Axelay/Akusurei (アクスレイ) - Super Famicom/SNES

When you're the legendary Konami, cranking out hit after hit after hit, you're bound to leave a little bit of greatness behind. With a vast stable full of long running, awesome franchises (Gradius/Nemesis, Salamander/Life Force, Parodius, just to name the shmups), ones which consistently turn out good reviews and great sales, the one-off games, the real risks, struggle to find a voice.

But it can be boring to turn out yet another Gradius game (or Gradius-like), with slight tweaks to mechanics long established as tradition. So the impetuous Konami game designer, eager to try out wholly different ideas, has to rally support to turn out a risky and unproven product.

With Konami, this has happened at least twice. In 1989, the extraordinary Space Manbow was released on the MSX and never seen in another platform or sequel again.

(Okay, I lied a little, it was ported to Japanese Mobile Phones (2006) and released against on the Japanese Virtual Console (2009). But the point still stands.)

Released a mere 4 years later, Axelay, perhaps the pinnacle shmup on the Super Famicom/SNES, is yet another game that's almost completely forgotten. Languishing in relative obscurity, unported, without sequel or prequel. It's largely a game forgotten.

(Okay, a little more lying to make my point, it landed on Virtual Console in 2007.)

Evidence that this game has been lost in the hearts and minds of gamers? Read any retrogaming message board, and you'll find people new to retrogaming asking for great SNES games -- Axelay, despite being one of the finest shooters ever released, almost never makes that list. When it does though, it's almost always talked about with gushing praise.

Why is Axelay forgotten? The world may never know the true answer, but I suspect it was sunk by reviews in the professional gaming media, never seeming to have risen up to more than a 7 out of 10 (± .5). Yet player reviews routinely score it 2 points higher. IGN's Virtual Console's score is a great case in point.

I'm not upset with the press over this, on the contrary, it helps keep Axelay a hidden gem, a shibboleth true retrogamers can use to parse away the posers. Okay it smarts a little. In the specifics of the reviews, they seemed confused about the game. It's a Konami shmup, so they expect a Gradius or Salamander style power up system, but it doesn't have that. Okay, so it must be a Parodius style cute-'em-up, but it isn't -- your family is killed by an unstoppable faceless enemy after all. Rather than review it on its own merits, and it's chock full of them, for each thing it isn't, a point gets deducted from the final score.

So what is Axelay? Probably one of the purest shmups ever made -- a kind of F-Zero for shooters. There are no collectibles and no powerups. Before each mission, you choose three weapons to loadout and you begin. New, rather unique, weapons are added to your arsenal as you complete missions. But there really isn't any one weapon better than another. They are situational tools, seasoning for different flavors of delicious combat.

Missions alternate between unique vertical and gorgeous horizontal levels each capped off with amazing, usually articulate, screen filling bosses. Axelay never becomes a grind, it's difficult, but always fair. It's first and foremost a game to experience all the way through -- and this is exactly how the difficulty is calibrated (and it can even be adjusted up or down to suit the player). A full run through on hard takes slightly over a half-hour to 45 minutes.

Along the way, each level will be filled with a never ending cornucopia of enemies, all unique to that level (as far as I could tell). Some might be used only in one instance in the entire game. Your weapons loadout double as a kind of life bar, take a shot and you lose the weapon. Take too many shots and you're fighting for you life with a peashooter and a warning alarm to get your blood pumping -- four shots and you're dead. Regardless of your remaining loadout, suffer a catastrophic collision and you lose a life.

Graphics are fantastic and often mindblowing, even today. Levels range from high tech orbital habitats to organic caves dripping with moisture. Enemies fit the theme of each level perfectly, and your ship has impressively subtle animations as you weave it to and fro. Lots of ink has been bled over the use of the SNES's "mode 7" in the vertical stages to simulate a slightly canted landscape. But I'm not convinced this is a mode 7 effect. It appears to be more likely programming wizardry. Where mode 7 is used, it's a gorgeous and surprisingly subtle tool. The body of the articulate boss in Stage 2 for example.

Perhaps most impressive to me in this game is the music and sound design. The music is astonishingly listenable today with barely a hint of the resource restrictions the SNES soundchip put on it. It's typically an uptempo 90s era jazz-rock, but lots of care was put into making it match and work off of the visuals. Each boss even gets its own variation on the level's music. In places, instruments are bent and twisted to build suspense, provide incidental tension, fill out the atmosphere of the stage and even sound like alien speech. An epic 30+ minute version of the Stage 2 music was even produced -- and it's a hell of a ride.

The sound effects are likewise perfect, explosions rip across the soundscape and weapon effects never get annoying or intrusive. It's the remarkable work of a collaboration between Taro Kudo known for work on Super Castlevania IV and sound programmer/designer Atsushi Fujio. As a layer over the game, it binds and tightens up every other facet and makes it a complete whole. There's really not enough that can be said for the audio work in this game.

An interesting side note about Axelay is the small legacy it created. One of the founders of Treasure, Kazuhiko Ishida worked on Axelay, the soundtrack has often been covered and remixed, and the recent Dreamcast game Sturmwind based much of its gameplay mechanics on Axelay -- almost enough to be a spiritual sequel. Another game clearly inspired by the Axelay powerup system is Satazius.

So what does the future hold for Axelay? The end of the game promised an Axelay 2, is it naive to hope Konami reaches back into their bag of awesome but forgotten games and gives Axelay the franchise it always deserved?