Otomedius Excellent ISN'T VERY GOOD AT ANYTHING, QUITE FRANKLY

As the credits rolled on my first successful clear of Otomedius Excellent, a feeling from the distant past started to creep over me. It wasn't nostalgia over shooting bubbles in Gradius III, or the game-over music from Salamander, or mid-90's videogame magazines' mystified reactions to the blockbuster sales performance of Tokimeki Memorial. 

It had just been so long since I'd felt such intense regret over buying a videogame.

Maybe last year, when the online play in SNK's fighting games straight up didn't work. But those were ten, fifteen dollars. I only regretted Garou for a few hours until I deleted it and went back to playing the pirated ROM online. No great pain there.

Otomedius Excellent cost $30. That's getting into Real Videogame Prices. And it was my own damn fault I bought the stupid thing. I have a certain amount of pride in my own taste! Konami released this title so quietly that we can safely assume they're ashamed of the game, and of the otaku at their company who almost certainly pushed hard for its release: I can't imagine how else it was ever put out.

And yeah, it's an embarrassing videogame. I classify Japanese videogames in social acceptability from “a little otaku” to “full otaku”. Phoenix Wright is a little bit otaku: the art and characters are friendly to the anime/manga fan aesthetic, but the games have a much wider appeal. Something like Blazblue is well into otaku game territory: the engine is built for advanced fighting game geeks, and many of its characters are copy-pasted in from Guilty Gear and adjusted according to cliché anime stereotype.

But those games aren't all the way in there. They aren't full otaku, the kind of videogame one puts away and hopes nobody finds. The Idolm@ster, in which the player manages, raises, dresses and photoshoots their own group of singing, dancing idol girls, is full otaku. Love Plus, which is like Animal Crossing except Tom Nook is a high school girl who you've videogame-married, is full otaku.

And so is Otomedius Excellent. Just pop this game into your Xbox and bam! Tits! (Konami, use this as a pull quote.) The spaceships of Konami's classic shooters are replaced with drastically underdressed girls-- courtesy of Yoshizaki Mine, who's made his fortune over the last decade doing exactly this sort of thing-- who wear bits of the old spaceships like water wings. To give you an idea, this is the Vic Viper. There's a warning for “partial nudity” on the box, and when Konami very awkwardly ran the opening video at E3 last year, they had to put stars over all that cleavage.

Even so, I still bought this game sight unseen. In part that was because of the low price, and in part because I was surprised it came out at all. I took it as a given, for some reason, that Konami would deliver a quality example of their particular flavor of classical arcade shooting. They did not. 

This game's cardinal sin isn't that you can move a cursor to poke the girls and make them gasp and moan-- though, really, that's pretty creepy-- it's that it's a lazy bore. The biggest problem is level design: the stages are barely distinguishable and offer nothing beyond superficial homage to games that did it all better years ago. There's the cave! There's the level with two paths! There's the one that scrolls vertically forever! There are quite a few characters and a great amount of weapon customization given to every one of them... but that doesn't count for a lot when the stages you're fighting through are so bland.

The nadir of the game is the moment it goes so far as to reference the time-travel scene in Treasure's superior Gradius V, using it to take the player to a succession of bosses they've already fought before. The lack of creativity evident throughout this game is truly driven home as one trudges through a series of monotonous bosses-- nearly all of whom are simple variations on the original Core boss from Gradius-- yet again. This is certainly a callback to the classics: it's a callback to one of their most specifically hated routines. This is the first time in recent memory that I have wondered, during a 40-minute videogame, “is it over yet?”

One of the reasons that genre fans consider it acceptable for an arcade-style shooter to be only 30 or 40 minutes long is that the experience is incredibly dense. Bullet-hell games overload the senses and urge the player to make extremely dangerous trick-shot maneuvers for the highest scores, requiring lightning reflexes, trance-like concentration and a major time investment to get everything out of the game. The more Gradius-styled shooter offers puzzle-like stages that must be solved with exacting precision: likewise, the real time investment is many hours more than the length of the game.

Otomedius X doesn't really do any of that stuff. It just calls you up on the phone and says “Hey, remember Gradius?”, throws a curve in the middle with “Hey, remember Tokimeki Memorial?” (this cameo is the only Parodius-worthy laugh in the game) and charges an additional fee to say “Hey, remember Castlevania?”. Yes, I remember those videogames. Their existence does not make this videogame any more fun to play.

I'm not an amazing shooter player, but I finished the game's story mode without dying on my third attempt. Over in the slightly more difficult arcade mode, the challenge Otomedius X offers the victorious player is the same as that offered by the other Gradius titles: you're taken back to the first stage on a slightly higher difficulty, and the game loops for as long as the player doesn't die.

As I wouldn't beat a good game twice in a row-- when presented with the famous turning point of Super Ghouls N' Ghosts as a child I simply pressed the off button and walked away-- this holds no appeal. Even if one wanted to high-score this game, the hitboxes are bizarre: unlike the originals and nearly every modern 2D shooter, no indication is given (except in the practice mode!) of what will and won't register as a hit on your ship.

Otomedius Excellent is constantly referencing classics and obscurities-- Axelay to Xexex to Getsu Fuuma Den-- because it sure as hell can't deliver anything that made any of them great. If you're feeling nostalgic for Gradius, that's no reason to make the mistake of buying this game. Gradius Gaiden and Gradius V are out there, after all. If you're just that desperate to see anime girls' breasts, Crunchyroll offers a variety of crappy anime series based on light novels in which an ineffectual young man is surrounded by busty girls who want to have sex with him but never quite do. If you're going to go full otaku, at least enjoy yourself while you're at it. And please, be free of Otomedius Excellent.

Comments

[Ladioss]

Yes, the doom&gloom may be sometimes a little bit exagerated but you know the japanese videogaming industry has lost its edge when even Konami can't design a good shooter anymore.

[Chris M.]

The last paragraph summoned up the game quiet nicely. I think I shall pass. Also, gave me a good chuckle. I tend to ref. those series like the time I first got online....it's slow, bumbleing, and no one has a clue what is going on.