Raiden V Director’s Cut

2017 | MOSS | Playstation 4

In the mid to late 90’s I spent most of my time huddled up in a local dusty arcade, spending my allowance on the various machines screaming for my attention. It’s here that I first discovered the shoot ‘m up genre with the original Raiden cabinet. Up until that point I had only ever seen the vertical CRT in Mighty Bombjack. So naturally I needed to spend a few coins to find out what this game was, and boy was it an experience. I was mesmerized by the bullets flying around the screen, accompanied by the wooly sounding bass and shrill synths blaring its incredible soundtrack.

We’ve come a very long way since the original arcade release of Raiden by Seibu Kaihatsu in 1990, with the genre seeing massive development in the nearly three decades since that original cabinet. With the release of Raiden III in arcades and on Playstation 2 the series was taken over by MOSS, who are also responsible for the excellent Caladrius games. They bought the rights to develop new games for the series with the assistance of former developers from Seibu Kaihatsu, which went bankrupt in 1998, and they’ve been thriving in the arcade scene up until this installment. Raiden V is the first game in the series that didn’t see a release distributed on arcades, whereas prior entries saw distribution through Taito’s NESiCAxLive service to an arcade cabinet in your area. UFO Interactive, known for arcade conversions like Fast Beat Loop Racer GT and the newer installments of Bubsy, took over the publication on XBOX One and Playstation 4. While the XBOX One version was the first to release, the Playstation 4 got the slightly tweaked Director’s Cut, which comes with its incredible soundtrack.

Raiden V takes us 17 years after the events of the original and drops us directly into a conflict to save the earth from a terrifying force of corrupting crystalline entities. You and the rest of the Vanquish Crystal Defense, or VCD, set out to fight off the invasion in a variety of locations across the globe, spanning 8 missions and 2 bonus stages. As the lead pilot you get to choose which one of the three available Fighting Thunder you take along for the ride. The classic Azuma; which bolsters average stats across the board, making it the perfect starting point, Spirit of Dragon; a slower but sturdier craft, and Moulin Rouge; a lightning fast ship that’s extremely fragile. Each ship can then be outfitted with one of three choices in the three available weapon categories; Vulcan, Laser and Plasma. This gives the player a large amount of options to mix and match with to find their favorite way to play the game. For my latest run, I went with a combination of a fan shaped bullet barrage with the Wide Vulcan, a disco ball that reflects lasers in a spinning motion across the screen, and the ever faithful Homing Plasma, which paints the screen violet with violence.

The strongest aspect of the game is its customizability and replayability. It’s wildly satisfying to find weapon synergies that perfectly match your vessel and playstyle and it’s part of the reason I keep coming back to this game. Each weapon can be upgraded with power ups that you’ll find scattered throughout the stages, leveling them up to a maximum of 10. It greatly incentivizes using every weapon at your disposal to level them up to become their most powerful. Plus you kind of need to have them maxed out by the time you reach the final stage for the true ending anyway. The Flash Point meter makes a return from previous games, which functions as a score multiplier. You keep it up by constantly shooting enemies and it drains during downtime and bosses. A large part of strategizing score runs in this game is finding methods to keep the Flash Point at maximum for as long as possible. One of the new mechanics is the Cheer system. This system allows other players to cheer you on for accomplishing things in game, it in turn fills a meter, and when that meter is full you can activate it to summon a second ship and double your firepower. It also comes with the added benefit of stopping any and all incoming fire, giving you a brief moment of relaxation in the middle of the hectic action. Naturally a shoot ‘m up wouldn’t be complete without bombs to clear the screen from any and all enemies. You start off with three of them per life, but can pick up as many as 5 at once from items dropped by enemies.

Raiden V is an extremely hectic game. Bullets are constantly scraping your paint and you’re constantly on the move. While this is something to be expected from the genre, it does come with a few downsides. The first being that processing the amount of visual information on screen is a challenge to say the least. It doesn’t help that on more than one occasion the bullets blended seamlessly into the fast moving background. At times it can feel like white noise that creates a lot of visual overload, and makes it extremely difficult to see what’s going on. What also doesn’t help is that during all this you’re expected to pay attention to the fully voice acted narrative that is constantly fighting for your attention. During gameplay the right side of the screen is dedicated to the story, with characters moving in and out of view. It makes a game that is already hard to keep track of nearly impossible to absorb on your first playthrough. People are constantly talking, medals are constantly filling the screen and bullets are constantly aimed at your head. While this sounds utterly detrimental, and for some people it definitely will be, it does get better on subsequent runs. It becomes easier to pick up on the patterns and easier to anticipate the oncoming waves of enemies. The enemies exploding into mountains of medals also creates a deep feeling of catharsis that makes Raiden V feel so incredibly rewarding to play. It’s one of those games that, the better you get, the more fun it is. The bosses are especially fun to fight. It’s one of the few moments the game feels at its most focused, pitting your attention against gigantic alien machinery.

Raiden V is a great shoot ‘m up for fans of the series, but not a good entry spot for newcomers to the genre. It’s hard to see what’s going on at a casual glance and this muddies the experience for new players. It takes time to get used to the sluggish movement in comparison to the enemies and this makes you a frustratingly easy target at times. Once you get used to the visual noise and slow movement, however, you get rewarded with a deeply addictive game that keeps drawing you back in with an insanely good soundtrack, explosive visuals and large variety of options. For returning players to the series, this is a must play, but for people looking to get their feet wet, there are better options out there. Raiden V is a solid game with some obvious and glaring flaws, but it does make me smile every time I boot it up.

An explosion of medals and pop-ups/10