Hardcore Gaming 101: Gunbird

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by Nick Zverloff - April 2013

Japanese PS2 Compilation Cover

European PS2 Compilation Cover

Shmups are not usually known for having good stories, and while there are exceptions (Radiant Silvergun comes to mind), they're usually gritty and serious sci-fi epics or extremely goofy parodies. While there is nothing wrong with this, Psikyo's Gunbird series has its own unique sense of humor. Parodius focuses on cuteness and Cho Aniki's humor is mostly being weird and slightly homoerotic. Gunbird is more about crude, sometimes very adult humor. Some of the jokes from Gunbird are kind of shocking, covering topics such as obesity, pedophilia, racial stereotypes, and male on male rape. Needless to say, if you're easily offended, you might want to stay away from these games. If you enjoy that style of humor and have a thick skin, Gunbird can be pretty funny and very enjoyable.

The games themselves are very similar to Psikyo's other shmups, Sengoku Ace and Strikers 1945, but with a little more polish. They're of pretty average quality, and never try anything spectacularly new, but never dip into outright bad territory either. They both have similar stories, too. The first involves seeking out pieces of a magic wishing mirror and the second looking for God's secret hideout to get his medicine.

Characters

Marion

A witch girl that rides on a broom and uses her pet bunny, Pom-Pom, as a weapon. Her goal is to become an adult, because apparently witches are more powerful when they're adults. She is one of the most popular characters in the series, being somewhat of a mascot for Psikyo at one point. Marion typically shoots homing stars and tosses Pom-Pom as her charge/close range attacks. Her bomb is pretty boring in the first game, shooting crescents everywhere, but is hilarious in the second game, turning all enemies and bullets onscreen into candy. The best part is that you can pick up the candy for extra points.

Valnus / Valpiro

A robot that works for Communist Russia and is equipped with lasers and missiles that he fires constantly. He's called Valpiro in the second game, possibly to signify his upgrade. He's short and fat in the first game, but gets an upgrade in the second that makes him look much more fearsome. He's the only character besides Marion that carries over from Gunbird to Gunbird 2. In both games, he secretly wishes he were a human so that he would not have to follow orders from his communist overlords. In the first game, Valnus has strong lasers that can pierce through enemies and shoot at a wide angle. He also has a short range punch as his charge attack. The punch is pretty hard to hit with because you have to be right in an enemy's face to get it to hit, but it does a lot of damage. His bomb is a giant laser. In the second game, Valpiro gets a new charge shot where he detaches his hands and sprays bullets everywhere. His electric punch is now his close range attack.

Ash

A pulp sci-fi style adventurer that flies around on a jetpack and shoots a ray gun. He also happens to be a pedophile. Ash has the hots for Marion, but only when she's young. His niece, Tavia replaces him when Psikyo explicitly states that he is not going to be playable in Gunbird 2 in one of his endings. His actual weapon shoots ring shaped ripple lasers, a huge ball or energy that spreads out once it hits as his charge shot, and a very powerful delayed bomb. Ash is both the fastest character and he also hits the hardest, but the fact that his bomb is delayed means that you really have to memorize boss patterns for him to be effective.

Tetsu

An old martial arts master that drives a flying machine with flapping wings and bicycle pedals. He is also a homosexual, to the point where Ash calls him an "old faggot" when frustrated with him. Supposedly, he used to be romantically involved with Sabu, a student of his, until he died. Part of his motivation for seeking out the wishing mirror is to resurrect his dead lover. Tetsu shoots both bullets and fireworks from his flying machine, which looks as strange as it sounds. His charge shot is disappointing, firing around five fireworks at once. It does not take long to charge, though, so it can be useful if you know how to use it. His bomb shoots four streams of fire that move very slow and probably won't eat up every bullet on screen, making them very poor for defense. They do a lot of damage, though, so they do have some use against bosses.

Yuan Nang

A warrior monkey girl that uses a staff to fight, inspired by the old "Journey to the West" tale. Yuan Nang is not actually interested in making any wishes from the magic mirror. She just wants to beat up monsters and destroy things. Her sub shot shoots huge swords, which not only pierce through bosses and enemies, but also do a lot of damage. Her charge shot has her extending her staff, which also does a lot of damage and has better range than most charge shots. Finally, her bomb shoots a bunch of shadow clones everywhere that pierce right through enemies and bosses, just like the swords. Yuan Nang is a great character for beginners because of her raw power and easy to understand weapons.

Tavia

Ash's niece. She is on a mission to ask God for medicine to make a cure for her sick mother. She may seem harmless and innocent enough, but at times, she can be just as much of an asshole as Ash, especially in some of her endings. She has largely the same weapons as Ash, but has a few different tricks too. Tavia has a huge pink sword as her close range weapon, which does amazing damage, but like all close range attacks, has bad range. She also has a vastly improved bomb where she calls in three giant robots to fly in and toss grenades everywhere.

