Fantasy Zone Review

      It's funny that not many of the actual Genesis games grabbed my attention on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I got more into the arcade games that are included as a bonus. Fantasy Zone grabbed me right from the start.

       It is a 2d space ship shmup, but you'll almost immediately notice that you can turn around and fly to the left at any time a la Defender (at least I think it is Defender that does this too). You'll also almost immediately notice the game's atypically colorful and even cutsey graphic design. In fact, if you look the game up on Wikipedia, you'll even see that it is considered one of the first “cute'em-up” games.

       Before we go any further, I want to warn you that just like Alien Syndrome you need to change all the arcade options to their easiest settings before playing the game. Seriously.

       In each level, you fly around from the left to right or right to left trying to take out 10 enemy bases. You can move left or right by pressing the direction button you want to go. The screen will then start scrolling in that direction. You can change direction at any time and the screen will start scrolling in the other direction. Each level is a loop, so if you go all the way to the right, you will be back at the beginning again. You fire your main gun with square (and you have to mash on it to make it fire quickly) and you drop bombs with X. Once you take out the enemy bases, you will fight a boss. During the boss fights, you will lock into the traditional left to right orientation. This really highlights the difference between a traditional shmup and what Fantasy Zone has going on. Dodging enemy fire is actually a lot easier when you are in traditional mode. When you are in the level before the boss fight, you can't move backward because you will just change direction. This makes many traditional shmup tactics unusable. You can't continuously dodge fire while firing yourself because when you move backward you turn around and are now firing in the other direction. This leads to you developing tactics that will work in Fantasy Zone's environment, such as hanging at the back of the screen and trying hard not to turn around, doing attack runs on enemy bases and then turning around to attack them again from the other direction, or buying weapons that can help you have enough attack power to run through the level without turning around or needing to dodge. These tactics give Fantasy Zone a great unique feel in a genre whose games can be pretty samey.

       Many enemies in Fantasy Zone (especially bases and bosses) drop money. At certain times in a level (usually at the beginning and when you collect a certain amount of money) a balloon that says shop will float by. If you touch it, time freezes and you go to the shop, where you can spend the money on power-ups. You can get new engines that make you go faster, powerful main weapons, and powerful one-time use bombs. It is basically required that you buy a better engine asap, as you are really slow by default. It's weird though, because two of the engines you can buy make you so insanely fast that you are impossible to control, so you pretty much always want the middle engine. If you're anything like me, you will need to buy a powerful main weapon to help you through most of the levels. There is a laser that blasts through bases really quickly that became my mainstay, although the seven way shot is great for taking on levels with lots of enemies. These weapons are on a timer, and when it runs out, you are back to your basic shot. The bombs you can buy are powerful, but expensive and very limited in usage. And like all of the powerups, you lose them if you die. I barely used bombs except in a few key places where they helped a lot. Lastly, you can buy lives. These increase in price dramatically each time you buy one. I was usually able to buy a few on my playthroughs. This is the only way to get extra lives. You can't continue by putting in another quarter or using free-play mode. The shop is great, but occasionally it won't show up when it usually would for some reason. This can leave you woefully under powered in a tough area, leading to a chain of deaths, which is very frustrating. But usually it appears right on cue to let you power yourself up.

       The bosses in Fantasy Zone are great. Some of them fire a well-balanced bullet curtain at you that you have to dodge. Some need to be shot in very specific places. One of them is almost exactly like one of the final bosses in Soldner X. And there are several that are really unique and do things I haven't seen in a shmup before. This includes the final boss, who has a really unique and interesting attack pattern. Most of the bosses are really well-balanced and smart fights that give you a challenge even if you've played them many times. The bosses all have really cool visual designs too. I was totally sold on the game when I saw that the boss of level 1 was a giant stump of wood. You'll also fight an angry plant, snowmen, and a bunch of other stuff (always with a face on it!).

       Actually, everything in Fantasy Zone has great visual design. The backgrounds of each level are colorful and feature great landscape... features and flora. There are strange lakes and weird forests and all kinds of stuff. Normal enemies are all pretty adorable or quite weird. There are little guys with faces, orbs with legs, spaceships, formations of drills and UFOs and more. The enemy bases you have to take out are often living creatures with eyes or wings or hands. The ship you play with is also apparently a living creature. His name is Opa-Opa, and his default engine is wings. If you are too far down on the screen he pops out some legs and runs along the ground, which is endlessly amusing.

       The music is also great. The levels are usually very cheery and catchy in a good way. The pinnacle is probably the ice level. Hearing that level's music makes me want to run outside into the snow and sled down a hill. It's really great, as is most of the other music. When you fight a boss, however, the music gets pretty serious and intense. It's a nice dichotomy that works well, especially since boss fights play a little different than the main game too.

       The game actually has a little story that is worth mentioning. It is explained through some text scrolls you can read at the beginning. It seems pretty generic at first glance, but it is kind of cool. And the ending of the game is actually pretty excellent, and probably not what you are expecting at all.

       This is an arcade game and a shmup, so it is very difficult and punishing. One hit kills, no continues, limited lives, then you start over from the beginning. I played it without save scumming for 2-3 weeks and was making a lot of progress and having a lot of fun. Then the progress really slowed to a halt for me, and I started to get antsy, so I decided to save-scum to beat the game. Well, let me tell you, I'm glad I did, because beating it legitimately would probably have taken another 1-2 months more of pretty regular play. It gets very hard at the end, and you have to learn by doing how to beat the bosses and levels.

       Ports of arcade games are always a weird thing. How do you reconcile the quarter-feeding nature of these games with home play? Ikaruga handled it by letting you earn more continues until you were in free play mode. But that feels cheap because once you are in free play mode you can endlessly continue your way to the end. Fantasy Zone on SUGC let's you save at any point, which can lead to frustration if you haven't gotten good at the game first. Fantasy Zone also doesn't have a continue system, so there is no free play option, which makes sense since it allows you to buy lives. I recommend playing it a lot regularly, getting good, and then save-scumming to see the end. The last few levels were still fun and interesting to me this way, and it's the only way a lot of people will be able to see the end of the game without a really, really big time commitment. Perhaps the best method of dealing with porting an arcade game for home play is what was done in the Metal Slug Anthology I played on PSP. In that collection you could set the difficulty and based on that you got a number of continues (aka quarters). So the normal setting gave you a realistic amount of virtual quarters that you could use to beat the game once you got somewhat good at it (which for a Metal Slug game, is like 15 or so!).

       Anyways, Fantasy Zone is 28 year old game that excels in its design, music, and gameplay. It's different. It almost feels like a modern indie game putting a few interesting spins on shmup gameplay. It's a real good time. I wish it had a better resolution of the arcade-game-ported-to-home conundrum, but that 's a tough one, especially for a game without continues. I guess the real solution to that is to man up and play it for a really, really long time. I don't think it quite merits that much attention though. But it does merit a few weeks of play to learn how to play it well, and then go ahead and save-scum to check out the last few great encounters in its endgame. It's a Great Game, Tier 3.