Retro spotlight: Ristar

Ristar didn't get the love it deserved out of the gate, but Sega has made sure it's been released again and again and again throughout the years.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ristar has something of a fascinating history. The earliest sketch of what would become Ristar actually came to be during Sega’s quest to create a rival for Mario. One of those potential mascots was a rabbit with long ears that were going to be used to grab objects. With the emphasis on speed that ended up taking over the brainstorming and development process — and, of course, resulted in Sonic the Hedgehog — the rabbit and grabbing ideas were set aside. Eventually, someone got the idea of going back to the stretching and grabbing idea, but instead of a rabbit and ears, the focus switched to arms, arms which ended up belonging to an anthropomorphic star, Ristar.

You would think, with how committed to it that Sega has been over the years by including it in Genesis compilations, in the Genesis Mini 2, and now on the Nintendo Switch Online service, that Ristar was a significant piece of their most successful console. That’s not how things actually played out, however, even if it’s what the game deserved.

Sega launched Ristar on the Genesis just three months before the North American launch of its successor console, the Saturn. In Japan, the Saturn had already been out for three months when Ristar released, and the rival Sony Playstation had already been available for two months. These 32-bit systems were capable of actual 3D, and, being disc-based, also had significant potential even when working within a 2D space, both in terms of graphical and audio upgrades. They were new, they were shiny: Ristar is real good, but if no one is paying attention to it because their eyes are elsewhere, well, who’s going to notice?

It doesn’t help that there were quite a few reviews saying Ristar didn’t have enough in the way of originality, but quite a bit of that — not all, but enough — was more surface-level similarity to other platformers. If you were saving up for a Saturn or a Playstation, seeing Ristar is fun but unoriginal might dissuade you from shelling out for it. There is also just the general fact that companies aren’t marketing the last releases on old consoles as much as they are what’s to come from their exciting new venture.

Ristar, basically, was a victim of timing, but it also maybe wouldn’t be what it is if it hadn’t released when it did. One of the reasons the rush to get to the next console bugs me a bit is because I’m not always convinced that developers have wrung everything out of a system that they can before moving on to something new. Think of how many great games — great, underappreciated games! — end up releasing at the end of a console’s life cycle while attention is on what’s to come. These games are made by hands that, at this point, know exactly what they can do with the console they’re developing for.

Kirby’s Dream Land 3 looks and sounds so special on the SNES because it released in late-1997, 14 months after the Nintendo 64 did. The Big N continued to develop some games for the Super Famicom beyond even that, releasing them in Japanese stores to machines that could write the game onto a cartridge, resulting in discounted titles like Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 that pushed the franchise well beyond what it had managed with its previous two outings on the system. Sunsoft’s Gimmick!, released in 1992 on the Famicom, and Kirby’s Adventure, also a 1992 release on the same platform well into the early life of that console’s Super successor, both look and sound like they released on entirely different hardware than the platform that produced Super Mario Bros. 3. Summer Carnival ‘92 Recca… well, I’m still not quite sure how KID got a shoot-em-up as fast-paced and intense as that one to work the way it does on the Famicom.

Add Ristar to that list, one much longer than I’ve provided here. The game sounds tremendous, with music that pushes the hardware with its complexity and leans heavily on what the Genesis, specifically, could sound like. It looks as great as anything else Sega produced on the console, and animates better than most, if not all of it. The attention to detail is really something, too, with context-sensitive idle animations for the titular Ristar: building little snowmen in the icy stages, looking ready to fight a mid-boss with balled fists, snapping and tapping along to the music another mid-boss is playing during the fight against them. It’s not just Mario and Sonic falling asleep because they’re bored at your inaction, as Sega developed a diverse set of animations for Ristar, which fits in well with the general superior, expressive animation found throughout.

