which ultimately is kind of okay but maybe not quite up to the full fury of the action--was a tad louder relative to the SFX and maybe the mech pilots were drawn as well as the super-cool bio-organic-looking mech things but anyway the actual game play and graphics are super-hot. The caravan modes are trying to be like the Soldier games and all the other like tile-based vertical shooters on PCE I guess and are pretty dull by comparison; there's really nothing like the actual main game on the system--not even the horizontal, talky sequel--Spriggan Mark 2--nor Compile's sort of look-alike v-shmup of two years later with an ancient mythical setting, Sylphia--or on any other system I know of. Lookit that ground scroll speed on some of the stages! The whirling build-a-weapons! The cracking SFX! The free bombs! The pixels! Fantasmagoric.
Well okay the last few bosses aren't so great. Or maybe I just need to learn to play them right. = P (Mmmmaybe I should go for a certain weapon type rather than just taking whatever it gives me. ; DDD)
Fave stage definitely mage bowling. ^ _^
As far as I can tell from gameplay so far, the glowy outline around your mech's shoulder pads indicates you have an energy shield that can absorb one hit; each life starts with it, and it's recharged when you touch a smart bomb.
I got "Spirit Soldier Spriggan" as the translation of "Seirei Senshi Spriggan" from somewhere--maybe I just liked keeping the "S" sounds--but technically Wikipedia and Google Translate both say the literal translation is "Spirit WARRIOR Spriggan" (emphasis mine); and Wikipedia says the never-published English localization shown at Summer CES 1992 was titled "Ghost Warrior Spriggan."
(And it looks like Valorant has claimed the term "magepunk," drat! ; D) |
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| | | | Have to toggle the infinite lives cheat off (like through Alt+C cheats interface from initial PCE BIOS screen) or else hitting Run to boot the "disc" results in "LOAD ERROR!" in orange. |
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