One thing I’ve always loved about the R-Type series is its creepy atmosphere, the uncomfortable dread that seems to drip from every pixel and polygon. Even if we choose to ignore the more overt horror leanings of later games, the ones where you can inhabit the fractured minds of the very things you’re trying to eradicate, the first game in Irem’s series is still a side-scrolling parade of terrifying fusions of monster and metal. The iconic curl of Dobkeratop’s tail, the dumping grounds filled with not-quite-dead castoffs, the path to the final boss paved with mutant babies. It’s pretty grim out there.
So I was very much hoping that the PC Engine’s CD-powered take on such a familiar game would really lean into that side of things, that I’d get to enjoy my usual sci-fi shmupping with a glistening dollop of creepy cutscenes on top.
It was a bit of a surprise to see Complete CD blast off to strike the evil Bydo Empire… and miss the most obvious mark.
The cutscenes within tell a really quite ordinary story of some brave humans going off to shoot down the alien menace, and they take far too long to do it (there are even cutscenes between stages). I wouldn’t mind this alternative take on R-Type’s setting—it’s not like the series is short of “The space horrors are coming and they’re also us” entries, after all—if it wasn’t all so very bland. The R-9 Arrowhead is a two-seater craft piloted by Ryo and Leza, who go off to shoot things with weird faces and distorted voices, then return to a hero’s welcome just in time for the credits. It didn’t have to be complicated, but I was hoping for something at least on the level of… let’s say Super Aleste. A light sprinkling of weirdness to accompany the action. Nobody minds if a shmup story gets a bit weird, and R-Type is hardly bound by chains to some imagined canon.
Slick presentation can of course gloss over, if not entirely make up for, the odd bout of disappointing storytelling, although Complete CD doesn’t even have that to fall back on. The bolted-on cutscenes in here are supposed to be one of the game’s main selling points (beyond having the full game in one place for the first time on the PC Engine), and yet they’re really quite rough and underwhelming, even by the standards of the time. All we have here is a rather sorry collection of poorly shaded, barely animated, and, um, “creatively proportioned” characters forced to stiffly flap their lips while the voice actors behind them make a concerted if ultimately futile effort to pick up the slack. This is the same hardware that delighted us with Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, Langrisser, The Legend of Xanadu, and of course the almighty Dracula X, for goodness’ sake: the PC Engine, especially in its souped-up Super CD form, could do gorgeous cutscenes in its sleep—R-Type just didn’t seem to bother.
The new CD soundtrack is also something of a letdown, the music plainly arranged for the most part, draining the tunes of the harsh edges and sense of danger the originals conveyed so very well. Only the opening stage’s music makes a real effort to offer something truly new; unfortunately it achieves this with a prominent R-R-R-R R-Type vocal sample, presumably as an unsubtle reminder that only futuristic optical media-playing devices could pull something like that off and whoever had bought Complete CD had definitely spent their money wisely. Hmm.
So the extra fluff has turned out to be a bit of a waste of time, but at least once we get past that we soon discover Complete CD’s take on Irem’s legendary shmup is as close to its arcade counterpart as anyone could have hoped for. It’s not flawlessly accurate in the way we would expect a home recreation of something like this to be these days, but at least what has been changed can honestly be described as nothing more than a touch of subtle trimming around the edges, rather than broad swings with an axe: the sort of “issues” I could really only point out if I was staring at screenshots showing both versions side-by-side, if I felt any burning desire to point them out at all.
One detail that’s impossible to compare with the arcade game is the sixth stage’s new boss. I didn’t know until now that the older HuCard port of the game came up with a new ending for that stage (shown below), or that this new mean green shooting machine had been carried over to this CD remake either.
I have to admit that now the initial surprise has faded, I’m a little torn on its inclusion. On the one hand the ending to stage six always felt a little odd to me—getting locked in a room with barrage of enemies I’m supposed to avoid until they just kinda get bored and leave has never been my idea of a fun time—and having a traditional giant boss with a huge blob of a weak point to shoot feels like a more fitting end. But having to do both, back to back? I’m not convinced that was the best way to handle it. One encounter is more accurate to the arcade, the other feels like a more satisfying climax, but both together only came across as life-sapping indecision to me, two potentially life-ending gauntlets thrown at me when one was already more than enough peril.
There’s no danger of Complete CD being called a bad port—the shmupping itself is smart and snappy—but it is an odd combination of the unwanted new and the perfectly good enough as it already was old, a superfluous game searching for a reason to exist. Every PC Engine in Japan could already play an incredible port of R-Type, one split across two HuCards because some games just deserve to be done properly, no matter how much “doing it properly” ends up costing everyone involved. And Complete CD was always going to have to play up to its new home’s strengths if it was going to turn anyone’s head. The problem isn’t just that these extras weren’t especially impressive, it’s that unlike Spriggan Mk.2, R-Type really wasn’t designed to have endless talking of any quality breaking up the action, and it shows. Complete CD fails to make good use of its host hardware, and because of that it ends up feeling far more disappointing than some of the game’s other ports to far simpler consoles and computers do.
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Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 