Alucard

A vampire that seems like he should be a pretty boy, but has a few problems. First, his hair isn't real. It's just a wig. Secondly, Alucard has stinky feet, so stinky in fact, that it can kill people. He is looking to cure his baldness and stinky feet with God's medicine. He shoots bats as his sub shot and his charge shot fires huge, screen clearing waves of bats. His bomb shoots lasers in the shape of a cross and lets you move while using it, making it very easy to use and very powerful. His close range attack is not worth it, though because it does terrible damage and just consists of him stabbing the enemy with his cape, which is about as effective as it sounds.

Hei Cob

A fat Indian man who rides on a flying carpet and wears a turban. He takes pride in his weight and boasts it as his greatest strength, but secretly, he wishes he could be thin. People always ridicule him for his weight and no one likes him. Supposedly, God's medicine will cure him of his obesity or at least make everyone stop making fat jokes about him. Hei Cob moves very slow and shoots slow moving swords as his sub shot. His charge shot shoots a ghost option that fires independently from Hei Cob and moves in circles. His close range attack is tossing a large cartoon bomb that does a lot of damage, but has a delayed explosion. His real bomb calls in a giant dancer girl to smash everything.

Aine

A guest character from Sengoku Ace. While Aine was somewhat respectable and heroic in his own series, in Gunbird 2, he's a rude and uncontrollable sex addict. Supposedly, his sister Asuka has a cold. Aine is out to get God's Medicine to cure a simple common cold, which is just as stupid as it sounds. Aine's 2 player storylines all end with him raping another male character, though thankfully, you never see anything. Aine plays very similar to how he does in Sengoku Ace, shooting a flurry of arrows as his normal shot and flaming arrows as his sub shot. His close range attack has Aine swinging his sword and has much more range than any other close range attack. His charge shot also involves his sword, but instead he shoots a laser from it. Despite being fairly normal with all his other attacks, Aine's bomb is very weird. He grows huge, blows kisses everywhere, and turns all enemy bullets into flower petals.

Morrigan

Morrigan is another guest character, from Capcom's Darkstalkers, and is exclusive to the Dreamcast port of Gunbird 2. With all the wackiness and crude humor going on, she fits in surprisingly well with the rest of the cast. Morrigan's shot homes in on enemies, making her very good for beginners. Her charge shot is her Soul Fist attack, lifted straight from Darkstalkers. Her close range attack shoots a barrage of lights, which has surprisingly good range and hits wide. Her bomb is a little disappointing, though. Morrigan shoots copies of herself. It's exactly like Yaun Nang's bomb from the first Gunbird, but flashier.

The Pirates

Both Gunbird games have a group of three pirates as recurring bosses. Both consist of a woman in a silly outfit as their leader, a strong guy that also happens to be an idiot, and a thin smart guy. They're always trying to stop the player with increasingly elaborate robot designs. Their wacky recurring boss crew dynamic is the same in both games, but with different characters, making their presence in the second game less interesting. They're called The Trump in the first Gunbird, and consist of Ace, (short guy), Claude (big guy), and a woman known only as The Boss. In the second Gunbird, they're called The Queen Pirates and consist of Blade (viking helmet), Gimmick (big nose), and Shark (lady pirate).

Mirror Sprite / Atler

The final boss of the first Gunbird. He is very strong, grants wishes, and calls forth very powerful attacks from a spellbook. Atler bears a very strong resemblance to the character Gizmo from the Gremlins movies. He also tends to shoot bullets when he roars. Alter also has a sense of humor, granting people's wishes quite literally, leading to some pretty funny endings.

God

The final boss of Gunbird 2. It turns out that God is an elephant with a trumpet and his "angels" are actually frogs. Like the Mirror Sprite's wishes in the first game, God's medicine has a way of backfiring in hilarious ways. He's also noticeably easier to defeat than most of the other bosses in Gunbird 2, having a health bar half the size of the sub boss in his stage, which is strange considering he's the final boss.

Gunbird (Arcade)

Gunbird 2 (Arcade)

Gunbird (ガンバード) / Mobile Light Force - Arcade, PlayStation, Saturn, PlayStation 2, PSN (1994)

Japanese Saturn Cover

American PlayStation Cover

Gunbird was Psikyo's second shmup, their first being Sengoku Ace. While it certainly plays like a Psikyo game and feels very old school, it lacks the polish of some of their later games and can feel a little cheap near the end. It's still a very enjoyable game and offers some very hectic action, but won't appeal to everyone.

Gunbird's story involves a bunch of very strange and wacky characters fighting a pirate gang called The Trump for a magic mirror. Supposedly, if the mirror is assembled, a magic mirror sprite will come forth and grant one wish. The game never takes itself too seriously, showing silly dialogue between levels and the pirates acting like morons right before every boss fight.

