Earthion Review (Switch eShop)

While not entirely dormant for the last 30 years, Yuzo Koshiro’s Ancient Corp — responsible for Streets of Rage II, Story of Thor, and the Master System’s superb Sonic the Hedgehog — is finally back in the public eye with the release of Earthion. What’s significant for the small studio is a return to the console that cemented it in the annals of gaming history.

Those who follow Koshiro on social media will know his love for the Mega Drive and its Motorola 68000 processor, and, as such, it is with great fanfare that Earthion has arrived to reignite Sega’s 16-bit powerhouse. Sort of. Intended for a physical release in the first instance, Ancient has instead decided to lead with modern formats to ensure the manufactured cartridge (ostensibly scheduled for 2026) is the best it can possibly be. This has already resulted in improved bullet visibility based on player feedback, and other tweaks via update.

For Nintendo Switch, then, Earthion works both beautifully in handheld (assuming you use anything other than the stock Joy-Con) and as a bigger, more arresting experience on the TV. Driven by precise emulation, Earthion is actually more the brainchild of Makoto Wada - a fact often drowned out by Koshiro’s celebrity status. Wada is the designer, programmer, planner, and overall director of the game, while Koshiro produces, adding in a blazing soundtrack and crunchy effects.

A clear labour of love, there are a lot of personal touches in Earthion, right down to the barrelled CRT and heavy shadow masking set as the startup screen filter. While pretty, this does make it a little tough for those new to the game to see everything that's going on. It's best, then, to go into the in-game menu and take advantage of one of the most granular and configurable scanline filters around, where you can change percentages by the digit for every aspect of the display.

What smacks you instantly is the game’s graphical bombast. Your craft, the YK-IIA (quite possibly representing someone’s initials), deployed by a mothership and blasting off on stage one, spins dynamically from the foreground to take its firing position amidst a booming space war of lasers and debris.

Koshiro's soundtrack ploughs you in, driving the action from one set-piece to the next in a game of near-constant variety. Giant mechs tear through space stations; lasers rip up through the floor of a technological, dinosaur-patrolled lost world; towering guardians rise from seething lava pits; and maddened alien monsters give chase through tight futuristic chicanes and sinewy, pulsating hives.

Bosses are profound — at one point stretching three-screens-tall — and come at you with smartly engineered attack patterns that only occasionally feel a touch haphazard. Moreover, the sheer number of regular enemy types is equally impressive, introducing small, medium, and large foes at breathless pace, ever-changing the game’s spots and continually keeping you on your toes. It’s hard to say if it can run so flicker and slowdown-free on real Mega Drive hardware, although beefed-up chipsets may do the job.

To help you deal with the barrage, the game employs multiple weapon options and a divisive regenerating shield system. Should you get pummelled too much when your shields are low and the warning is blaring, you’ll go up in flames; but, avoid damage for a brief period and that protective blue bar will work its way back to top-spec.

Earthion is engineered more around taking fire and surviving than absolute precision dodging — especially in its latter stages — and to some this may be irksome. But, with extended play, Earthion’s mechanics reveal themselves to work very well indeed, with the survival aspect nicely implemented around the increasingly dense flak. While at first it may seem complex, and you’re likely to go up in smoke early on, once you grasp the balancing it becomes both much easier and very encouraging to clear.

Wada’s ideas are unique and interesting. You start out with two shield bars, two weapon power bars, and two weapon slots. You can fill the swappable weapon slots with lasers, homing missiles, and twin-firing cannon pick-ups, amongst others, and, by grabbing green icons spilled from the destruction, you can keep those weapons chugging at their most powerful state.

Most important to the game’s strategy is the “Adaptation Pod” released at the tail-end of each stage. Grabbing this will occupy one weapon slot and has no in-play function, restricting you to a single actual weapon of choice to battle the boss. Should you manage to hold on to the Adaptation Pod (which is at risk of being destroyed should you take too much fire), it can then be spent at the mid-stage interval to upgrade your craft via a menu. Options here include adding additional shields, increasing max weapon power and slots, or even an extra life.

How you choose to spend the Adaptation Pod is down to the player, although in reality there are better ways to apply them. From personal experience, whereby I managed to pin down two one-credit clears, the upgrades that seem most immediately beneficial (like extra lives) aren’t always best in the long-term.

It’s clear that Wada’s approach to Earthion is multi-functional. In a positive way, it feels markedly different from the genre norm, and lot of this is owed to how broad and unique the various weaponry is, and their distinct usefulness in certain sections. It's also designed to be friendlier to new audiences; not just through its several difficulty levels or mid-stage ship upgrades, but its password system - one that allows you to carry over boosted shields and weaponry to subsequent playthroughs. This is a nice, Radiant Silvergun-style augmentation that allows anyone the chance to complete the game through multiple attempts. For those who want to have at it traditionally, though, the password option can be comfortably ignored.

It's worth noting, too, that the Switch version seems to have been toned down ever so slightly in its default difficulty. No doubt whatever changes have been made here have now also been patched through to the Steam version, resulting in a game that feels cleaner and easier to navigate than its initial release. It wasn't overly difficult to begin with, only sitting mid-range in terms of shoot-'em-up challenge, but some further fine-tuning has definitely occurred, removing certain popcorn enemies and refining some of the bullet spreads and speeds. Overall, it's now at its most enjoyable state.

Earthion is a game that may not click immediately. It looks and sounds fantastic, but its idiosyncrasies take a few runs to adjust to. To that end, it requires time to grow on you. Once it clicks, you'll find yourself engrossed in strategising a path to victory, and the wonderful risk-reward of the Adaptation Pod. It’s full of neat elements, including safe spots and techniques, where the more unlikely, less obvious weapons can prove advantageous in certain areas. There are multiple methods of approach for bosses, and there are several extra lives dotted about to keep you in play.

What it does brilliantly is in its constant inventiveness, requiring the learning of the smallest of enemies to the largest of bosses; and its final third is thoroughly climactic. It has a big-budget, arcade feel to it, and really nice introduction and ending sequences.

It is, however, imperfect overall, with Wada’s creative enterprising never quite hitting that absolute shoot-'em-up adrenaline high, that pocket of euphoria that comes from pure and perfect dodges, near misses, and glorious untouched victories. The bullets can still be difficult to spot in places, and will often tag you because of it, and the soundtrack — while top-notch by Mega Drive standards — doesn't excel beyond the likes of Gleylancer, Thunder Force III, or the more recent Andro Dunos 2.