While Otomedius is Konami's first real attempt at putting in a scoring system for any of their Gradius games, that was never what the series was about (if you wanted to play something like that, should you be looking at something from Cave, Touhou, or another modern danmaku shmup that's proliferating the market as we speak). If you wanted to know where the inspiration to Gradius' mythos came from and what makes it such an iconic figure in Konami's history, you should watch Star Trek. A good place to start would be the movie released at box offices in 2009.

I'm not kidding. Everything Treasure did to Gradius V mythos that made the game so appealing to both newcomers to the series (although it would probably eat them alive due to its sheer difficulty, which is probably why it wasn’t that successful) and to the old fans alike is errily recreated in this film.

What, you don't believe me that Star Trek was the inspiration to Gradius? How each stage represented a themed world the Vic Viper was flying through, which is exactly how an episode of the first Star Trek series always went? Or despite being Japanese in origin, the game uses text and spoken dialog entirely in English and up until Treasure's intervention always felt like I was stuck in a sci-fi universe created by people from the 1960s?

Or how about the fact that Hitoshi Sakimoto composed the first few seconds of the orchestral piece heard in Gradius V's theme song to sound exactly like the one in Star Trek's? Yeah, I was shocked myself at that realization.

So what does me rambling about Gradius' mythos have to do with Otomedius? A lot, actually. You see, anyone who's been exposed to vidoegame culture for a while at least knows what Gradius is. A few might know that Vic Viper is the name of the ship the player pilots in the game. Ask them what the Lord British is though and most of them will have no clue, while some of the more literate videogamers of the West might ask you what in the world Richard Garriott has to do with Gradius.

And therein lies the motivation for creating Otomedius’ universe- To cram as many shmup references from the company's history and plop it into this game so the players might be intrigued enough to go and check out the games to where the references came from.

So what was the other goal of Otomedius’universe? Well, it’d be better if I just tell you the story so far first…