Of note is how Gunbird handles endings. Each character gets a choice of two endings, some of them good and others bad (at least for the characters). Two player endings are always the same, though.

Levels are chosen in a random order, much like in the Aero Fighters series, which was made by a lot of the same team. Most of them are pretty standard shmup levels such as jungles, factories, or forests. Things stop being randomized once you get all four pieces of the mirror and go to the mirror shrine. Once in the mirror shrine, Gunbird stops pulling its punches. The enemies get faster, the bosses get tougher, and the levels get longer. This only lasts three levels, the third one mostly consisting of the final boss fight, making Gunbird one of Psikyo's easier shooters.

Gunbird's scoring system is very simple. Land enemies and buildings can be blown up and will sometimes have gold underneath them. The gold will cycle from shiny to dull and you'll get more points if you pick it up when it's shiny. A similar system was used in the first Strikers 1945 game, but with gold bricks instead of coins.

Gunbird received ports to the PlayStation and Saturn in 1995, fairly early in both system's lives. Both ports were handled by Atlus, and were done surprisingly well given each system's limitations. Both ports feature a fully animated opening movie, which is pretty short, but kind of cool. The home versions also feature checkpoints if you choose to continue later on in the game, something that was completely absent in the arcade version. It hardly affects the game's difficulty, though. The Saturn port is pretty much arcade perfect and includes a fan art gallery, much like the one in Sengoku Blade / Tengai. There are over 400 illustrations, along with a video of the characters of Gunbird picking which ones to put in the disc.

The PlayStation port is a bit sloppy, though. There is slowdown where there wasn't any in the arcade version and some of the animation is a little choppy. It may not be arcade perfect, but it's still an okay port, so don't dismiss it just because there are better versions. Later, in 2005, ten years after the original Gunbird, a compilation featuring Gunbird 1 and 2 was released on the PS2 by Empire Interactive, long after Psikyo had gone out of business. It was only released in Europe and Japan, much like other re-released Psikyo games. It does not feature any extras like in the Saturn version, though. In 2009, Gunbird was released on PSN, though not everyone may be aware of it because it was released under the name Mobile Light Force. Why the name change? Time to get into that.

Back in 2003, a company called XS Games decided to publish some of Psikyo's games on the dying PS1, namely Gunbird and Sol Divide. None of these games were localized very well, as huge pieces of text either made no sense or were not even translated into English and left in as Japanese. XS also had a habit of removing extra content and cutting out story sequences entirely. The box art was changed to a completely misleading picture of three Charlie's Angel style secret agents running through a battlefield with explosions everywhere. The art gallery was completely removed, along with TATE mode, which involves turning your television sideways to let the action fit the screen better. Instead XS opted for a cramped letterbox style screen that makes everything too small. It doesn't save your high score either, which is very annoying if you like to play for a higher score. XS also tore out the story, leaving any and all exposition in the manual. Mobile Light Force is generally seen as a mockery.

Besides gutting all the extra content and leaving out the story, XS Games also changed a few of the character names. Hilariously, Valnus was renamed to Milf 2000, Ash was renamed to Jason Last, and Tetsu was changed to John Saurez. Supposedly, Milf 2000's name was going to be MLF 2000, the MLF standing for Mobile Light Force. Why they changed it to a dirty acronym is anyone's guess. For those who don't know, Jason Last and John Saurez were XS employees who worked on Mobile light Force, Jason Last being from Quality Assurance and John Saurez being the producer. Sadly, the Mobile Light Force version of Gunbird was the version released on PSN, which is bit of a disappointment.

Strangely, Mobile Light Force 2 is a similarly butchered version of Shikigami No Shiro, a shmup by Taito that is only similar because it has a very character driven storyline and that it features flying people instead of the usual planes or space ships. It uses nearly identical box art too, which comes off as really cheap on XS' part.

The first Gunbird game was adapted into a graphic novel by Gamest Comics in 1995. It was only released in Japanese, with both story and art by Masato Natsumoto, an artist that worked on many other video games such as King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, and Record of Lodoss War. It's around 125 pages long.

Quick Info:

Developer:

Psykio

Publisher:

Psykio (Arcade)
Atlus (Consoles)
XS Games (MLF)

Genre:

Shoot-'em-Up: Vertical

Themes:

Anime
Mechas!

Gunbird (Arcade)

Additional Screenshots

Gunbird (Arcade)

Gunbird 2 - Arcade, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 (1998)

Japanese Arcade Flyer

Gunbird 2 takes everything that Gunbird started and cranks it up even more. It has a much more refined scoring system, modernized gameplay that adds in elements of danmaku, and replaces most of the cast with new characters. The same thing happened with another one of Psikyo's series, Strikers 1945 when Strikers 1999, the third game in the series, was released. The two games even share a few sprites!