Image credit: Tenor

Stylistically, it has a lot in common with the Sonic franchise, but as said, it’s surface-level. The color palettes are similar, some of the designs — the way the eyes on little robots and robot-esque creatures look, for instance — certainly have a Sonic vibe to them, and some sound effects are very obviously being reused from Sonic games. (To be fair, there are are also sounds reused from games like Phantasy Star IV, so this is Sega being efficient with effects they’ve already got on hand that fit the bill more than anything else.) Ristar is a slow-moving, methodical platformer. Which, of course, was pretty funny at the time and remains funny now, since much of Sega’s marketing was built around the fact that the Genesis was faster, stronger, more intense than Nintendo, and Sonic’s adventures, when compared to Mario’s, were the proof of that. And here comes Ristar at the end of the Genesis’ life, without even the ability to run, in a game where sometimes you have to kind of scope out your environment in order to figure out what you should do next, and where.

As much as I love those later Genesis Sonic games where speed was king, Sega had a real talent for slower platformers, and Ristar was a chance to show that off once again. The original Sonic the Hedgehog is a favorite from that era for a reason. Sure, it was fast compared to other platformers of the time, but compared to other Sonic games? Not so much. As I wrote about it last summer when it turned 30:

Sonic the Hedgehog is a platformer that benefits from exploration, from taking your time to find its hidden secrets and paths and items, of being played again and again until you can successfully master its special stages to collect the six Chaos Emeralds and see the game’s real ending.

There are so many challenging jumps in this game, that require both timing and an understanding of what Sonic is capable of. There are so many paths and hidden rings, power-ups, extra lives, and so on that you’ll miss if you try running through the whole game.

The first Sonic the Hedgehog on the Game Gear was significantly slower than its Genesis counterpart, and relied heavily on the methodical platforming and exploration aspects of the game, to its benefit. Ristar returning a bit to that style of platformer might not have been every Genesis’ fans favorite switch, but it’s one I respect, and enjoy to this day.

It looks like Sonic and sounds like Sonic, but plays a bit more like Treasure’s Dynamite Headdy, if we’re forcing comparisons instead of just letting Ristar be Ristar. It’s not as superficial as the general Sonic comparison, but in Dynamite Headdy, you are actually throwing your head to attack enemies and traverse your environment, with different heads having different powers. Ristar is more about using his stretchy arms to grab enemies and handholds, and, eventually, rapid-fire like to move through environmental puzzles where failure to angle Ristar’s arms and stretch them toward the next object you need to will result in taking damage or death.

You can take four hits before dying, though, you are able to restore health with stars of varying effectiveness. Extra live are found throughout the levels, and earned every 20,000 points, too, with opportunities for massive point scoring coming at the end of a level, where you get a chance to swing Ristar around on a pole before firing him off as high as you can, exiting the level at the highest possible point before you fall down too far. There are also bonus treasure rooms that will net you more points (as well as passwords to alter the game on a replay, once you’ve cleared it and are shown the passwords post-credits), and hidden gems that range from a few hundred points all the way up to 1,600. Your continues are limited, so even though Ristar isn’t the toughest platformer around, you’ll still want to have those in reserve in case something that does trouble you comes around.

Ristar has exceptional diversity in its gameplay, and it’s a large part of the reason that the game still feels pretty fresh all this time later, despite the issues with “originality” in its early reviews. The game is a pretty standard length for a 16-bit platformer, coming in around two-and-a-half to three hours, but despite there only being so many levels to play through (12 non-boss stages and another seven for bosses) there is an abundance of ideas present. The second world has you swimming underwater, which is damn bold for a platformer that maybe hasn’t even gotten the player to fully commit yet, but it works so well. Ristar swims with ease, and actually moves faster underwater than in any other context, and it’s just the start of having to play things differently than you just did in order to progress.

