XP Arcade: Burning Force
XP Arcade: Burning Force
The superior form of Namco's 1989 on-rails arcade shooter is available worldwide for the first time.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Sega’s Space Harrier was a huge, influential hit back in 1985, so it’s no wonder that other companies started to make their own pseudo-3D on-rail shooters for both arcades and home consoles. In 1989, Taito released the excellent Night Striker, and by 1993, Nintendo would have Star Fox running on a home console utilizing actual 3D graphics. There’s a high-quality Space Harrier-style game that doesn’t get the same level of discussion as those gems, however, owing to it lacking a worldwide release, other than a fairly mediocre console port to the Sega Genesis. That’s Namco’s Burning Force.
Burning Force, like Night Striker, released in arcades in 1989. It didn’t leave Japan, however, at least not in that form. A Mega Drive/Genesis port hit shelves, starting in Japan a year later, with releases in the United States and various European countries between late-1990 and 1992. (Ports to the X68000, SNES, and Neo Geo were supposedly planned, but if they were, they were canceled.) It’s far less challenging than its arcade cousin due to the introduction of both a temporary invincibility mechanic and the ability to take multiple hits before dying, which wouldn’t be a huge problem on its own except for that the sheer volume of enemies and chaos that was on-screen in the arcade version is missing here, as well. It’s not surprising that reviewers weren’t thrilled with the conversion, considering that the real excitement of the original Burning Force, and what kept you from just kind playing through unchallenged, was that chaos.
Now, though, via Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, Burning Force is available in its more challenging 1989 form: the superior graphical effects, soundtrack, and level design are here, too. And yes, it’s much more difficult than the Genesis port that’s been comparatively easier to track down, but the game being a bit too tough sometimes beats it being easy in an unsatisfying way. Plus, you can mess with options in the Arcade Archives edition to make extends easier to acquire, or start with more lives in the first place, and Burning Force lets you continue from whatever level you’ve already completed on your current playthrough until the machine resets, as well. You can certainly persevere if you’re struggling.
You play as a pilot in training, Hiromi Tengenji, who will become a full-fledged space pilot should she complete the nearly week-long mission in front of her. Six days, six areas. The first five stages are broken up into four sections each: two daytime levels, a third nighttime stage where your jet bike transforms into a ship with more maneuverability and ends with a boss fight, and then a bonus round, once again in the ship. The sixth and final stage is just a boss fight, with you in the ship, and it’s a tough one.
Each location has a different design — ocean, desert, fields, ancient Greek-inspired (?) chess board (??) with flashing neon lights (???), space — and some impressive scaling effects. The most noticeable of these comes from the boss fights, as those sprites are huge, taking up a ton of the screen’s real estate, and they keep moving and moving. Sometimes the scaling is just for the entrance of the boss, but there are others where moving back and forth, further into and out of the background, is part of the “puzzle” you have to solve to stay alive.
The jet bike, where you’ll spend most of your time, can move left and right. Which doesn’t seem like much in comparison to Space Harrier and Night Striker, but what keeps things feeling dynamic and gives you more control than that is the ability to speed up or slow down… everything. In theory, pressing up or down on the D-pad (or, in its original form, pushing forward or pulling back on the stick) speeds Hiromi’s jet bike up or slows it down, which lets you avoid obstacles, projectiles, and enemies. In practice, however, utilizing these options changes the speed of the enemies you’re facing, to the point that slamming down on the “accelerator” the whole time will also speed up enemy formations and movement, allowing you to both trigger what’s next and finish the level faster than if you had just traveled at the normal speed. Since you receive a time bonus at the end of the stage — and it’s a large enough bonus to matter for the purpose of those much-needed extends — that’s no small thing to work out.
This video depicts speeding up to bring enemies and enemy formations into wide shots faster, as well as slowing down to keep a foe that takes multiple shots to down on screen longer — long enough to defeat it, and without it leaving screen for another pass that’d shave off precious seconds from the remaining time. (Also, you might have noted that the item collection sound in Burning Force sure resembles the one heard in Earth Defense Force games.)
The ship can move in eight directions and fly rather than just hover over the surface, which feels more like Space Harrier et al. It’s fun to use, too, but not quite as differentiated from other games in the genre given that similarity. The transition from the jet bike to ship does have a nifty little animation, though:
Your mobile base arrives on scene, you fly into it, get a little lesson on the location of the weak points of the boss of the stage, then it’s off you go out of the base once more. Just a neat way to show off what the Namco System 2 hardware could do.
Since you can’t just fly over explosions on the ground or right over incoming projectiles, the jet bike levels tend to be tougher — and since new enemy types are introduced in each stage, and your familiarity with them won’t exist until after you already know what they do, much of your first plays of these levels will be through instinct. The ship, though, comes in the third stage, and while it seems more chaotic at first, the fact you have more freedom of movement and foreknowledge of what you’re up against — at least until the boss — is a considerable advantage. Which is probably why the bosses are such pains in the ass (complimentary).
