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yamamanama78 days until the vernal equinox
Captain’s Journal. Stardate… uhhhhh.
January 1st. Point two.
In real life, NGC-1611 is a lenticular galaxy in Eridanus.
AKA Super Attack God Sādion. The X makes it sound cool.
This scene is playing itself.
I bet you thought this game was going to be a shmup.
It’s sort of a proto-metroidvania with some RPG elements.
I took over 220 screenshots because the story to this game is told one or two lines at a time in a tiny font.
It’s by Asmik. No wonder the movement is somewhat stiff. Even by the standards of giant anime robots. You know, back in the days before everything is isekai or “reborn as a vending machine, I now wander the dungeon.” I didn’t make that up. Let’s see what the manual has to say.
Xardion is the ultimate cyborg. Alcedes, Panthera, and Triton are robots. Triton is King of the Sea. Panthera is a cybernetic Leopard. Alcedes is a telekinetic Beastybot.
The manual tells me nothing. Well, it did tell me there’s the Metal Maniac Sweepstakes, a contest that starts on April 1, 1992 that runs until July 30, 1992. You can win a SNES with five Asmik games including Xardion if you come up with a better name for one of the robots than Panthera.
I wonder what did win.
This part is a reminder that you can change characters.
Everyone has their own health bar, just so you know.
Despite what looks like a buzzsaw spin dash, I don’t think he can actually jump into enemies Sonic-style.
These boss battles take forever. But at least I don’t have to play red light green light.
Beating a boss fills your current character’s health but not everyone else’s. You don’t get health back when you beat a level and health pickups are so scarce as to not even matter. If you die, you get to keep all your experience, at least. In fact, I think the gameplay kind of depends on it. On the other hand, only the character who dies regains health. And for whatever reason, the music doesn’t restart when you die.
The cannons shoot eyeballs at you.
I’m not sure if Alcedes does more damage than the others or if his whip attack is cumulative with his shot.
the music is very repetitive.
When you level up, you gain max health but do not get an automatic refill of your health.
But your weapons don’t work. What you have to do is just jump into it.
The water sprites are super easy. The guide suggests transforming into Panthera but sometimes the glob of water tracks downward and hits you.
Panthera’s also lower to the ground.
Start does nothing. However, pressing start and select at the same time takes you to the map screen.
The ice segment is very short.
Just jump in the hole.
The giant space ants throw their boomerang antennae at you.
There’s a buzzing noise in the background music.
Moths track your movement. They explode rather dramatically when you defeat them.
We’re heading into Axel the Red’s stage. Or Spike Rosered depending on which version you prefer.
There’s no boss here. Just a cutscene.
This is just hilarious to me.
After the rose segment is a vertical segment.
You can stand on the edge of the screen and most of the crabs will vanish into the offscreen aether but occasionally one will blindside you anyway. Just to be a jerk.
This seems to be the best place to stand. Face left. You’ll fight about six waves of crab. One of the crabs will drop down at ludicrous speed. You’re supposed to hit the eyestalks in between. Panthera is low enough to the ground that he can just stand on the ledge and hit the eye. After that, you’ll go through a brief upside down segment with no enemies
They call it a red desert planet when it is clearly beige.
I don’t know why the game repeats the text after you die and have to repeat the area.
Those paratroopers are invincible.
This game is really good at atmosphere, I’ll say.
You can skip the underground segment if you want.
But you really really really want the shield that’s down here.
The guide suggests getting the shield and then restart the level but there’s no real point to doing that.
I don’t know if there’s a better way to fight this boss aside from stand there, shoot it, and use sub-tanks when you’re running low on health.
It’s another vertical stage.
There’s nothing out here. You have to ride the platforms upwards.
It’s really slow.
And it’s still functional despite all the decay.
We’re climbing up into space.
If you come back to this stage, you can’t get back up through the hatch. You’re just going to have to exit the stage or die.
This boss looks intimidating
But then it just shoots the floor and the level ends. You still get experience for “beating” it.
The shield robots dash towards you and then back and forth. Despite having shields, you can shoot through them as you would any other part of their body. They get stuck where the turrets once stood.
Those drones sure are annoying.
One of the abilities Panthera got along the way is an utterly broken as shit that uses a sliver of ammo and lasts a while. I don’t want to imply anything here.
It’ll stomp and shoot a lot of balls out of its, uhm, bottom orifice and then move to your location and stomp again.
