XP Arcade: Fantasy Zone

A foundational title from 1986 that still plays (and looks) like a dream.

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.

There aren’t all that many games in the Fantasy Zone series, which is both confusing and understandable at the same time. Confusing, because Fantasy Zone was incredible when it released back in 1986 and remains excellent to this day, so why not make more of them? But understandable, too, because Sega pretty much nailed it the first time, nailed the eventual Sega Genesis sequel — Super Fantasy Zone —too, and then proceeded to basically just re-release those on every platform they could throughout the years.

I’m not forgetting about Fantasy Zone II in here, the Master System original sequel to the first game, which itself had merely been ported to the SMS: II is the exception to both Sega’s flawless track record with Fantasy Zone and their being done with the franchise other than re-releases, as it received an updated (and vastly improved, both technically and design-wise) arcade release and then Nintendo 3DS port developed by M2 in 2008 and 2015, respectively. So the one misstep was made up for, and then some, in time. Other than that, though, it’s been Sega Ages releases, Virtual Console appearances, showing up in Genesis and general Sega collections as an extra or starring piece, and inclusion on the Genesis Minis, rather than revisiting the series with new entries since 1992’s Super Fantasy Zone.

And that’s fine, really, because again, the original Fantasy Zone still rips, and is still widely available sans compromise. Its most recent iterations came as part of the Nintendo Switch line of Sega Ages releases, in a brand-new version developed for the Sega Genesis that’s included in the Genesis Mini 2, and as one of the dozens of classic Sega titles on the Astro City mini arcade cabinet. The Astro City version is just the base version of the arcade game with some quality-of-life emulation features like save states, and it also lets you use credits to continue, something the arcade version did not actually do. The Switch edition, however, is loaded with features that make it the definitive edition of the game. More on all of that later.

Fantasy Zone is a very early cute-em-up, a sub-genre of shoot-em-ups that has emphasis on bright colors, cartoonish and cute characters, and, in some cases, ships that are also sentient characters themselves. Alongside Konami’s TwinBee franchise, Fantasy Zone ticked all of those boxes in the sub-genre’s early days. The ship you fly is Opa-Opa, and he has wings and can fly and walk, and also I’m referring to him with some personhood there. Fantasy Zone, even today, is bright and colorful and surreal to look at, a game developed with incredible vision that looks a lot like someone’s visual interpretation of an acid trip. And it’s also very cute, because how could it not be when so many of the ships you’re facing off against have eyes and facial expressions?

It doesn’t play like the vast majority of shoot-em-ups or cute-em-ups, as the setup is different. Rather than an auto-scrolling screen, your ship has a slight forward momentum which always drags you forward just a little bit, and you can speed up from there. Or, you can completely turn around and head the other way: each stage actually loops on itself, so if you go all the way to the right, you’ll pop back over on the left. It’s seamless, too, so you won’t actually know you did it unless you’re looking at the radar and notice that you’re now back at the start of things, or went straight from the beginning to the end by going left.

It takes some getting used to, the combination of the ever-present forward momentum with the ability to head either left or right at any time — and again, you can walk on the ground, too, which is slower but sometimes more effective or even necessary depending on the challenges you’re up against — but if you’ve never played before, you can get a pretty good sense of it all from this short gameplay clip:

That clip showed Opa-Opa not just flying back and forth as needed to avoid enemy fire, but also collecting coins and taking down a larger, yellow structure. That’s a base, where additional enemies release from, and your goal in each stage is to wipe each base out in order to bring forth the level’s boss. You don’t have to defeat any standard enemies, but they give you additional coins as well as points, and letting them roam free brings its own challenges, especially as they begin to have more difficult to predict movement and fire more bullets at you from afar.

You can see how many bases are left — and the direction in which they’re located versus your own highlighted position in the level — on the little box grid labeled Map at the bottom of the screen (above the border in the above clip, which is full of Sega Ages-specific info boxes). In the arcade version of Fantasy Zone and its modern ports on more advanced hardware, there are 10 bases per stage. The faster you manage to defeat them, the higher the value of the coin they’ll drop: loiter too long facing off against popcorn enemies and the like, and you’ll end up costing yourself coins at the expense of some extra points, in addition to putting yourself in some unnecessary danger.

You need these coins in order to buy ship upgrades and extra lives. “Should I buy an upgrade?” is also a viable question where the answer is not an automatic yes: it’s contextual! Every time you buy a specific weapon upgrade, the cost for it climbs the next time you need it. And since you lose all of your upgrades every time you lose a life, and the upgrades you use rather than store for later have a usage timer attached to them, upgrading your weapons can get expensive, fast, whether you’re talking about the standard shot upgrading to a wide beam, a laser, or the 7-way spread, or the various bomb types you can use. Some of the bombs are even single-use: devastating, yes, but costly in the long run.

