Radiant Silvergun is a vertical scrolling shooter from the well-known company called Treasure, who also created Guardian Heroes, a 1st-generation Saturn title that still kicks butt due to its incredible 2D frantic action. RS came out in 1998 in Japan and has a very different slant than your generic 2D shooter - I'll explain further down in the review. Radiant Silvergun has turned out to be one of the games I always expected to see on Saturn, but it actually took quite a while for someone to produce a high quality "classic shooter" with many innovative features. From what this English-speaking gamer can fathom, the plot involves a crew on a spaceship fighting enemies in pursuit of a crystal across time. You start your timeline in the next century right after a terrible explosion has destroyed the Earth, and you start to skip backwards in time, seeing the Earth again as it was, seeing Earth's Secretary (a pointy bearded guy), whom you know just got blown up in the future, and progressing until you end up in the distant past.
Graphics -- 10 points out of 10
Treasure's use of a combination of sprites (for the littler ships & their weapons) and 3D polygonal craft (for the bigger enemies) looks fantastic. The craft fly vertically over several layers of high resolution scaling/rotating/parallax backgrounds. The transparent layer of clouds is a superb effect. The explosions are very animated and shaded well, too. Nothing in RS looks bad! The backgrounds are at all times very detailed and they scale in a very well-done manner, never ever looking pixely. There seems to be times were literally hundreds of sprites are on the screen at once, and only at the most intense times and during huge exposions do you ever see even a hint of slowdown -- it's THAT good. Treasure has used the Saturn hardware to do exactly what it was designed to do well, and in my opinion, without equal among the current gaming systems.
Rating the graphics on style, the enemies dont look as unique as, say, the fish enemies in a Darius shooter. But then again, everything here looks great. The graphics that astounded me the most were the smoothness of everything (high frame rate), the awesome high resolution/well-shaded backgrounds, and the wonderful misty cloud layer. Why didn't more developers use the Saturn's VDP2 background chip for transparency FX? Also, the explosions are the best done I have ever seen --the fiery ones look fiery, the blinding ones are indeed blindingly bright. The bosses consist of mechanical variations of odd segmented craft, an eel or snake type boss, and a human silouette looking boss. There is a lot of variety in the different stages, and in story mode you get little dialogues with your crew. I have very little idea what most of the Japanese words mean, but that just adds to the appeal and mood to me! Even the title screen and brief anime movie and option screens are of a very unique and high quality style. There is absolutely NO pop-up, NO warping ugly polygons, no confusing camera angles in RS. BRING BACK 2D GAMES!
Music and Sounds -- 8 points out of 10
The music is orchestral and it fits, 'nuff said. The game sounds are also of a high quality, but nothing astounding. As I mentioned above, you get little bits of dialogue in Japanese at times -- well done and typical Treasure-produced Japanese overacting, I love it!
Gameplay -- 9 points out of 10
First of all, all shooters get dull after time. It's their nature -- the one-dimensional act of twitching and shooting and powering up is an explosive blast of gaming, but in time you get familiar with the nuances of any shooter and it loses its appeal. That's why I feel that so far NO shooter deserves a perfect 10 of 10 score in Gameplay. Most deserve a 6 or 7, in fact. But Radiant Silvergun has introduced new rules and marries these to absolutely frenzied action.
Basically, you get 7 weapons using the A,B,C,X,Y,Z, and Right Shift buttons. You get them from the start, and they begin to power up from level one. Your first gaming session will be short because there is just no way to get very far with your wimpy weapons. So when you lose your last life, you can save your weapons status. Then you can start the whole game over but your weapons will maintain their former levels. Thus, you'll get farther and farther, not only because you'll recognize the patterns, but because you'll be far more powerful each time you start. So, there are NO floating powerups for you to attempt to grab in RS. Instead, your weapons will increase based on your shooting chains of similarly-colored enemies. Shooting chains of Red enemies will boost one shot, and the same goes for blue or yellow enemies.
The weapons themselves deserve mention. Button A fires powerful forward blasts, B fires homing circular blasts, C fires angled left/right blasts that are extremely powerful but slower; the X button splits button A's blast forward & rear, Y is a circular auto-lock thing, and Z is a tracking laser that will also lock onto a target. Your "smart bomb" type weapon is the Right shift, I think it is called the Radiant Sword. Pressing it causes a sword to swipe around your ship. The strategy here is to catch the pink colored shots from the enemies in the sword's swipe. Once the Radiant Sword gets powered up (you'll know), another button press causes a HUGE scissors type energy sword to open and slam down on the entire top half of the screen, causing MASSIVE damage.
Finally, there is also a Dog Master rating. I have never found all 30 or so Dogs, but I've found pretty many. I've read that you don't really get a reward for finding them, but this feature adds replayability. Only one kind of weapon will lock onto the hidden Dogs and find them. Find them all!
Overall Rating
Ratings are tough, you know? How do you put an overall numerical rating on a game? As a shooter, this is one of the best I've played. It didn't "awe" me like the 3D Panzer Dragoons originally did, but I can honestly say that Radiant Silvergun astounded me and surprised me many, many times. What can I say, I like shooters and I am 100 percent satisfied with high quality and overall complete package that I got with Radiant Silvergun.
I'd give it a 9.5 out of 10.