Re-release this: Einhänder

Square made a shoot-em-up during their peak Playstation years, so of course it's heavy on the things you expect from a late-90s Square title. It's also impossible to find now.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Square is and was primarily known for their role-playing games. They’re a major publisher at this point, with subsidiaries they’ve both formed and purchased over the years, but that centerpiece, Square? JRPGs has been their thing forever. It’s what the company was built on, it’s what their creative golden years in the 90s were mostly comprised of, and even today, the games that Square Enix’s internal studios develop that get the most praise or attention? Those are also JRPGs.

For a while, basically everything was an RPG, even when it wasn’t. Parasite Eve was Square’s attempt at the burgeoning horror genre, and while it had a lot of the elements of your Resident Evils and such in place, it also had turn-based combat. Racing Lagoon, which was a Japan-only release that only recently received a fan translation, is a racing game… that is also a JRPG. Many of the races in the game are random-ish encounters that you find on the world map, which zoom in to a short race you’ll do again and again against other opponents as well, and you spend the game building up your character — your car, in this instance — so you can take down the significant racers across the city, and not just these random mobs.

And yet, there is Einhänder. Instead of roping in any of the JRPG elements that Square would put into their other original Playstation-era games like Parasite Eve and Racing Lagoon, Einhänder, a horizontally scrolling shoot-me-up, instead borrowed from the cinematics and attempts at meaningful story telling of the genre. There is no JRPG-esque gimmick in the gameplay — being able to equip and switch between weaponry existed in shmups long before Einhänder came along — but the dedication to telling a story that existed outside of the manual and in the worldwide release was still something of a rarity for the genre.

Image credit: Moby Games

This is not to say Einhänder invented overt story telling in shmups, by any means. It was just a few months back in this space that Gleylancer, which released five years before Square’s shmup effort originally came out in Japan, got recognition for its cutscenes and attempt at a story that would resonate with the player. And even before then, franchises like Aleste were full of named characters, cutscenes, and stories — the thing with Aleste’s various games, though, is that when they were localized for non-Japanese audiences, the names of the games were often changed and the story bits were removed, relegated to the manual instead of as part of the in-game experience. Which also served to sever some North American releases of Aleste titles from the franchise themselves.

Einhänder, though, retained its story as an experience central to the game when it reached North American shores. Like said, it didn’t invent story telling in shmups, but the existence of games like Einhänder that emphasize story is how we end up in a situation where Grasshopper Manufacture can decide it makes sense to produce a story-driven, cinematic shoot-em-up experience like Sine Mora, and have that be something that a juggernaut like Microsoft would be interested in publishing.

Einhänder tells the story of a war between people living on Earth, and those living instead on Earth’s moon. You, the pilot of one of the Einhänder-model ships the moon has at its disposal, are tasked with infiltrating and destroying the Earth’s defenses on a suicide mission, after which another Einhänder ship and pilot would be sent to repeat the process. This is the second such war between Earth and moon, with the first having destroyed much of the planet: this time around, the moon’s colony, Selene, is razing Earth in order to take natural resources from it.

How the story is presented is part of why it stands out in the genre. There is an opening cutscene that lays out the what and where of it all, sure, but Square would employ these kind of sweeping zoom out shots on the environment and the ship while orders from the base tell you about your success and what you are to do next in between missions. It’s almost entirely one unbroken string, from boss fight to complete a level to a voice over updating you on the story and your next mission while your score is totaled and extra lives are awarded, and then the next level begins right where your ship is when that menu fades. You also switch between the segments of stages with a similar pulling out of the camera and an angle switch, which are playable sections, too, that give you a new look at backgrounds, the foreground, enemies, and what’s in front of you. It’s all tied together very neatly, and works well.

And then there is the twist in the game, which is so very Square. At this point, after six of the game’s seven stages, you have successfully destroyed Earth’s defenses. Your next mission comes in from the moon, and it is for you to die, with honor, at the “hands” of an Einhänder ship piloted by a computer — as the final test for the unmanned fighter, which Selene will produce to continue its war with Earth. Don’t worry, you’ll be promoted by two whole ranks for this, in addition to the inherent glory that comes from serving your country.

The pilot survives the assault, and begins to question why this war is even happening in the first place. Earth is not a paradise of plenty, as the pilot and everyone in the moon colony had been led to believe: the length of the Einhänder’s engagement on Earth allowed for the revelation that it is a wasteland much like the moon. And that maybe, the purpose of this war was war itself, that the existence of the war was of a benefit to the leaders of Selene, and that’s why it was ongoing, and why lies were told about why it had to happen to begin with.

The game resumes “one month later,” with the Einhänder and its pilot still intact, and now with guns trained on the moon’s base instead of Earth’s defenses. “You are committing a major act of treason. Remove your armament promptly, and then surrender.” It’s partially revenge, sure, but it’s also a recognition by the pilot — who single-handedly ended Earth’s part in the war over the previous six levels — that Selene’s leaders on the moon, and their desire for war, are a problem. And if he’s going to die, regardless, he might as well take down as much of the moon’s military might as possible first.

The game would be great without all of this, but it does add something to the proceedings. A believable world you can understand, with those in power abusing that power and starting senseless, unnecessary conflicts simply to keep the engines of war going? So whatever the Lockheed Martin and Raytheon equivalents are in Square’s future here can see the their stock value climb up and up as battles rage on and new weapons must be forged? Not that those titans of industry would ever do something like that in the real world, of course.

