A playthrough of NEC's 1997 shoot 'em up for the NEC PC-FX, Choujin Heiki Zeroigar.

Played through on the normal difficulty setting.

Like every other game for the PC-FX, Zeroigar was a Japanese-exclusive release. However, thanks to the huge efforts of a couple of fans, the entire thing has been patch to English. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can find all the necessary details over at [ Ссылка ]

Given what a haven for top-quality shoot 'em ups the PC Engine was, you might expect that its successor would have continued that trend. Unfortunately, Zeroigar was the *only* shoot 'em up released on the PC-FX!

Come on, Hudson, seriously?! You gave even the N64 a Star Soldier game!

But still, at least they made it a fairly good one. Zeroigar doesn't ever come close to the heights that the genre on the Turbo with releases like Air Zonk, Lords/Gate of Thunder, Soldier Blade, Gradius II, Blazing Lazers... well, you get the idea. The list of classics it had could go on for awhile.

Zeroigar is an extremely well-produced anime - about equal to the quality of a show produced for television - that happens to be punctuated by vertically-scrolling shooter action. The story is pretty out there and would take a fair effort to explain coherently, so I'll leave it for you to see for yourself. There is about twenty minutes of the game dedicated solely to the story, so the designers clearly wanted you to pay attention. It definitely entertains with its melodrama and general strangeness.

The game play itself is just fine - there's nothing super-stellar about it, but it pulls off all of the basics without a hitch. You get several different special weapons over the course of the game, and all of your weapons gradually power-up as you gain experience - it feels a fair amount like Imperium on the SNES in that respect. The controls are a bit unwieldy at times because of the speed that you move at - your ship hauls across the screen even at the lowest speed setting, and if you aren't careful to exploit the momentary invincibility you get when picked up an item, your mech's huge sprite will get nailed seven ways to Sunday by enemy gunfire. It has its moments where the screen begins to resemble the bullet-hell style shooter, so you have to be very careful to navigate through the mazes of bullets. If you're life bar runs out, you go back to the beginning of the stage.

Hint for the last boss: jam the nose of your ship into its crotch as close as you can without getting hit. This will allow your shots to clip through the legs and hit, making the battle much, much shorter than the marathon it typically would be.

The game looks and sounds fantastic, as you might imagine running on the PC-FX. Tons of parallax scrolling, screen-filling bosses, and enough firepower to make you feel claustrophobic without a hint of slowdown really makes it a sight to behold. Once you get to the later half of the game, that is. The first few levels are oddly plain in comparison, but it makes up for it by the time you get to the crazy endgame. It's soundtrack is also thoroughly excellent.

Now that it's been translated - and the quality of the work is excellent - it's well worth playing through. Zeroigar is one of the extreme few PC-FX titles accessible to English-speakers, and it's one of the best action games on the platform. I wouldn't recommend buying a copy for what it goes for at this point, but if you can obtain it by any cheaper means, go for it. You'll have a lot of fun, even if it doesn't last you very long.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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