Features
- Eight levels
- 14 different weapons
- Battery save
- Only for Game Boy Advance
When the Super NES version of Gradius III, Konami used the system to the game's advantage, showing off what the hardware can do...horrible slowdown aside. It's the same deal with Gradius Galaxies, as many of the levels push the GBA's hardware showing off rotating enemies and objects, transparent backgrounds, and digitized voices throughout the action...all without any of the slowdown that plagued previous versions of the series. The designers even get cute with the popular Konami code that was made famous by the NES version. Folks who enter in the familiar command during the game are rewarded with all weapons and power-ups...but only for three seconds as their ship self-destructs. (The true "all weapons" code can be activated with a slight variation of this command string). Konami obviously learned their lesson with the GBA's lighting problem from its contrast mistake with Castlevania, as Gradius Galaxies is much brighter to see overall...despite taking place in the blackness of space, all the tiny hazardous and helpful sprites can be seen in normal lighting. And thankfully the designers added a rapid-fire mode to the game -- it's not like you can add a controller with rapid-fire to the GBA, so they added it to the options menu if you want it.
Other cool features include the game's ability to save high scores to cartridge. And since there's a battery involved, the game will also allow players to return to any sub-level that's been completed...which means players can continue the game before the last level just to pick up a few power-ups to assist them in the level they screwed up.
Gradius Galaxies is definitely a challenging and action-packed title, but it's definitely not without issues. The graphics, while definitely using the GBA's hardware to good use, isn't really advancing the series in its look -- Mobile 21 kept the game looking extremely close to the classic versions, so sprites and backgrounds don't exactly leap off the LCD screen. The audio is definitely a step backwards from Konami's previous efforts, especially compared to Castlevania...the tunes barely sound better than NES and Game Boy music. And while it seems like a good thing that the game features battery save, it hurts the challenge of Gradius Galaxies since players can jump right to the last level reached whenever they want...with infinite continues to boot. Eight levels can only go so far, and a skilled player can blast through this game in an hour or two. Of course, there's the matter of playing through at a higher difficulty next time, but the incentive isn't there since it doesn't offer anything really different at the end.
