A clear of the first loop of Gradius II (GOFER no Yabou), sequel to the legendary Gradius, also known as Vulcan Venture outside of Japan.

You have various ships at your disposal, I think type D is pretty much considered the best one. However there's not a massive difference in difficulty between ships. In my opinion, the main draw is the missile which fires up and down, but its two main weapons are also very useful. Ripple has great coverage which is rare in Gradius and allows you to deal with some parts easily without having to be precise, while tail-gun is self-explanatory.

Regarding upgrades, my strategy is to take 2 speed-ups and the missiles immediately, then 4 options and ripple and keep it until the end of the game. During stage 4 the option thief should appear and I let it steal one option without taking a new one. I do this to make sure he doesn't appear anymore, since he only spawns when you have 4 options. You kinda need the 4 options early on (mainly for stage 3, but it's good for the second boss), but for the rest of the game it matters less. I don't want the option thief to appear at the worst times.

Tail-gun could have been useful, but the fact that Ripple is so great, that you can put your options behind you to deal with threats from behind, and that your missiles shoot up and down, meant that I ended up never using it. I experimented to see if I could use it in some places but honestly it's not really worth it in my opinion, at least for the first loop.

In some ways I find it easier than the original Gradius but it's hard to tell. The first game had a weird difficulty curve that peaks in stages 3 and 4 while the rest is fine until the final stage, whereas Gradius 2 is more balanced but twice as long.

Recovery in this game is pretty damn hard, but technically possible in the first loop. The problem being your weak starting shot and the fact that you need 2 Speed-ups + Missiles + Ripple + at least one Option to stand a chance, + Force Field to be sure you don't get sniped, which is a lot of upgrades (19 for the setup I just described). The more you advance in the game, the harder the checkpoints become (except for the final checkpoint where you can simply hug the right edge of the screen).

You can pretty much do the first 4 stages without a solid plan as long as you stay aggressive, but I would recommend starting routing in the Moai stage. Stage 6 is easy in itself but you can easily get walled if you don't know what you're doing, so just memorize a good path. Bosses overall aren't too hard once you know them and so is the boss rush, aside from the last boss in said boss rush which can be a challenge. With the 2-way missiles, final stage is ok as long as you remember when to be aggressive, though the spider at the end needs practice too. The path I use for the spider is very consistent and I recommend it.

Second loop is no joke, I played for fun but you really need a great plan to go anywhere. Everything is so aggressive and half of the enemies shoot revenge bullets. Maybe in a distant future I'd like to clear multiple loops of a Gradius game, but this would probably be on the first one since it's shorter (and because it would be the opportunity to record a clear).

Aside from the end of Stage 3 where I get really close to losing a life, the run was pretty much as good as I could hope and everything went as planned.

All in all, it's a very good game. So far I really liked all 3 Gradius games I played seriously (the first 2 and Gaiden). Music is great, art direction is nice and the pacing is excellent, it really feels like a 10 minutes game even if it's roughly half an hour long.

00:00 - Boot screens
0:31 - Stage 1 (Artificial Sun)
3:10 - Stage 2 (Alien)
5:57 - Stage 3 (Crystal)
9:25 - Stage 4 (Volcano)
12:12 - Stage 5 (Moai)
16:30 - Stage 6 (High Speed Maze)
18:10 - Boss Rush
23:00 - Stage 7 (Gofer Ship Interior)
27:57 - Ending
28:46 - Having fun in loop 2
32:33 - Attract mode and Intro

свернуть