Your weapons are the same regardless of whether you’re using the jet bike or ship. You start with a basic pea shooter that’s two shots wide, and can collect a wide beam (six shots wide), a standard laser, and the “cross lasers,” which are powerful and fast-firing, but do have limited horizontal range, albeit more than the standard laser since the beams do, you guessed it, cross. You also have two missile types: homing, and max. Homing does what it says on the box with a salvo of missiles, while the max variety creates an explosion radius for area-of-effect damage — both have their uses, and it’s not the worst idea to follow which missiles are on offer in a given level and assume that’s the one that’ll help you the most.
It’s also a good idea to do this if for no other reason than pickups are the one way to refill your missile stores. While your standard shot of any type has infinite ammunition, missiles are finite, and don’t even refill when you die. Fire off missiles when you need to, and you’ll stay alive longer, but if you don’t make a habit of going after the pickups — whether they change you from the missile type you want or not — you won’t have them when you need them again. And you’re going to want them against bosses, which have multiple weak points and fire loads of projectiles at you, making lining up against them for accurate standard shots over extended periods a difficult ask.
There are obstacles to crash into, both as the jet bike and the ship, but they don’t damage you. They do briefly stun you since you’ve crashed and are rebounding off of a surface, and that leaves you open to damage, but the crashes themselves do not kill or harm you. The only other non-violent piece in a given level are the powered ramps, which are the only way to be able to reach the items found up in the sky when you’re in jet bike form. You get points for weapon pickups, and points are important, but again, if there’s a choice between more missiles or a change of weapon, you’re most likely going to want the missiles unless you’re finding yourself wildly outgunned or overmatched with your current weapon.
Points really are important, though. The first extend comes at 80,000 points. While that doesn’t sound like many points, you might not even get that many until you’ve already completed all of Area 1’s four levels, or, nearly 20 percent of the game. As of this writing, you need over 100,000 of them to get into the top 25 worldwide in the Nintendo Switch’s Hi-Score mode from the Arcade Archives release of the game While the Hi-Score mode uses the original arcade rules and doesn’t even let you pause your game without forcing a restart of it, the standard mode lets you change difficulty and whatever options you’d like to make things easier or more difficult for you. Even there, with the laxer rules, it still takes just over 100,000 points to make the top 100.
Sure, Burning Force released through ACA all of three-plus months ago, but these figures should tell you something about how many people who decided to test themselves ran out of lives before they even came close to securing an extra one.
Besides the end-level time bonus, the once-per-area bonus rounds are where you’re going to get the most help in your quest for both a high score and an extend. There are no enemies here, just obstacles to avoid and point orbs to collect. The orbs come in different denominations: 10, 100, 1,000. You’re going to want to collect them all so as not to accidentally go off course and miss one of the more valuable ones, especially since they end up counting double. You get points as you collect them the first time, then, at the end of the level, there’s a second count that multiplies by the number of them you collected. Being able to get as many points as you would from a stage where you dodged a ton of projectiles, blew up a ton of enemies, and defeated a boss, all for collecting some orbs? Take advantage when you can.
The soundtrack, as Namco’s arcade soundtracks so often were at this stage of their history, is full of bangers. Right from the start of stage 1-1, you get a song that makes you want to fly and pumps y ou up, and what else do you need from an on-rails shooter where you fly a vehicle and are constantly having just-miss moments with missiles and bullets?
The video footage from earlier doesn’t show as much since it’s from the start of the game, but business picks up in 2-2, and things just continue to escalate from there. New kinds of enemies with large and fast bullet patterns, explosions that take up big chunks of the screen and are dropped in multiple places at once forcing you to both time and maneuver everything perfectly lest you also blow up, enemies beginning to come from both behind and underneath you — it’s a lot! It’s chaos! It’s great. Those hard-to-earn extends? They’re even more difficult to keep, as Burning Force does everything in its power to take them back by the time you can get one. This might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but for those looking for a game to try to hurt them, Burning Force is happy to oblige.
And hey, the game does have a warning system for those enemies coming at you from directions besides in front of you, it’s not completely rude. Aan alarm goes off that has both a sound effect and a visual cue — flashing red lights — to let you know you’re about to be surprised. Heed those warnings, or lose a life.
Burning Force isn’t one of Namco’s major franchises by any means, as it was one and done and, single port aside, mostly left in Japan. The protagonist, though, one of many in a long line of Namco’s run of Adorable Cartoon Lady Fights Robots and Aliens and Monsters and Such, has reappeared quite a few times over the years. If you’ve bothered to play the unofficially translated Playstation 2 game Namco x Capcom, you’ll recognize Hiromi from her partnership in that game with Baraduke’s Masuyo Toby (or “Kissy,” who, like Samus Aran after her, was revealed to have been a woman wearing a space helmet all along.) Namco’s browser-based high school dating sim, Namco High, included Hiromi as well, and she was a character in the four World Stadium sports games released on Namco 12 arcade hardware between 1998 and 2001. And, as Hardcore Gaming 101 has noted, there’s a Burning Force medley in some of the Taiko no Tatsujin rhythm games, so the strong music lives on.
Since Namco didn’t bother reviving Burning Force during the aughts wave that returned on-rails shooters to the world, more appearances like those are probably all Hiromi’s got left in her. But hey, the original Burning Force is available now, on Nintendo Switch and Playstations 4 and 5, and that’s a better situation than we or the game was in just a few months ago.
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