Welcome to Import Gaming FTW, a series of short videos featuring games that never made
it outside of Japan, or at the very least, never made it to the U.S. of A. With this
series, I hope to share my love of Japanese retro games and hopefully introduce some gems
from across the Pacific to people who missed the chance to play them the first time around!
Today I'll take a brief look at Gunners Heaven, a run-and-gun shooting game developed by Media.vision
and published by SCEI for the PlayStation One.
It was released way back in 1995 in Japan, a very early title in the system's long library
of games.
While Gunners Heaven did manage to secure a PAL release under the name "Rapid Reload,"
it never saw the light of day in North America, most likely due to the oddly anti-2D game
stance that Sony Computer Entertainment America had at the time in regards to licensing games
for the PSOne.
Anyway, about the game...it's a really fun, colorful, and challenging shooting game with
minimal story and maximum action.
It's pretty similar to the Metal Slug series or Gunstar Heroes, and in fact I remember
years ago in online forums and auction sites that people mistakenly believed that this
game was the sequel to the latter.
It would be easy to make that mistake since Gunners Heaven so liberally pays homage to
the Genesis classic...
In Gunners Heaven, there are six stages, and most are cleared by mowing down hordes of
robots, mechas, and...dog-soldier...guys...taking out a sub-boss or two, and then defeating
a level boss.
In order to do this successfully, you must cycle through four different weapon types,
choosing the best one for the situation at hand.
There is a standard, normal shot, a homing shot, a grand shot, and a fire shot.
Each type has unlimited ammo, but is pretty weak unless supplemented by power-up items
which are dropped by certain enemies.
These add to the player's power level, which results in a more powerful shot.
However, the power level is constantly being drained, so you must keep collecting these
items and maintain a power level above 0 in order to benefit from its effects.
This creates a nice balance of forcing the player to cause as much destruction as possible,
collecting power ups, and moving along as fast as possible in order to maintain the
added bonuses from a powered up weapon.
Thankfully, the power level stops depleting during boss fights, so you won't have to worry
about using a weakened weapon for a big fight...well, usually, anyway...
Other gameplay mechanics include a slide, a wire shot, a boost item, a life item, and
bombs.
The slide is performed by pressing down on the d-pad and the jump button, and is an essential
move to master in many cases.
The wire shot, performed with the R2 button, is a nice option, but I found it was pretty
useless for the most part.
The boost item exponentially increases the attack and area of your shot for a brief period
of time, and are only found on rare enemies at predetermined intervals.
The life item replenishes a little bit of the player's HP and is also found at fixed
parts of each stage.
And finally, there are bombs, which for the most part are just that...but we'll talk more
about them more in depth in a minute.
You get to choose from two protagonists to play as--the spikey-haired Axel Sonics or
the tomboy-ish Ruka Hetfield.
Aside from the obvious differences between them aesthetically, the big thing that sets
them apart are their arsenals.
The four basic types of shots remain the same, but the range, pattern, and animations...those
are all different.
For example, Axel's fire shot is a powerful burst of flame that travels across the entire
screen with a slow rate of fire.
But Ruka's fire shot is a straight up flame thrower, with very limited range but able
to deal massive damage at a constant rate.
It is up to the player to determine which character's array of weapons suit his or her
play style the most.
One more thing that is different, too, are how bombs are deployed.
Axel has a "Soldeleter," which is a standard bomb that hits everything on screen, whereas
Ruka uses a forcefield, which has a more limted range that destroys anything in her immediate
vicinity.
There is a story about finding a hidden stone called Valkyrie before a militant group calling
itself Pumpkin Head does, as well as some bouts of dialogue before and after boss fights,
but it's pretty inconsequential and not really interesting.
A weird thing about this game is that there IS spoken dialogue in the game, but it is
set to off by default...granted, the voice acting is not necessary or particularly well-done...but
I don't know why that would be the default setting.
I really enjoy Gunners Heaven, but there are some inevitable negative points the the game.
Short length, some awkward sound bits, and a bit of unbalance with certain weapon types...I'm
looking at you, homing shot.
There is no memory card support at all for this game, which means that any play through
will start at the beginning, much like most run and gun shooting games that preceded it.
No big deal, but it would have been nice to have a level select and the ability to save
high scores.
Thankfully, sub-bosses sort of act like checkpoints, so when you do die, you return to the last
defeated boss.
And there are infinite continues, which makes sense as this was a game developed exclusively
for the PlayStation rather than a straight arcade port like most other shoot 'em ups.
In my opinion the biggest letdown is, however, that Gunners Heaven is single player only.
In a game like this and especially where there are already two playable characters, you'd
think co-op would have been a given...but whether it was due to budgetary reasons, deadlines
from the publisher, or lack of a firm understanding on the workings of the hardware by the development
team at the time, sadly, Gunners Heaven is a solo venture.
One thing I'll mention just randomly is that I always thought that Axel looked a lot like
Rudy from the RPG Wild ARMs, with the spiky blue hair, headband, GUN...turns out is is
not so much of a coincidence, as the developer, Media.vision, is also behind the Wild ARMs
series of games, and Wild ARMs 1 was in fact the game they worked on right after completing
Gunners Heaven.
So there you go--fun fact!
Anyway, if you like Gunstar Heroes, or run-and-gun shooting games in general, Gunners Heaven
is a fine game to add to your collection.
A few years ago, the game sold for pretty high prices at online auction sites, but at
the time of this video, you can easily find a copy for under twenty dollars.
Copies in Japan run from about one to ten dollars, and if you have a Japanese PSN account
on the PlayStation 3, Gunners Heaven is available as a PSOne Classics download for 600 yen,
or a little over 6 U.S. dollars.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, please rate or leave a comment!
Thanks for watching...take care.