A look at how Einhänder’s view can change, even mid-level. Image credit: Retro Gamer

So, how does it all play? Einhänder is a horizontally scrolling shooter, in the vein of titles like Gradius or R-Type, which focus more on waves of enemies and making the screen feel claustrophobic than they do endless bullets or a fast pace. Which is not a coincidence, either: Tatsuo Fuji, who used to be a programmer at Konami — the developers of Gradius — before joining Square, was the director of Einhänder. The gameplay gimmick more specific to Einhänder revolves around being able to acquire, store, and switch between various pieces of enemy weaponry. The Einhänder-class vessels have an arm that allows it to equip additional weapons, whether they are rapid-fire Vulcan guns, or blaster cannons, or homing missiles, an enormous beam sword, or more. With the basic ship, you can store three such weapons at a time, and switch between them with the L and R shoulder buttons. While your ship can only take one hit before it explodes and ends your life, the guns can take a little bit of damage, and be blown up separately from your ship. If you can’t escape a collision or blast, try to maneuver things so that the equipped secondary weapon takes the hit instead: you’ll lose the gun, but not a life or your progress.

You have to be kind of intentional with how you fire on enemies in order to get these weapons. If you blow up the cannon aimed at you in order to defeat a foe, then no, you won’t have a cannon you can pick up afterward. If you fire at another part of the ship or ground vehicle or whatever it is, however, and disable it that way, the weapon (or weapons) they were using will disengage from your fallen foe, and you can scoop them up by flying into them.

Not only do you have a wide variety of secondary weapons to wield along with your basic, default cannon, but you can fire them simultaneously if you want. Hold down the Square button for rapid-fire of your basic gun, and press or hold the X button for your equipped weapon. You can also do quite a bit with two different weapons equipped and firing at the same time, because there are two different weapon placements on your ship for those recovered guns.

By default, the arm on the Einhänder is below the ship. So, the Vulcan, for instance, is a rapid-fire machine gun that aims diagonally below the ship, allowing you to point the Einhänder at what’s in front of it to fire on it, while also providing cover fire below, attacking two enemies at once, or on mid-bosses and bosses, maybe firing on two different parts of a large enemy at the same time. You can also press the Circle button, however, to swing the Einhänder’s arm above the ship: for the Vulcan, that now puts it in a straight firing line, same as your default weaponry, which means you can really focus fire on an opponent or wave of them to blast through faster, and maybe safer, too.

Each weapon has these two different angles. For the grenades, being under the ship just kind of drops them like you’re a bomber, but if you place it above, it acts more like a grenade launcher, arcing explosives into foes in front of and/or above you. Sometimes it’s being under the ship that gives you the straight firing line, and sometimes it’s being above that gives you the angle. You need to experiment to figure out what will work best for you, both in generally and in a given situation. And since Einhänder is a difficult game that will test you on more than one occasion, you will have plenty of time to experiment.

There might not be a whole lot of bullets to avoid in Einhänder, but your ship is large for the amount of real estate that’s on screen at any given time, and can only take the one hit before you die. Plus, the screen might rarely be full of bullets, but it is very often full of danger all the same, and between massive laser blasts and fast-moving enemies intent on ramming you, you will have plenty to contend with even when there isn’t a single wave of bullets to weave out of the way of.

Which is one of the reasons that complaints about the short length of Einhänder bother me — longtime readers are surely shocked by this revelation. It takes about an hour to complete, from start to finish, assuming you make it through the entire game unscathed. It’s possible to do it — here, watch this person manage it…

…but do you know how many hours you have to put in before you can get to the point where you can pull that off? Or to be able to beat it at all? I will give you a hint: it is more than one. The game is tough nearly from the start, and it gets much harder as you go. It’s absolutely worth it, but beating this game again took me longer than an hour, and while my experience with Einhänder does not go back to its original PSX release, we’re still talking about well over a decade.

Now, despite Einhänder being considered a stellar shoot-em-up at the time, one that has aged gracefully and with dignity, one that Sony Computer Entertainment decided to use their right of first refusal on Square games in order to publish in North America instead of Square themselves, it has basically vanished from existence since its initial — and in some territories, only — release. Einhänder was, at one point, on the Playstation 3’s digital storefront, but only to those with Japanese Playstation Network accounts. While I used to have access to a dummy account setup specifically to do things like, well, buy and play Einhänder, it no longer works, so now if you I or anyone else wants to play Einhänder, you either need to already have it, or you need to emulate it.

A critically acclaimed shoot-em-up published by Sony themselves, that isn’t just easily available, and was never even made available by Sony in North America on the PSN, despite a slew of other PSX titles existing on that service. Einhänder, released in 1998 literally five Playstations ago, is long overdue for a re-release, to the point that you could now also argue for a remaster. The art direction is great, the story elements need no real updating: just give it some quality of life updates for online leaderboards, perhaps a rewind function and some continues leniency for those who are not masochistic, and make it look appropriate for 2022 while you’re at it. Instead, we’ll probably get nothing: no remaster, and seemingly no re-release, either, despite how easy it would be to put Einhänder on the shops of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo systems like Square has done with various Final Fantasy titles.

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