Re-release this: Parodius (series)
Re-release this: Parodius (series)
Even when Konami was more active, they didn't release Parodius games all over the world. As the classic series turns 35, it's time to change that.
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.
You’re likely familiar with Gradius. Konami’s horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up is one of the true classics, a highly influential series that’s thrived in arcades and been ported to new platforms again and again over the decades. It’s been around for so long and been so successful that it has a whole array of spin-offs of its own, which includes various other horizontal shoot ‘em ups like Salamander (Life Force in North America), as well as a turn-based strategy game, Cosmic Wars, set in the Gradius universe.
And then there’s Parodius. It’s a portmanteau of “parody” and “Gradius,” and while the initial entry very much leans on it being a parody of Gradius, specifically, the series would grow into its own in a hurry. The gameplay, at its most basic, would still resemble Gradius in these later releases, between the very general stage design — crowded, claustrophobic, littered with bullets and foes, and with the same upgrade system as Gradius — but it would end up with so much more personality, and so much more color. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Parodius is one of the most influential cute ‘em ups, the success of which helped inspire the creation of other cute ‘em ups as well as for companies like Hudson to make their own parody title. In Hudson Soft’s case, it was Star Parodier, but even Taito released a cartoony parody of Space Invaders with Space Invaders ‘95.
Konami was the king of the cute ‘em up for a bit between Parodius and TwinBee, the latter of which was heavily intertwined with the former. TwinBee was one of the characters available in Parodius’ first sequel, and is playable in some games beyond that one, while the power-up bells from TwinBee were there from the start and had a purpose in Parodius, too. TwinBee is also as responsible as any franchise for the rise of the cute ‘em up; released in 1985, a year before Sega’s Fantasy Zone, it had the inside track on popularizing this colorful and bouncy sub-genre of the shoot ‘em up. Turning Gradius from a dark, grim horizontal shooter into a bright experience featuring flying space penguins, though, is the level of cute that Parodius managed. And when the series moved beyond the confines of the MSX, the bright, colorful nature of it — and the number of penguins — only increased.
Parodius — full title, Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth — on the MSX was fun and all, but it was straightforward in many ways, at least relative to later releases in the series. Backgrounds were black star fields, which was the style at the time, and the sprites weren’t particularly large, save the bosses, which have always been big in every sense of the word in this series. It’s not like the game was the result of a Find/Replace where every enemy ship from Gradius was swapped out for a flying penguin or a Moai statue head wearing sunglasses, but the whole concept of parodying Gradius was a little more buttoned down at this stage. All I’m saying is that, in the last Parodius shooter, a high-energy arrangement of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays while you collect a bunch of coins in order to complete your mission before fighting a giant piece of peppermint candy surrounded by smaller, spiraling candies that will blow up your ship if they touch you. That is probably the most normal boss in a game where the foe you’ve been chasing the entire time — an octopus with a mustache carting a bag of money around — eventually ends up squashed beneath the ass of a screen-sized lady who has only pulled her sheet up as far as the ratings board required.
The name of that game? Sexy Parodius. What else would you title something where that happens? The last paragraph also probably preemptively answers any questions you might have had about why exactly none of the Parodius games ever made their way to North America. Hey, Parodius was happening at the same time another Konami series was getting raised eyebrows from American critics for how Japanese it was, and that one was actually selling in a genre that was still popular by the mid-to-late-90s.
Parodius is more than just its ridiculous nature, though. There’s an expertly crafted slate of horizontal scrolling shooters here, one that began appearing — and successfully so — in arcades starting with the first sequel, Parodius Da! (or, Parodius: From Myth to Laughter if you were playing in Europe). While it got its start on the MSX and stayed there exclusively for some time — Parodius would receive a port to the Sega Saturn and Playstation in Japan as part of a larger Konami MSX collection, and a graphically enhanced port to the Playstation Portable in Japan as part of a complete Parodius collection — its sequels ended up all over the place. Arcades, the Famicom, Game Boy and Game Boy Color, PC Engine, the aforementioned PSX, PSP, and Saturn, as well as the Super Famicom and X68000, and with some re-releases to the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS digital shops last decade.
You might have noticed that there’s kind of an end of the line there, with it being very 80s- and 90s-centric, then the Playstation Portable collection, and then, outside of Virtual Console… silence. There hasn’t been a new Parodius since 1996’s Sexy Parodius, and there hasn’t been a Parodius collection to speak of since 2007’s Parodius Portable on the PSP. Considering Konami has put forth the effort to throw a bunch of classic 8- and 16-bit Gradius titles up all over the place in the present — including Salamander/Life Force and doubles of some of them on the same systems between Arcade Archives and collections — it’s surprising that there’s simply been nothing on the Parodius side of things, even with the date of this publication marking the 35th anniversary of the series.
Granted, we are talking about Konami, a company that more than occasionally forgets its own history and even failed to release 35th anniversary Gradius merchandise until the series was celebrating 36, but still. Parodius rules, and it deserves to be remembered and discovered anew in the present, especially when we’re in the midst of a shoot ‘em up revival. If a cute ‘em up like Cotton (which also rules) can have its full library slowly rolled out and even see a new release on modern platforms, then where the hell is Parodius hiding?