You should have the shield. Use it.
So, despite having the special weapons, they’re still grayed out. And that’s part of what makes this so counterintuitive. You’d think because they’re dimmed out, it means that you don’t have access to them because you’re missing an item or because your level is too low, but no.
The problem with this game is that nothing is explained very well.
You have to, on the menu screen, hit A (which, for me, is the x button on the keyboard) and you select your special weapon and press it again to select your special item, and then go back to the main screen and press x to use your special item. That is way too much effort for a game that came out after Mega Man.
Surprise! The game isn’t ending here. I don’t know what implied that, maybe the black space on the level map.
I excluded that first frame from the gif because it looks better that way.
It looks like a peaceful planet but that ominous music tells me otherwise.
You’re immediately assaulted by mud monsters and trees.
I just ran through it (well, slog through it because you’re slow and having five enemies on the screen causes slowdown) and used subtanks when I needed to.
Because I didn’t know about Panthera and his inv-shield.
It was a thumbnail depicting this area that drew me to this game. I thought it was an NES game, which makes sense because early SNES games look like NES games with their sprite sizes but have a richer color palette and the occasional fake transparency effect. While late NES games look like SNES games with oversized player sprites but with a reduced color palette and severely downgraded backgrounds.
This thing is a manifestation of hatred or something. There are five faces to damage. The first thing you want to do is shoot the lowest face, either by ducking or by being Panthera, and then the second face from the bottom. Then the middle face. Then the second face from the top. Then the top face. You’ll have to jump to hit it. They all spit and the spit falls in a predictable pattern. Easy. As. Piss. If you’re at a low level, it takes for-fucking-ever.
Once all the faces are gone, a Xenomorph tongue pops out and shoots tracking shots. Make sure you have a shield up. If it comes out of the lower face, just ignore it. Don’t leave the top.
We move on after this.
Real acid. That means I want to see goggles, everyone. We lose Panthera. All this means you can’t press the switch and access the side area in the first level. And no more cheesing the game with inv-shield.
Xardion starts out at level one. It turns out the best place to grind is the first level and the first desert planet level (which has multiple health pickups). Apparently leveling up increases their speed, jump height, and weapon power, as well as giving you an increase in health and ammunition. The max level is 12, I’ve learned afterwards. At least, Alcedes and Xardion both gain power as they level up.
We also need the three pieces of Xardion’s ultimate weapon, which are all kept in those places you couldn’t access.
This boss is a joke. If you came here earlier, the robots will talk about turning this octopus into sushi but realize they can’t actually damage him. Now that you have the power of Xardion on your side, you can mash fire and defeat him before he defeats you, even at the lowest level. And you get 200 experience from him.
The second part is at the end of Spike Rosered’s stage.
The third part is in that alcove where you fall into the sand pit.
It’s weird that we lose Panthera when Xardion is basically an upgraded Triton.
Fought the faces at 6:07 PM on May 10, 2023. Got back here at 7:04 PM on May 10, 2023. So it wasn’t that bad, I guess.
It’s a very short game. I wrote this coming off of Sky Kid, which I called overlong.
For some perspective, I took 227 screenshots. 140 are for gifs, leaving 86. A few of those screenshots are redundant.
Jasu Bakuhatsu thinks the background here is a reference to Macross but the robots themselves are Gundams.
There are five phases to the final boss. The first phase is stupid and his hitbox is too big to jump over.
The second phase is a joke.
The third phase is a damage sponge. I swear the sole purpose of this part is so you waste all your sub-tanks.
Fourth phase, just get close and spam that fire button. The orbs do four different things, two of which will hit you when you’re standing next to him and the other two only hit you if you stand far away.
You may take damage when it turns into its fifth phase. I didn’t. But even if you do, the front is still the safest place to stand.
As for the fifth phase, just spam your special attack and if you need to restore ammo or heal, do so.
You still get experience for beating the final boss.
Gainax was involved. No wonder. The English script was written by one of the guys involved in Wizardry. Trebor, the Mad Overlord, not Werdna, the evil Arch-Wizard. The mecha were designed by Hajime Katoki and Yasuhiro Moriki. All of this means that Xardion should be amazing but it isn’t.
This is an apt description of the game: this game is pretty much nothing but neat concepts and ideas that simply aren’t expanded on.
burning question: Who do you think you are, manual writer? Emily Dickinson?
