XP Arcade: Raiden

Raiden went back to genre basics, but in an extraordinary way.

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.

Raiden ended up being the defining game and series for two different development studios, which makes the fact that its success was something of a happy accident that much more surprising. It’s not that Raiden wasn’t put in a position to succeed, not by any means: developer Seibu Kaihatsu poured their significant abilities into the game, and the results are there for anyone who plays Raiden to see. It’s that Raiden, or anything like it, wasn’t supposed to be the plan at all for Seibu Kaihatsu, but circumstance dictated that they go in this direction.

In an interview for the INH Superplay release of Raiden III, Toshinobu Komazawa, former artist for Seibu Kaihatsu and the founder and CEO of Raiden III, IV, and V developer MOSS, explained that there was little budget leftover after the failure of an expensive arcade game released in 1989, Dynamite Duke. As Komazawa told it, “At that time, every developer was under the influence of “Major Title”-ism, and planned their games accordingly… everyone was trying to emulate the big hits of the day, games like Street Fighter and Final Fight. Those games used lots of expensive ROMs and other high-tech hardware. It was an era when, following Capcom, every designer started releasing games on high-spec PCBs. Despite being a small developer, Seibu Kaihatsu also started designing such new hardware, heedless of the costs.”

Dynamite Duke didn’t succeed at retail like hoped, and Seibu Kaihatsu didn’t make their money back on the expensive venture. As Komazawa explained, they still wanted to make a sequel to the game, but, “for the health of the company,” they had to focus on something they could actually afford to do, in order to attempt to make some money back with something that might sell a bit, and at a much lower entry cost than Dynamite Duke had been. The project? Raiden.

“…there was a lot of negativity surrounding the decision to develop Raiden. At that time STGs were still relatively inexpensive to produce (and with our budget, it was all we could afford to make). Raiden was a financial decision for the company, a title that we had to make.” Shooting games were still popular, though, they didn’t have quite the sway they did a few years prior in the arcades as aforementioned companies like Capcom started to produce bigger, flashier games in other genres, a quest that would eventually result in Street Fighter II and the era of the arcade fighter. So, as much as Seibu Kaihatsu didn’t want to make a shoot ‘em up, and wanted to be making more games like Dynamite Duke, the budget simply wasn’t there to do anything else besides gamble on creating a low-cost shooter that’d pay the bills that were piling up due to Duke’s development and subsequent failure.

As for the “happy accident” thing, Raiden ended up being a massive success. It sold 17,000 arcade units worldwide, made Seibu Kaihatsu major players in the shooter space, and brought on a wave of “clones” like Mad Shark, launched a series that’s five entries in as well as a three-game subseries, as well as a company as successful as Capcom even namedropping Raiden in their advertisement of a future game a decade later, Dimahoo, to arcade operators. Seibu Kaihatsu were able to wipe away the debt that Dynamite Duke had piled up, according to Komazawa, and while the studio would end up shuttering at the end of the decade, that might have happened a whole lot sooner if not for this one game.

The timing was fortuitous. Raiden didn’t necessarily do anything new — anyone familiar with the shoot ‘em ups of the 80s can pretty easily identify what Seibu Kaihatsu was using for influence and inspiration — but what it managed was to be a refined, no-nonsense version of the games that came before. Tighter, more mindful of your time, able to hook you with ease and keep you invested, especially if you were playing alongside a friend. The bosses were impressive both visually and in their design and behavior, a step up from those found in the game’s inspirations, and the levels that brought you to these massive, memorable encounters were shorter than what was normal for the time. Raiden was basically the exclamation point on a particular era of shooting games, and, as a 1990 release, got in right before the buzzer, aka, Street Fighter II, as well.

Raiden was difficult, yes, especially in its original Japan release, where dying resulted in being sent back to a checkpoint instead of what would become the series standard following the international release: simply reviving right where you were, able to scoop up a lost power-up or two and get back to fighting that boss instead of having to start the encounter over, potentially even more underpowered. The thing that made it work, though, is that it was so simple to understand what had to be done, while containing additional layers for more advanced players. There are just the two main weapons: the red one eventually becomes a spread shot with additional power-ups, and the blue fires a straight-line laser that grows in both width and how often it fires until it’s a neverending beam as wide as your ship. There are two missile variants, as well, with the H power-up representing homing missiles, and the M a straight-shot barrage. Both grow in power and speed as you pick up more missile power-ups.

With 11 medals collected and four bombs in stock, a 44,000 point bonus nearly as large as the point total from stage 1 has been earned.

