R-Type Final: I guess my advice to anyone who plays this game would be to keep an open mind at least until you get into normal (human) difficulty. 'Baby' does seem to be a throwaway (though still not as pointless as Strikers 1945 II's lowest level, imho). 'Kids' is mostly dull, though a few good parts shine through. 'Normal' is quite a bit better. However, at this point I'd still say R-Type Delta is a better game. But at least it seems like if you're an R-Type fan and have already plunked down the cash for Final, you won't necessarily feel like kicking yourself for it.

Now, some categories:

Sound: Most of the music in this game is very low key, ambient stuff. I don't think Final's soundtrack is as good as Delta's.

Graphics: While everything is smooth and detailed, call me crazy, but I like Delta's graphics more. I'm not sure I can explain it yet. Final's graphics look sort of fake and plastic-y, whereas Delta's looked very organic. Delta also seemed to have taken more advantage of the engine being in 3D (I liked the part in stage 4 where you fly up the base and beams connect the foreground to the background). Also, I think Delta had some of the best PSone graphics, and it has a unique look of its own compared to other PSone games. Final looks more typically PS2.

Slow Down: There's been a lot of talk about this game having slow down. I don't think it has slow down. I just think it's consistently slow. I think it's probably the slowest of the (at least legitimate) R-Type games. The older R-Type games definitely had some fast parts: Remember Rios from R-Type 2? The slowness, coupled with the general easiesness of the first two difficulty levels, makes them fairly dull, bordering on boring. Reports of the game having 20 second stretches of nothing happening are accurate on Kids and Baby; it doesn't seem to be an issue (except maybe in the first stage) on Human. There, there seems to be enough strategic considerations to make up somewhat for the lack of speed.

Best Parts (spoilers, maybe): When I first played the game, the first part that stood out to me was the stage 5 boss. It had a pattern I couldn't figure out how to dodge. In retrospect, it wasn't that hard, but the earlier difficulty levels are so easy before this point that the difficulty curve jump there was surprising. Strangely enough, the first time I beat that boss, it didn't use its hardest pattern.


One part in stage 6 almost seems like a homage to R-Type's stage 7 (or maybe Delta's stage 6, right before the final checkpoint). Of course, it's not nearly as difficult... One pretty obvious reason why is that the game is slow enough that it's not terribly difficulty to keep track of all the bullets on screen, despite that there's a fair number of them.

Even with the best parts, though, I think we're starting to see diminishing returns with the R-Type series. I've complained before, of course, about Dracula X being too easy. But aside from that, there's not a lot new in that game. Most of the stuff that's kind of new in Dracula is really just a tiny new twist on an old thing... like how you revisit the town from Castlevania II, but now it's on fire. I think just about every setting in that game had been used in another Castlevania game. Many of the stages (swamp, reprisal of Castlevania 1's final stage) were very typical Castlevania. The most unusual setting in Dracula X, I'd say, was the pirate ship... and of course that was done before in Castlevania III.

There's a similar thing here in Final. I'd say R-Type 1's 6th stage pushed the boundaries of weirdness more than anything in Final. Plus, many of the pleasure coming from the settings in Final isn't from seeing things that are completely new; it's in seeing older stuff having a slight twist to it. And sometimes, there's not even much of a twist. I think the R-Type warship reprisal in this game is lame compared to how it was twisted (in two different ways) in Delta.





Ships (might be a spoiler, but I'm not marking it): So far, I think the best ship in the game is the T-X. It's like the R-X from Delta (which is also in Final), but improved in some ways, and downgraded in no ways. The ability to set the Force free seems even more useful than in Delta, as is the concussive beam weapon (which has more range here).

One novelty ship I kind of like is the Kiwi Fruit, which is a tank (though it still flies like every other ship). It's Force is a drill, which attaches to bosses as it drills in, reminding me of the R-13's force.

There is kind of an addictiveness factor to getting the ships. It can keep even the lower difficulties from being a complete wash. It reminds me of some other games, such as Final Fantasy 9 or Donkey Kong 64, where even if the predominate gameplay isn't exciting, I still kept playing either to earn a new ability, or to see what came next.
I LOOOOOOVE Flying Omelette!!
Crawl and 1000