Captain’s Journal. Stardate… uhhhhh.
January 1st. Point two.
In real life, NGC-1611 is a lenticular galaxy in Eridanus.
AKA Super Attack God Sādion. The X makes it sound cool.
This scene is playing itself.
I bet you thought this game was going to be a shmup.
It’s sort of a proto-metroidvania with some RPG elements.
I took over 220 screenshots because the story to this game is told one or two lines at a time in a tiny font.
It’s by Asmik. No wonder the movement is somewhat stiff. Even by the standards of giant anime robots. You know, back in the days before everything is isekai or “reborn as a vending machine, I now wander the dungeon.” I didn’t make that up. Let’s see what the manual has to say.
Xardion is the ultimate cyborg. Alcedes, Panthera, and Triton are robots. Triton is King of the Sea. Panthera is a cybernetic Leopard. Alcedes is a telekinetic Beastybot.
The manual tells me nothing. Well, it did tell me there’s the Metal Maniac Sweepstakes, a contest that starts on April 1, 1992 that runs until July 30, 1992. You can win a SNES with five Asmik games including Xardion if you come up with a better name for one of the robots than Panthera.
I wonder what did win.
This part is a reminder that you can change characters.
Everyone has their own health bar, just so you know.
Despite what looks like a buzzsaw spin dash, I don’t think he can actually jump into enemies Sonic-style.
These boss battles take forever. But at least I don’t have to play red light green light.
Beating a boss fills your current character’s health but not everyone else’s. You don’t get health back when you beat a level and health pickups are so scarce as to not even matter. If you die, you get to keep all your experience, at least. In fact, I think the gameplay kind of depends on it. On the other hand, only the character who dies regains health. And for whatever reason, the music doesn’t restart when you die.
The cannons shoot eyeballs at you.
I’m not sure if Alcedes does more damage than the others or if his whip attack is cumulative with his shot.
the music is very repetitive.
When you level up, you gain max health but do not get an automatic refill of your health.
But your weapons don’t work. What you have to do is just jump into it.
The water sprites are super easy. The guide suggests transforming into Panthera but sometimes the glob of water tracks downward and hits you.
Panthera’s also lower to the ground.
Start does nothing. However, pressing start and select at the same time takes you to the map screen.
The ice segment is very short.
Just jump in the hole.
The giant space ants throw their boomerang antennae at you.
There’s a buzzing noise in the background music.
Moths track your movement. They explode rather dramatically when you defeat them.
We’re heading into Axel the Red’s stage. Or Spike Rosered depending on which version you prefer.
There’s no boss here. Just a cutscene.
This is just hilarious to me.
After the rose segment is a vertical segment.
You can stand on the edge of the screen and most of the crabs will vanish into the offscreen aether but occasionally one will blindside you anyway. Just to be a jerk.
This seems to be the best place to stand. Face left. You’ll fight about six waves of crab. One of the crabs will drop down at ludicrous speed. You’re supposed to hit the eyestalks in between. Panthera is low enough to the ground that he can just stand on the ledge and hit the eye. After that, you’ll go through a brief upside down segment with no enemies
They call it a red desert planet when it is clearly beige.
I don’t know why the game repeats the text after you die and have to repeat the area.
Those paratroopers are invincible.
This game is really good at atmosphere, I’ll say.
You can skip the underground segment if you want.
But you really really really want the shield that’s down here.
The guide suggests getting the shield and then restart the level but there’s no real point to doing that.
I don’t know if there’s a better way to fight this boss aside from stand there, shoot it, and use sub-tanks when you’re running low on health.
It’s another vertical stage.
There’s nothing out here. You have to ride the platforms upwards.
It’s really slow.
And it’s still functional despite all the decay.
We’re climbing up into space.
If you come back to this stage, you can’t get back up through the hatch. You’re just going to have to exit the stage or die.
This boss looks intimidating
But then it just shoots the floor and the level ends. You still get experience for “beating” it.
The shield robots dash towards you and then back and forth. Despite having shields, you can shoot through them as you would any other part of their body. They get stuck where the turrets once stood.
Those drones sure are annoying.
One of the abilities Panthera got along the way is an utterly broken as shit that uses a sliver of ammo and lasts a while. I don’t want to imply anything here.
It’ll stomp and shoot a lot of balls out of its, uhm, bottom orifice and then move to your location and stomp again.