All of it is useful, and while you might hear arguments that one is more useful than another, it’s really up to personal preference. The spread covers more ground but its power has been diffused over that larger area; homing can pick off weaker enemies that aren’t where you’re firing the main shots but has a mind of its own; the missile barrage can make taking down tougher enemies easier, but only fires directly ahead; and the blue laser limits your range, but basically melts enemies directly in front of you. The laser plus homing can be a deadly, versatile combination, as can the spread and barrage, but you can also go overboard by combining main weapons to their similar-ish subweapon and still do perfectly fine. It’s your call, and that there aren’t a ton of choices to agonize over — or a number of options you will never have a need or preference for — makes familiarizing yourself with Raiden’s systems that much easier.

“Don’t get shot” is all you really need to worry about. The higher-level scoring system is there, a reward for the people who actually do avoid getting shot and can do so without using their bombs — there are hidden medals to collect in each stage, and at the end of them, the number of medals you collected since your last death are worth 1,000 points each and then multiplied by the number of bombs remaining, resulting in some significant point bonuses. If you don’t want to or can’t get by without using bombs, though, or find collecting medals to be a distraction from the “don’t get shot” lifestyle, then, don’t sweat them. The same goes for the bonus items you can collect, like the hidden fairy in stage 1 that’s worth 10,000 points if you can manage to make it come out of hiding…

…or the fast car that shows up on the bridge in stage 2 that maybe, possibly only shows up if you haven’t yet died — I’ve gone through this stage again and again, and I’m still trying to suss out the exact conditions there. It’s this balance that made Raiden popular at the arcades, as it was easy enough to get into, and you could get through at least a stage and most of the second, if not more, without dying once you familiarized yourself with it. Then, business would start to pick up, but at that point you were already hooked, and maybe intrigued by these extra layers, to boot.

Raiden is certainly more on the survival scale than the scoring one, and there are going to be times where dropping a bomb matters more because of the former than saving it for the latter does. But attempting to put together a high score by surviving as long as possible before you need to pop in another credit is its own kind of exhilarating. It’s not a Cave shooter with complicated systems or chaining that reveal themselves more to you over time, it’s not a masterwork of rank or triumphant blend of the survival vs. scoring dichotomy like Battle Garegga. Raiden is “merely” a finely tuned, fat-trimmed, military-style shooter that looks, sounds, and plays splendidly — enough so for it to be both an arcade hit at the tail end of the genre’s peak popularity in the space, and for it to be ported to practically every system in existence.

The thing that truly makes Raiden “accessible” in spite of its difficulty is how it feels when you’ve died. It doesn’t feel cheap, like you’ve been cheated somehow. The balance is too good for that, your ship’s hit box sized well and within visual expectations, the movement just right so long as you understand what you’re working with here. What you end up feeling is that you were one better decision or faster reaction away from not exploding into bits of shrapnel, that if you had simply moved or acted a little differently, you’d still have your fully-powered weaponry and the medals you’d collected in the stage to that point. High-difficulty shooters do not always feel like that, and especially didn’t back in 1990, when balance was sometimes a mess even in the best of games.

You will die in Raiden because of proto-danmaku bullet patterns, and swarms of ships that fill the screen. Whereas something like a Cave shooter will fill the screen with popcorn enemies — meaning, very easy ones that oftentimes don’t even fire at you and exist merely for building up and sustaining a chain of kills for scoring purposes — Raiden fills its real estate with enemies that are actively trying to kill you. Helicopters swoop in from above and try to sneak beside you to either collide or blast you out of the sky. Tanks come out from hiding to shoot at you, or, sometimes, leave merely the tiniest hint of their placement under the cover of foliage, and don’t even make their presence known otherwise before firing. They’re all wildly accurate, too, which means it’s very much on you to learn how to keep moving, where you need to be against certain patterns of foes, how to dodge and bob and weave and still manage to blast away the enemies on screen to keep your ship intact. This isn’t bullet hell: there aren’t extremely complicated patterns of bullets or minuscule hit boxes, where staying put where you’ll somehow, against all visual odds, be able to thread the needle is key. Raiden requires movement, and yes, a knowledge of safe spots for the larger bullet patterns that do exist, but mostly the former.

Here are two examples of how Raiden gets complicated, the first from just the second stage:

It’s just a few basic tanks at first, and then, it’s suddenly a flood of enemy craft that aren’t even shooting at you, but are just hoping, by sheer numbers, to cause a collision. Or to cause you to, in your self-interest of not crashing into another jet, miss seeing a bullet that comes from one of the ground forces, be it from one of the stronger, more aggressive tanks, or the trains pulling hidden guns behind them. There is no magic safe spot there, merely movement that has to eventually feel instinctual rather than coming by way of thought, and the enemies are following your movements with their own, too. It’s a dance between you and your foes with you as the leader, and perfecting a dance takes practice.