Other things borrowed from Psikyo's Strikers 1945 series are the more elaborate bosses and the charge shot power bar. Like in Strikers 1945, bosses typically have more than one form and get progressively more powerful as the fight goes. Some of them even have the same attacks as a few of the bosses from the Strikers series, making the games very similar. It also has a charge shot power bar, which lets you empty a bar at the bottom of the screen and fire off a charge shot that gets more powerful depending on how full it is.

The charge shot power bar can also be used for close range attacks, something completely new to Gunbird 2 and appears nowhere else in any Psikyo game. You press a third button to activate it, and it eats up only one power bar level. These attacks typically do a lot of damage and are great for taking out bosses, but thy have very bad range, making them a little hard to use, but completely worth it when they do hit. Some of these attacks are clearly better than others, though.

In addition to the more refined gameplay, Gunbird 2 has an even more crude sense of humor than the first one. If you're easily offended, then you might want to skip this one, but if you don't mind that kind of humor, Gunbird 2 can be pretty hilarious. Aine from Sengoku Ace and Morrigan from Darkstalkers appear as guest characters. Aine seems to have lost his characterization from the Sengoku Ace series, though. Now the once noble samurai keeps bottles in his underwear to keep his butt cool and tells Marion that he wants to make a potion to turn people into homosexuals.

The scoring system is refined now, adding in flashing medals that replace the gold coins. When the medals are brightest, they are worth the most points. You can get extra points by medal chaining, which involves grabbing medals at their brightest many times in a row. It takes a lot of timing and precision to get medal chains right. This medal chaining system would be reused in Strikers 1999.

There's also a new feature called "Nice Bomb!" It goes off when you use a bomb to clear a bullet that's in your sprite but not your hitbox. Nice Bomb triggers a multiplier that depends on how many bullets you're grazing at once. It's very risky, but can boost your score immensely. You can also score "tech bonuses" by hitting bosses with close range or charge attacks when they show their weak spot. This feature was borrowed from the Strikers 1945 series.

Lastly, every so often, a huge wooden head will come out of nowhere and rain down green gems that are worth a lot of points when you shoot them. The heads can drop a blue gem as they disappear, which is worth more than the green ones. This feature gets reused in Dragon Blaze, Psikyo's last shmup, but with coins instead of gems. The sprites are reused too, which can be seen as either a fun little easter egg.

Another fun thing that not very many people notice is a reference to Aerofighters, a game series made by Video System. Psikyo was made of many former Video System employees, leading to many thematic and gameplay similarities between the two companies games. Near the end of Gunbird 2, you fight a large, dark colored eye in a temple. Aerofighters 2 had Lar, the gigantic eye that was a possible final boss that was fought in a temple. It's a fun little shout out that adds a bit to the game's personality.

While Gunbird 2 has a fairly simple scoring system compared to other shmups at the time, it makes up for its scoring system by being Psikyo's hardest game. It's not actually bullet hell, as many of the bullets come out pretty fast, though not as fast as the first Gunbird, and are aimed. Bullet Patterns exist, but they aren't as elaborate as the ones seen in games by Cave or Shanghai Alice. Still, Gunbird 2 can and will have over 100 bullets onscreen near the end of the game, just not in any particular pattern. Also, bosses tend to have multiple forms, some of which are copied in design from the Strikers 1945 series, but with a more cartoonish look to them. They take a long time to destroy and usually take up most of the screen. It's a pretty daunting challenge, but a lot of the cheapness of the first game has been eliminated with the relatively slower bullet speed, giving bosses weak spots, and generally more powerful playable characters.

Gunbird 2 was ported to home consoles, thankfully with XS having nothing to do with them. Capcom published the Dreamcast port of Gunbird 2, adding in Morrigan as an exclusive character that does not appear in any other version. The Capcom/Psikyo crossover did not end there, though. Psikyo produced Cannon Spike, an overhead shooter starring many of Capcom's classic characters such as Cammy, Mega Man, and Arthur. There was also a Capcom vs Psikyo game, but it was produced and released in Japan, only on the Dreamcast, and it is not what you would expect. Instead of a fighting game, it's a mahjong game, featuring Capcom and Psikyo characters playing mahjong against each other. Psikyo did produce a pornographic mahjong series called Taisen Hot Gimmick, though Taisen Net Gimmick Capcom and Psikyo All Stars was for the most part clean.

The PS2 port, as mentioned before, includes both Gunbird games. It's arcade perfect, which is good, though it's missing Morrigan. There was also going to be a PSP port called Gunbird 2 Remix. Unfortunately, it was cancelled, though some screenshots and footage exist of what the game could have looked like.

Quick Info:

Developer:

Psykio

Publisher:

Psykio (Arcade)
Capcom (Dreamcast)

Genre:

Shoot-'em-Up: Vertical

Themes:

Anime
Mechas!