You should have the shield. Use it.
So, despite having the special weapons, they’re still grayed out. And that’s part of what makes this so counterintuitive. You’d think because they’re dimmed out, it means that you don’t have access to them because you’re missing an item or because your level is too low, but no.
The problem with this game is that nothing is explained very well.
You have to, on the menu screen, hit A (which, for me, is the x button on the keyboard) and you select your special weapon and press it again to select your special item, and then go back to the main screen and press x to use your special item. That is way too much effort for a game that came out after Mega Man.
Surprise! The game isn’t ending here. I don’t know what implied that, maybe the black space on the level map.
I excluded that first frame from the gif because it looks better that way.
It looks like a peaceful planet but that ominous music tells me otherwise.
You’re immediately assaulted by mud monsters and trees.
I just ran through it (well, slog through it because you’re slow and having five enemies on the screen causes slowdown) and used subtanks when I needed to.
Because I didn’t know about Panthera and his inv-shield.
It was a thumbnail depicting this area that drew me to this game. I thought it was an NES game, which makes sense because early SNES games look like NES games with their sprite sizes but have a richer color palette and the occasional fake transparency effect. While late NES games look like SNES games with oversized player sprites but with a reduced color palette and severely downgraded backgrounds.
This thing is a manifestation of hatred or something. There are five faces to damage. The first thing you want to do is shoot the lowest face, either by ducking or by being Panthera, and then the second face from the bottom. Then the middle face. Then the second face from the top. Then the top face. You’ll have to jump to hit it. They all spit and the spit falls in a predictable pattern. Easy. As. Piss. If you’re at a low level, it takes for-fucking-ever.
Once all the faces are gone, a Xenomorph tongue pops out and shoots tracking shots. Make sure you have a shield up. If it comes out of the lower face, just ignore it. Don’t leave the top.
We move on after this.
Real acid. That means I want to see goggles, everyone. We lose Panthera. All this means you can’t press the switch and access the side area in the first level. And no more cheesing the game with inv-shield.
Xardion starts out at level one. It turns out the best place to grind is the first level and the first desert planet level (which has multiple health pickups). Apparently leveling up increases their speed, jump height, and weapon power, as well as giving you an increase in health and ammunition. The max level is 12, I’ve learned afterwards. At least, Alcedes and Xardion both gain power as they level up.
We also need the three pieces of Xardion’s ultimate weapon, which are all kept in those places you couldn’t access.
This boss is a joke. If you came here earlier, the robots will talk about turning this octopus into sushi but realize they can’t actually damage him. Now that you have the power of Xardion on your side, you can mash fire and defeat him before he defeats you, even at the lowest level. And you get 200 experience from him.
The second part is at the end of Spike Rosered’s stage.
The third part is in that alcove where you fall into the sand pit.
It’s weird that we lose Panthera when Xardion is basically an upgraded Triton.
Fought the faces at 6:07 PM on May 10, 2023. Got back here at 7:04 PM on May 10, 2023. So it wasn’t that bad, I guess.
It’s a very short game. I wrote this coming off of Sky Kid, which I called overlong.
For some perspective, I took 227 screenshots. 140 are for gifs, leaving 86. A few of those screenshots are redundant.
Jasu Bakuhatsu thinks the background here is a reference to Macross but the robots themselves are Gundams.
There are five phases to the final boss. The first phase is stupid and his hitbox is too big to jump over.
The second phase is a joke.
The third phase is a damage sponge. I swear the sole purpose of this part is so you waste all your sub-tanks.
Fourth phase, just get close and spam that fire button. The orbs do four different things, two of which will hit you when you’re standing next to him and the other two only hit you if you stand far away.
You may take damage when it turns into its fifth phase. I didn’t. But even if you do, the front is still the safest place to stand.
As for the fifth phase, just spam your special attack and if you need to restore ammo or heal, do so.
You still get experience for beating the final boss.
Gainax was involved. No wonder. The English script was written by one of the guys involved in Wizardry. Trebor, the Mad Overlord, not Werdna, the evil Arch-Wizard. The mecha were designed by Hajime Katoki and Yasuhiro Moriki. All of this means that Xardion should be amazing but it isn’t.
This is an apt description of the game: this game is pretty much nothing but neat concepts and ideas that simply aren’t expanded on.
burning question: Who do you think you are, manual writer? Emily Dickinson?
