Irem Collection Volume 1 Review (Switch eShop)

Founded in 1974, Irem, then known as IPM Co. Ltd, began as a distributor and assembler of arcade machines for general stores and other small independent businesses. It wasn’t until 1978 that the relabelled company released its own software.

Despite being shoot-'em-up focused, the Irem Collection Volume 1 sidesteps R-Type, the obvious choice, to deliver three alternative titles and their associated ports. Image Fight is a 1988 arcade game that made a strong impression in Japan. Although not instantly apparent owing to its extreme difficulty, it’s a brilliantly executed game that demands deconstruction, and famously inspired Hiroshi Iuichi in conceiving Treasure’s Radiant Silvergun.

Pioneering for its time, Image Fight is a vertically scrolling affair that, unlike the looser shoot 'em ups of the '90s, is a strict, two-loop memoriser. It nudges you to conquer it without dying, and demands repetition to such a degree that you’ll likely know its every detail by the time you near the end. You need to work out the roadmap for each of its five stages, employ your strategies, and gun your way to success. Your ship has four speed options that can be changed at will, and you can collect a maximum of three pods that flank your craft and beef up your firepower. These appear in two cycling colours: blue and orange. Blue are straight firing, while orange are inverted, firing in the opposite direction to the movement of your craft, allowing you to angle them.

You can mix and match pod pickups, too, holding, for example, two straight firing and one free firing pod, or vice-versa. You can also hold down a second button to briefly launch the pods out before rubber-banding back to you. Since Image Fight has a lot of point-blanking tricks (going nose to nose with enemies for faster kills) this helps to clear a path more quickly. The firing options aren’t just for show, either. Sections with giant flanking destroyers bristling with gun turrets, or tight chicanes peppered with entrenched enemies all but demand you switch to angled fire, as do a handful of bosses.

In addition to your pods, there are also attachments known as ‘Forces’ that bolt on a secondary weapon and a slight protective shield until they’re destroyed. They need to be acquired strategically, however, since once attached they can not be exchanged for another. Certain stages will offer a row of Forces early on with different firing attributes — left-and-right homing, spread bubbles, etc. — and it’s down to you to figure out which will get you through the most immediate hurdle.

Navigating Image Fight’s five stages is incredibly challenging, especially since a death initiates a dreaded checkpoint restart and strips you of your weapon power-ups. But, learning it piece by piece reveals a wonderfully creative, joyously brutal game. It’s an experience to be immersed within, and memorably, rapturously conquered rather than raced through and forgotten.

Included in the package are the PC Engine and Famicom/NES home ports, the latter being the only time the game was ever originally released in North America. This version is graced with auto fire as well as a blue background alternative to Japan’s original spacey black. Dabbling in these is interesting. The ports are in a 4:3 vertical aspect ratio, zooming in the action and adjusting the layouts, and the PC Engine version is slightly easier while feeling excitingly urgent. The NES port is easiest of all, but an excellent rendition that plays differently owing to the smaller sprite sizes and broader screen space.

Image Fight II: Operation Deepstriker follows the same format as its predecessor, with improved graphics, but switches to a 4:3 vertical aspect owing to the fact it was created for NEC’s PC Engine. It includes the console's customary and lengthy anime story interludes, but ININ Games has missed a trick by not adding subtitles for the Japanese speech. Considering how long some of them go on for, the addition would have been a desirable selling point.

Image Fight II is arguably even harder than the original, utilising the exact same system of pod acquisition and Forces attachments, but then cruelly stripping you of all power-ups at the start of a new stage. It maintains the checkpoint death system and the weapon strategy mix-ups, while increasing the action with bigger enemies and faster attacks. It’s another cleverly assembled, hardcore experience that shows off its brilliance when you start to understand its makeup. Disassembling it is thrilling and rewarding, as long as you have the patience and resolve to make initial headway. Getting through stage one's trial-by-fire is a must, because for our money the first stage and its boss are actually slightly tougher than several thereafter.

Finally, 1989’s X Multiply is a far friendlier, more immediate game to wade into. Unlike the demandingly strict line of Image Fight, here newcomers can comfortably get stuck into the action and have a blast. Your craft, the X-002, fires from its nose and the two snaking tentacles affixed to its top and underside. These tentacles, although they roam automatically, can be positioned temporarily by adjusting your craft’s position, acting as shields against incoming bullets. There are several weapon types to grab from colour-coded pods, and consecutively obtaining the same colour enhances the shot type until it reaches a devastating maximum.

X Multiply was fairly fresh on release, trading R-Type’s fussiness for a faster, more explosive action affair without the threat of expert difficulty. Additionally, it features one of the weirdest, and most wonderfully icky universes in the genre: the human body. An H.R. Giger-inspired fusion of pulsating, organic masses, tendrils, protruding heads, and roaming eyeballs, it's up to you to free the host of a microscopic alien invasion.

While emulation quality seems strong across the board, The Irem Collection Volume I’s presentation is disappointingly bare bones. The three titles are tied together with a select screen that looks like it was assembled in half a day, while suffering a weird amount of slowdown during its cycling. Anyone familiar with ININ Game’s previous releases can at least expect a good set of configuration and screen filter options, highly adjustable in nature, plus save states that are useful for practice. There is also a rewind function, as well as cheats for invincibility and infinite lives, all of which rob these particular titles of their value.

We couldn’t find a quick restart option on any title, which was incredibly annoying, and initially Image Fight II didn’t even allow you to select ’No’ on its continue screen (this has since been patched). The limited wallpaper choices are so lacklustre you may as well just switch them off, and there are no historical artworks or manual scans, nor a dedicated practice mode or music player. There are achievements and some simple challenge options that may appeal to pro players, but try as we might we couldn't locate the online leaderboards until contacting PR. For reference, they're located under 'Challenges' after confirming the difficulty. Odd.

Additionally, it's worth mentioning that Image Fight and X Multiply are both already available in arcade form under the Arcade Archives label by Hamster Corporation, although they don't have quite as many configurable options as present here.