Gradius Origins Review – Review

I’m impressed with the care taken by some developers who release compilations of their archives with the reverence they deserve. Capcom’s recent fighting collections had great arcade ports and a wealth of options and special features. Digital Eclipse’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection was an anthology spanning six platforms and fourteen games with game rewind, artwork, soundtracks, and more. Gradius Origins by way of M2 & Konami is the story of how one game can be refined over seven entries.

The Gradius series spans across seven titles – Gradius, Salamander, Life Force, Gradius II, Gradius III, Salamander II, and the new for this collection Salamander III. All the games feature side scrolling and vertical shooter levels, flurries of enemies on screen, oversized bosses, and a screen plastered with projectiles. For most games, the level -up system is based on a series of power-up options (speed up, missiles that drop from the ship, laser weapons, duplicate weapons, etc.). When enemies drop an item on screen it changes what power up is highlighted and you can then select that corresponding power up. For example, if you get one item and consume it right away, it’ll enable a speed up, but if you wait to get three or four items collected it’ll move the selected item choice to something more powerful. It’s an interesting way to handle enhancements as I’m used to each new item being an additive to the existing kit compared to this more manual approach.

Like many of its peers, this collection features an abundance of features and options. Each game has several different arcade versions to choose from. Difficulty settings include original, easy mode (where projectiles have a narrower hit range), and invincible mode. Scoreboards are available to those looking for a challenge, though using the built-in rewind feature makes you ineligible to submit that high score. There are also the entire game soundtracks available to listen to on the menus. Gradius’ music has good melodies, though the sounds don’t include a lot of layering, so it comes off as thin. Each game also includes some key art, though very limited. I’m guessing that’s a function of its place in time rather than a purposeful omission.

These games are hard as nails. It was so hard that I couldn’t make it past the first level until tamping down the difficulty to easy. Playing in that setting provided a reasonable challenge, though some parts of the game still have that borderline unfair ethos that old arcade machines had. It’s free to insert an additional coin in their current form, but even with that some games (particularly earlier entries) are such a grind of death-rinse-repeat that it kills the fun. Each game feels like an iterative attempt at recreating the wheel with small tweaks at the margins and gradually nicer graphics. It goes as far as the exact pattern of enemy ships upon the first approach. It’s a redundancy that you’d think would be annoying, but for such difficult games, that familiarity helped me hone my skill especially as I hopscotched between titles. For my money, Salamander II hits the sweet spot of good art direction, soundtrack, and gameplay that felt exciting.

Gradius Origins feels like a more niche collection in some ways. Fighting games are at a relatively high point in popularity, so it makes sense that the Capcom’s of the world would pump out collections of their huge library. Side-scrolling space shooters haven’t hit the same kind of resurgence, so what we’re left with is a series of similar-playing shooters wrapped in a best-in-class collection of features that make them just close enough to playable. I appreciate the level of effort that was made for Gradius Origins, it has been treated with a kind of reverence that makes me think M2 truly cared about preserving these games. That said, in practice it feels more like a niche history lesson rather than a source of deep fun.