My personal preference is to get through as much of the game as possible — more than half of the eight stages — buying just the “Big Wings” speed option that only costs 100 coins (as compared to 10,000 for the rocket engine or 100,000 for the turbo engine) and extra live upgrades. Extra lives start at 5,000 coins, then 20,000, then 50,000, and so on: they get costly, too, but are very worth it. As you get late in the game and the extra lives are so expensive that new ones are hard to come by, I start to buy weapon upgrades either to help deal with the busier waves of ships coming against me in conjunction with the increased health of the bases, or in preparation for a boss that’s going to take a lot more dodging and shots from me than previous ones — it ends up being cheaper than additional lives at that point, and helps you retain the ones you have. The better you get at the whole game, and the more you understand what you’re up against in each stage, the less you need the weapon upgrades and the more you just need extra lives to help cover for a mistake or a bullet that’s escaped your sight. Those weapons are still helpful in any situation, but you won’t be able to afford to rely on them if you use them too often.

As for the speed upgrades, that’s all about your own comfort with Opa-Opa’s speed. The ship moves like molasses with the default small wings, but if you’re moving too fast with the more expensive engines, precise movements become more difficult due to how touchy and speedily you move: that can cause (very expensive) deaths that wouldn’t have occurred if you had a bit more precision control over the ship. Maybe you handle Opa-Opa and ships in general at higher speeds better than I do, and would prefer the extra quickness to weapon upgrades: that’s the beauty of the system, though, that you can funnel money into whichever avenue makes Fantasy Zone easier to play for you.

Fantasy Zone has eight stages, the last of which is a battle against the final boss that, like the rest of the boss fights, has fixed scrolling instead of backward and forward scrolling. Getting through the game is a difficult endeavor even all these decades later, as Fantasy Zone, by default, is a one-credit clear situation. Not to post your score to a leaderboard, but for everything: you can’t just add more credits when you run out of lives, you have to start over from the beginning and try it all again. There is an exception, as noted, with the Astro City Mini version allowing you to feed credits in to continue, and some of the modern releases like the Switch’s Sega Ages version allows you to use stage select to begin from any stage you’ve previously reached, but in order to post a score to the standard leaderboards instead of the “Freestyle” one where people are adjusting their lives, the difficulty, and maybe even starting with some stored coins to make shopping easier, you have to start from stage one and forego a life with continues in it.

The first time I cracked the top 500 in the online leaderboards (in the standard leaderboards for the “New” version of the game, which just means “North American” versus the “Old” Japanese edition; there are no frills or modern amenities within this arena) of the Switch edition came in a run in which I met my Game Over in stage five. Again, of eight. I made it to number 320 after dying before I even fired a shot against the stage six boss who appeared, suddenly-like, mid-screen where I happened to be at the moment. Fantasy Zone is rough in this regard, but oh so satisfying. With practice, you’ll find yourself shooting up the leaderboards, too, as you figure out strategies for dealing with the various levels, how best to dole out your coin supply, and the movements of enemies who can at times be wildly unpredictable, often to your detriment.

Fantasy Zone was a hit, and was ported basically everywhere it could be — even to the system’s of Sega’s rivals. It received a Master System port, but that’s a bit of a downgrade for a few reasons. Fantasy Zone released in 1986 on Sega’s System 16 arcade hardware, which as you probably can guess was 16-bit. The Master System was 8-bit, and while it could outshine the NES graphically due to the larger array of available colors — the Famicom had 16 colors available to it, the Master System 32, with the ability to use 16 colors at a time on a single sprite — the System 16 board allowed for 256 colors. Despite this massive difference in hardware capabilities, the Master System edition still, for the most part, looks good. It’s still bright, it’s still fascinating to look at, and probably easier to enjoy the visuals if you aren’t aware of what the arcade version produced.

There were a number of sacrifices made to get it to work on the SMS, however. The soundtrack, which is just fantastic, bouncy mid-80s Sega synth work in the arcade edition that expertly matches the visuals and vibe of the rest of the game, is significantly worsened by being restricted to the programmable sound generator of the Master System rather than its FM Synth chip. This is a wrong that M2 righted in the 3DS port of the Master System’s edition of Fantasy Zone — it’s included as a bonus extra in the Sega 3D Classics Collection — by creating an FM Synth soundtrack option. It doesn’t improve the visuals, no, but a superior version of the soundtrack makes the game far more enjoyable when you want to check out a non-arcade edition of the original game.

Here’s what Fantasy Zone’s first stage sounds like on the Master System through its PSG:

Again, it’s not bad, but listen to the arcade’s version of the same track:

The Master System port also had a few other cuts: there is no longer a visual cue for how much health a base has remaining to it — in the arcade edition, an orb in the base would change colors within a spectrum from blue (full health) to red (nearly defeated). In the SMS version, you just have to keep firing and get used to it by feel without any hints. There are also fewer bases per stage. Additionally, boss fights now take place against a solid colored background instead, some bosses were changed outright since they were too much for the SMS to handle, and, unsurprisingly, parallax scrolling went right out. (Parallax scrolling, for the uninitiated, allows multiple backgrounds to move at different speeds in order to give off the appearance of depth: the Master System was capable of it, but didn’t utilize it for Fantasy Zone.) It’s still fun because it’s Fantasy Zone, but we live in a time period where we’re blessed with options for playing this classic, and you don’t ever have to resort to the Master System version if you’d prefer not to.

