I finished R-Type Final over the weekend. It wasn't as hard as I had expected it to be, actually. On my very first play I got half way through stage three, and that was before I found out I could speed up my ship or use my super weapon. It does ratchet up in difficulty after that stage, but I'd say there were only a couple seriously hard areas that I encountered. That could just be from my previous R-Type experience however.

Most of the difficulty for me, and really the downer of the game, was just trying to get the depth perception right. It tries to be both 2D and 3D at the same time, and sometimes the camera moves around you, buildings stick out into the play area, etc. Some of this was cool, some of it was very disorienting. There were many times where I didn't know if when I hit something I'd crash or not. It seems that the backgrounds are able to be touched without incident, but with the enemies you die on impact. The biggest problem was sometimes telling what was an enemy and what wasn't. Unfortunatley this comes at the cost of losing lives to learn, and it's never really something you grow accustom to (or at least I didn't). Personally I'd prefer a straight 2D experience, even if it's 3D rendered (like Ikaruga).

Still there are some very good parts of the game, the ship stage as the hat tip to the original R-Type was excellent, as was the Bydo "eye" monster (only this time you fly into it). Still I thought the really good moments were too few and far between. There just didn't seem to be enough going on. Perhaps it was the rather large size of the enemies, but it didn't give me much in the sense of survival-of-the-fitest. It's definitely not a bullet grazer, but I guess R-Type never was.

The graphics are great, and in one stage the entire screen seems to undulate, making things move in weird ways, sort of like if you were on a ship floating on a choppy sea. Objects (like enemies and bullets) take on this effect and it makes for some rather interesting gameplay (you never know quite where the bullets will go). It's very unique and I highly enjoyed this level (its boss was perhaps the best in the game).

But then there's the final stage. I absolutely hated it. You have this solid brown background, and when you move your ship it makes water-like "waves" on the screen. It's quite gimmicky. To add to this, you see the sillouette of a man and woman in the background making out, and then getting it on. I'm not sure if this was for the prepubecent teens who would to stare at it and make this level "harder" (pun intended), but it did absolutely nothing for me (in either sense). How is this R-Type? It has nothing to do with the Bydo empire, and just seems like a cheezy add on. Did I expect too much in my final fight to rid the universe of the Bydo for good? Blah.

I did like the amount of ships in the game and getting all 100 will prove to be a chore. I also liked that depending on what you do in the game, you can take different routes through it (level 2 I believe has 4 different "themes" to it, all different). I still have yet to explore many of these. The amount of stats that are kept about your missions are great as well, better than most games. It makes replaying the game quite worth it.

Well, worth it if the game itself was better. I'm not saying it's bad, far from it, but for the final R-Type ever, I really wished for better. It's not as good as the first R-Type, and doesn't even come close to touching Mars Matrix (the best shooter I've played to date), although they are different in their approach. But it just left me wanting more. Oh well, at least I have 82 more ships to unlock. ;)