[Fantasy Zone II] Master System JP ALL CLEAR (Rapid Fire ON)(Score: 1,909,400)[CC Commentary]

Fantasy Zone II is the console-only sequel of Fantasy Zone I. Felt like console-only sequels are kinda common, like, Final Fight 2? But I'm probably wrong about it. It's a sequel that both wants to go bold and play it safe at the same time. While its efforts can be admired and kinda understandable considering the shmup genre was still young at the time, the direction it went is frankly, not that good! It made the game turn into a bloated Euroshmup nightmare of Fantasy Zone I! It's still fun enough and I understand that they want to lengthen the game duration and even give some (illusion of) leniency, but unnecessarily getting lost, unfair speeds and cryptically hidden critical items, namely MAX HP BOTTLES, are bad, bad ideas! The game is kinda lucky for still being playable, actually! Now I understand why M2 went as far as funding the development of its remake and basically made a new game instead of a faithful remake. I love the game enough.
The controls are the same. You can shoot and bomb. The bomb button is shared with the special bomb button so if you've bought some, if you want to save the special bombs up, the normal bombs are practically disabled. Pay attention to this! Regarding rapid fire, I swear that the bases' HP got horribly boosted! Sadly the PS5 DualSense controller is not a good controller for manual rapid firing. Not to mention, the manual immediately advertised a rapid fire controller! Felt like the game was designed with rapid fire controllers in mind...! I don't feel guilty using the rapid fire in this case!
Before we talk about the stage structure, let's talk about the most notable upgrade given to Opa-Opa: the HP gauge! 1 chunk is actually worth 2 HP. It works in reverse to Deathsmiles. Bullets give 1 HP damage, while colliding with enemies give 2 HP damage. Crashing to popcorns is more dangerous than getting shot, then. Fair enough. This is not Opa-Opa's life and actually the HP gets recovered to full each time you respawn. Nice! I honestly don't have a problem with how the HP works and since it's a lengthier console shmup, it's not a bad choice. But at what cost...?
First, the popcorns are much, much meaner, faster, and trickier! If you don't memorize the popcorn order of the stage, you're toast! It's borderline unfair! Must be mandated at the time to counteract how many HP Opa-Opa can have! I believe you can get 6 HP Max boosts? That's 6 enemy collisions before Opa-Opa dies. That's a lot!
Second, this comes hand to hand with the warps! Each stages have more than one rooms and to travel between them you need to enter the blue Warp portals that appears after you destroy the base. These are consistent so it can be memorized / taken note of. You don't fight the boss automatically after you destroy all the bases. You need to enter the red Warp. But you can't enter it until you destroy all bases on all rooms of the stage. It's not that bad and in fact, you can prepare first before you fight the boss buy shopping at the shop you like! But with the game being this big, it'd be great to have a radar or a Warp destination indicator, isn't it!?
Yes, hidden items and shops. No clue at all to find them and all of the HP Max bottles, either out in the wild or in a shop are HIDDEN ITEMS! If you play it normally without revealing the secret spots, your HP will be TOO LOW TO FACE THE FINAL BOSS! "BUY OUR GUIDEBOOK SO YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND THE HP MAX BOTTLES WE TEASED IN THE MANUAL! THANKS!!!" Screw you, SEGA!
Otherwise it's a good ol' Fantasy Zone. Semi-permanent upgrades, temporary upgrades, wider weapon selection though locked by shop progression since each shop feature different inventories, etc. The thing I genuinely love is the boss designs are great! It's more menacing and fun to fight. They still spew out lots of bullets too and assuming the emulation is accurate within Like A Dragon Gaiden, then this game is technically quite impressive for a game before Recca was made! It's bullet hell before the term existed! Opa-Opa is still fat, though. Take that in mind.
It can be said this game is the worst Fantasy Zone game in the main trilogy of 1, 2 and Super, but gripes aside it's still a solid and fun game! It's far from a horrible game. Just, bloated. I can recommend people to play this game.
This was played on the Like A Dragon Gaiden port on the PS5.
#stg #shmup #sega

[@luilong3083]

hey have you beat judment sivler sword

[@weebnerdgaming4908]

No, not yet.