It also received two different Nintendo console ports: one for the Famicom developed and published by Sunsoft, and one for North America that was published — in unlicensed form — for the NES by Atari subsidiary Tengen. Yes, the same Tengen that released an unlicensed Shinobi for the NES, too. As I wrote in that feature, “Sure, Tengen didn’t have the rights to any of what they did, but Sega didn’t have the rights to Marilyn Monroe’s or Spider-Man’s likenesses, either, and that didn’t stop them from putting both in Shinobi. The 80s, everyone.” The Famicom one is on par with the SMS port despite the more limited hardware discussed previously, while Tengen’s is full of issues.

The PC Engine port was the best of the pre-Sega Ages bunch for decades, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The early 16-bit system was capable of plenty that the SMS and Famicom were not, and while there were still some concessions made to get Fantasy Zone working on the PC Engine — there’s no parallax scrolling here, either, and the soundtrack isn’t nearly as good as it would have been had it released on the PC Engine CD with its Red Book audio options, too — it’s otherwise close to the arcade original. The PC Engine could manage 512 different colors, and 482 of them on-screen at once, so there weren’t visual sacrifices in regards to the brightness and colorful nature of Fantasy Zone like there were in other console ports. Sega didn’t mind licensing out Fantasy Zone to the PC Engine despite it being in competition with their own system, in large part because the Master System was a relative dud in Japan: at least this way a quality port of the arcade version would end up on a platform people would play, which could drum up interest in the arcade edition as well as future Fantasy Zone releases on more powerful and popular Sega hardware.

The only reason the PC Engine edition is no longer the best 16- or 8-bit home edition of the game is because Sega had M2 develop a Sega Genesis version in 2022 for the Genesis Mini 2: it’s essentially arcade perfect, and with additional modes like a Super Easy option as well as the Time Attack that’s also made appearances in the Sega Ages release of the game. The Genesis wasn’t capable of arcade-perfect ports of performance-intense Super Scaler games like Super Hang-on and OutRun, no, but for a System 16 cute-em-up? The Genesis was capable of producing more on-screen colors than the System 16 board, was capable of parallax scrolling effects, and came with a Yamaha FM Synth sound chip, too. M2 took advantage of all of that to make a better-late-than-never edition of the classic for Genesis Mini 2 owners, which can now be included in any other Genesis collections or retro subscription services Sega puts out, too.

The Switch edition remains the best one around, though, as it took all the little bells and whistles of M2’s 3DS release of Fantasy Zone — not the bonus version of the SMS port, but a separate release, 3D Fantasy Zone — and then added more to the pile. You can change how many lives you start with (a change that puts you into the “Freestyle” leaderboards) and how difficult the game is — incredibly, the “Easy” mode is the default arcade difficulty, which is, as explained before, not anything approaching easy. So if you’re a real Fantasy Zone veteran and want to punish yourself, you can.

In-game, there are hands on the borders of the screen that denote where a base is going to appear, and the larger the hand, the closer the base. There’s also a more detailed map on the bottom border, which shows exactly where your ship and the remaining bases are in the level, including the height both of you are within the stage. The bottom also shows you the stage name, how many coins you’ve collected in your run, the number of bases left, and the name of the boss you’ll eventually face. And last, the left and right borders are also filled with rankings for the various power-ups, as well as game art. That’s a lot of useful info to pack in, which shouldn’t be a shock given M2 is responsible for the ShotTriggers series, which revives various classic shoot-em-ups and fills the border with all kinds of helpful information you used to have to either intuit or just inherently know. Fantasy Zone might not be a ShotTriggers release, but M2 has clearly given it the same level of care as their own published work.

You have a larger coin stock that keeps track of all the coins you’ve collected — not the ones leftover after spending, but collected in total — which can be used to unlock additional options in-game as well as to get you started with a big ole bag of cash to make our (Freestyle) playthrough easier. It has online leaderboards for whatever permutation of Fantasy Zone you choose to play, a Time Attack mode that eschews points and removes the radar so you focus entirely on speed and discovery, and lets you play Upa-Upa mode, too. Upa-Upa is Opa-Opa’s brother, but this mode is more than just a palette swap, since you have access to the entire array of weaponry at any time with a press of the L and R buttons… so long as you’ve got enough coins on hand to fire those guns. New ways to play are welcome, but just the base Fantasy Zone is going to give you plenty to work with, too, as mastering it is no easy feat.

Sega might not have a perfect track record of keeping everything they’ve produced available, but they’re the best around for ensuring that the classics that built them are constantly recirculated on new hardware and improved upon, too. That they know well enough to keep M2 constantly contracted to handle these ports and emulation says much, too, and results in exceptional, incredibly playable modern versions of titles like Fantasy Zone. It’s a brilliant game, foundational for the genre (and sub-genre) it’s within, and is as joyful (and difficult) to play now as it was when it debuted in arcades in the mid-80s. If you’ve never given it a shot before, change that.

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