The third world features fire like, everywhere. You’ll have to avoid it in some pretty basic ways, but there are also world-specific traps and puzzles, like the one where flames shoot up from the ground in an area where a cage will fall on Ristar’s head if you move him underneath it. So, to avoid being trapped and burned, you have to find the Ristar statue, and then carry it with you until you find the trap: spring it by throwing the decoy, then destroy the cage while the flames are down. Grab your decoy, and move on to the next cage, which will have a tougher angle for you to solve with your throw.

The fourth world is music-focused, with the first level having you carry and transport a series of metronomes across the stage to birds who are standing guard at your next point of ingress. You need to keep these metronomes away from foes who will steal them away and force you to backtrack, throw them at helpful crane arms that can carry them across pits of spikes, accurately throw the metronome to places where you can stretch for it again when you’ve crossed the same obstacle, or float the metronomes with fans so you can grab them after climbing up a wall or series of platforms.

And that’s just the first music level: the second introduces some new musical enemy types you need to watch out for, like ones that release new enemies into the world to the beat of the music, or guitars that, if you stand on the giant keyboard keys, will slam down and attempt to crush Ristar beneath them. Figuring out the timing of these guitars, as well as the mechanism that guides them, is key to making it past them without taking damage. And then when you do get through, you’re faced with drums that are basically trampolines, and need to time your jumps and falls and grabs to avoid entire walls of spikes.

The game just kind of goes like that from start to finish: building on past concepts as you go, but introducing new ones entirely in a way that makes the game feel fresh not just from themed world to themed world, but also when moving from the first level within a specific theme to the next.

We should talk a bit more about the soundtrack. It’s the work of Tomoko Sasaki, who was also behind the soundtrack for NiGHTS Into Dreams, and has penned lyrics, sang for, or was thanked for working on a whole bunch of other Sega franchises and games you’ve heard of, from Sonic to Burning Rangers to Space Channel 5. Her work on Ristar is exceptional. It’s busy, but I mean that in a good way: it has a real Sonic vibe to it, yes, but it pushes the Genesis in the same way the aforementioned Kirby’s Dream Land 3 pushed the SNES, layering as many instruments and beats as possible to show off what the sound hardware could really do when it was handled by someone who fully understood what that would mean.

Busy Flare, from the first of the fire-focused levels, is a highlight:

When you hear that humming synth push through the rest of the sound starting around the 43-second mark? That’s actually tied into action in the stage itself: when that sound can be heard, flames have risen, and Ristar needs to grab onto a handhold above him in order to avoid being damaged by them. The sound fades out as the flames sink, and the process repeats until you can escape that section of the stage. It sounds a little different just listening to it outside of the game, but within it, it’s a nifty little syncing up of sound and play.

Crying World, the theme for stage 6-1, makes me think a lot about the soundtrack for the original Command & Conquer. It’s not an exact fit for those songs, but there’s quite a bit going on in there that would work perfectly in that particular world. And since that soundtrack rules, well, of course I like this song and will share it with y’all:

The whole soundtrack is worth your time, and certainly enhances the game and helps make it an even more memorable experience. The sound effects are right up there, too.

Ristar is pretty easy to find, generally speaking. It’s on Steam, for one, but you can also get it as part of basically any Genesis Collection that’s released in the past decade on essentially every console, as well as the Genesis Mini 2, and the Genesis portion of Nintendo Switch Online. Sega never did make a sequel to Ristar, which is a real shame, but when you consider that the original game was more popular with critics than the masses, and that the team that developed it moved on to make NiGHTs while Sega failed to even get a Sonic game on the Saturn, well, the lack of a Ristar sequel makes a lot more sense. Even in the Dreamcast era, leaving aside that it was short-lived for Sega themselves, is just the general fact that the company’s focus was on developing a whole slew of brand new properties.

Of course, nothing is really stopping Sega from giving Ristar a second chance, all this time later during an era where franchise revivals and reboots are common. They’re the ones with the data on how many people are buying Ristar on Steam or playing it on NSO, though. Maybe we’ll just have to be satisfied with the Ristar we already have.

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