Later on, you get this kind of chaos, but with far more bullets in the mix, too. The kind of enemies that would have been a boss or mid-boss style foe in shooters from just a few years before, like Toaplan’s Twin Cobra, are just there on screen in batches, making life more difficult for you. And they aren’t alone, either, as plenty of choppers are coming right at and around you, using their craft and shots to try to hit you any way they can:

Let’s talk about Twin Cobra (known as Kyukyoku Tiger in Japan, where it first released). It was one of the aforementioned “obvious” influences on Raiden, which would be noticeable even if you hadn’t seen Komazawa straight-up say that Seibu Kaihatsu studied Toaplan’s 1987 game during the development of Raiden. It, like its predecessor, Tiger-Heli, was a military-themed shooter. It featured something like the medal system, with hidden gold stars you could collect that would be worth 3,000 points each at the end of the level… but only the ones you had collected since your most recent death. Like Raiden, it featured a playing area that was larger than the screen that it was shown on, which, just like Raiden, required you are constantly going left to right and back and forth in order to keep unseen enemies from surprising you, and to be able to find the various pickups and power-ups. It, too, was well, well before the advent of bullet hell — which came by way of Toaplan a few years after Raiden — but still filled the screen with a sometimes overwhelming number of enemies and accurate shots from them.

What followed Raiden were known as Raiden clones, but you wouldn’t be wrong to point out that Raiden itself is something of a Twin Cobra clone. There is still a noticeable difference between the two, however, and it really has to do with how refined Raiden is. Twin Cobra is great, and in a way where it’s still shocking that it came out just two years after Tiger-Heli, Toaplan’s first shoot ‘em up, which was also great. But your arsenal is more useless than useful, with just one of the four weapons to choose from passing muster across the game, and the bosses left plenty of room to improve upon. Raiden is the overall tighter experience, and more rewarding, too, but it’s just important to remember that there is no Raiden without Twin Cobra.

It’s no one big thing that makes the difference, but instead, a series of little things that add up. Raiden looks excellent, despite being on “inferior” and less expensive hardware than what Seibu Kaihatsu had just been working on (and hoped to continue working on). The initial settings themselves aren’t much to look at — countryside, city, etc. — but all the little extra details put in by the artists and programmers, like the people milling about or animals on farms or in the woods — adds something to the proceedings. The explosions look amazing, multi-stage and popping out of the screen with vivid coloring, and the game’s sound, from the weapons to the soundtrack, are stellar. That you start on Earth and make your way to space is also appreciated, as it gives Raiden that much more separation from its influences.

On the topic of Raiden’s visuals: Tom Massey recently wrote a history of Cave’s DoDonPachi series for Time Extension, and it’s excellent. One of his relevant compliments toward the series was for DonPachi’s use of shadows in 1995: “DonPachi felt fresh on arrival. Targeting enemies off-screen as their shadows appeared, learning chaining routes, and using your laser ‘aura’ as a defensive tool were new and interesting features.” Two of those three are certainly accurate, but I’d argue that Raiden’s use of shadows for similar purposes predates DonPachi’s, and with the added bonus of encouraging you to sweep from left to right to find the source of those shadows on the hidden sides of the play area, as well. You might see a shadow from a large craft bearing down you before you see the actual craft, and then you might see another shadow from another coming elsewhere before you’ve taken care of the first — it doesn’t have the same concern with chaining and maintaining your scoring multiplier that DonPachi and its successors did, which is what Massey was getting at, but you have to pay attention to those shadows if you want to survive, which was more Raiden’s game, anyway.

All of Raiden is like this, requiring your attention, giving you all that you’ll need to succeed through various cues so long as you actually do focus and learn, and it’s as good of a game as it is because of this level of detail. Not bad for a title that Seibu Kaihatsu felt they had to do but didn’t initially want to.

Raiden wasn’t ahead of its time like some shooters you’ll see critics and fans gush over. It was exactly where and what it needed to be at the time it came to be, a stellar refinement that understood where the genre was and how it could be better, without deviating from that path into a completely new kind of shooter. That work was for Toaplan, eventually, for their many successor studios, for Treasure once they decided to enter the space, and so on. What Seibu Kaihatsu did, though, was vital in a different way: it was the culmination of that style of shoot ‘em up to that point, the realistic military STG, made less niche and more accessible in spite of its admitted difficulty. And it helped lead to a continuation of the subgenre that Toaplan and others would move away from in the coming years. It’s a true classic, and worth seeking out in its original arcade form by way of Arcade Archives on the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4.

Hardcore Gaming 101 broke down the various ports of Raiden in their coverage of the game back in 2011 — too many of them aren’t great, but the one that is also includes a copy of Raiden II, which didn’t get nearly the wide release of Raiden, and as of this writing isn’t available on Arcade Archives nor as a MIKADO re-release like III and IV.

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