Anyway, back to what Parodius is instead of where it isn’t. As Parodius embraced and expanded upon its initial quirks, it also started playing off of not just other Konami games and series like Castlevania, but other popular franchises from other publishers, as well. TwinBee, as said, was central from the beginning, but you could also choose to play as Goemon in the original Parodius, Popolon from Knightmare, or to decide you wanted to straight-up play with the ship from Gradius, the Vic Viper, in this parody where cows in space were going to try to kill you. You could also play as the titular Octopus trying to save the Earth, Tako, or a penguin named Penguin who clearly wants to clear the name of penguin kind. While the original Parodius was “straightforward” in comparison to later games, it still features a boss fight that has you playing rock-paper-scissors in order to advance rather than shooting your way out of it, so, you know. It’s always been Parodius.
As Parodius grew, so too did the selectable ships, the foes you’d face, and the game’s structure. More characters original to the franchise became playable, like a blue blob character named Option that is supposed to be the option of the Vic Viper given sentience and a face that can transform into other characters’ weapons and also gets its own options, or former bosses now shrunken down to ship-sprite-sized cute ladies riding rockets that fire lasers from them, or pigs with halos named Michael and Gabriel. The usual stuff. And by the time of Sexy Parodius there were missions to complete that would determine not just the screen you’d see after a stage was finished — like, say, art of everyone upset at failing a mission, or success meaning you get to see your characters celebrating their newfound riches, or of the mustachioed octopus painting a portrait of a woman with far more cleavage than the model he’s using is sporting, to her great distress — but also whether or not you’d get a chance to play in hidden levels.
Parodius isn’t as tough as the notoriously difficult Gradius can be, but it’s not necessarily an easy play, either: it has a rank system that can be absolutely brutal if it’s not managed, and it will fill the screen with bullets and enemies just like Gradius would, with the same kind of need to avoid crashing into walls or ceilings or obstacles in your path, too. Luckily, the console ports feature unlimited continues and the option to crank up the base number of lives, which helps to make up for how stingy the games can be with point-based extends. Parodius Da!, for instance, features just two scoring extends, and if you power up your ship too fast, you’ll have a hard time living long enough to earn them.
The upgrade system is just like that of Gradius, with its own twists. While differences between characters were more cosmetic early in the series — Goemon collected Japanese coins for power-ups, for instance, just like the coins he collects in his own games — differences in arsenals would appear, just like how later Gradius titles let you choose the possible slate of upgrades that would be available to you at the start of those games. You can make upgrades automatic, semi-automatic, or completely manual (automatic has the game powering you up or down as it deems necessary, including for stretches where your ship should speed up), and there’s the additional wrinkle of a roulette power-up chip that could completely ruin your day if it lands on the wrong spot, since one of the upgrade spots actually resets your upgrades entirely. That can be helpful if you’re trying to reset rank, sure, but the reality is that you’d go from a speedier ship with a wide array of weaponry and possibly a shield to the slowest-moving version of your craft armed with a pea shooter and soon to be unfulfilled dreams.
The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” mention should have been a clue, but Parodius games are full of wonderful arrangements of music Konami didn’t have to license (as well as some they didn’t bother asking about back in the day, like an instrumental version of K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It),” which would be replaced in a less Wild West-ish 2007 compilation). Classical songs get used in some incredible situations, like in Gokujō Parodiusu’s rendition of “Ride of the Valkyries” that plays while an enormous ship equipped (?) with Moai statues flies by you like a deranged version of the classic R-Type battleship stage.
Or there’s Sexy Parodius’ use of “Can-Can” against a boss named Hot Lips, who is literally just an enormous pair of lips. Well, eight pairs of them, each with teeth behind them, and I’m pretty sure their goal isn’t to kiss. It’s all so good, and so perfect for the setting, because the setting is batshit fun that only takes itself seriously in terms of designing tight, enjoyable shoot ‘em up experiences. Everything else is as bananas as it could be, and the series is better for that.
Parodius, Parodius Da!, Gokujō Parodiusu, Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, and Sexy Parodius. Five games, all of them enjoyable to fantastic given they were developed during Konami’s unquestioned period of shoot ‘em up excellence, and none of them currently available on modern platforms. No Windows collection that you would have already bought on Steam, nothing forthcoming from somewhere like Strictly Limited or ININ, and Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, despite getting its start on the Super Famicom, hasn’t been added to even the Japanese version of Nintendo Switch Online! That has to change: the Gradius games are legendary, but their spin-off series never got the chance to shine on an international stage despite being worthy of that. What better time than the present, when love for shoot ‘em ups on consoles has been rejuvenated, when cute ‘em ups are as popular as they’ve ever been, so much so that the work is being done to not just revive Cotton’s old work, but to make new Cotton games as well? Konami hasn’t been shy about making TwinBee reappear all over the place to take advantage of this trend: now it’s time for Parodius to get its moment, too.
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