Rendering Ranger Review
By Nick Zverloff

Rendering Ranger is easily the most expensive game you’ve never heard of. It was only released in Japan and had a very limited run. Combined with it’s excellent sound, graphics, and gameplay, Rendering Ranger went on to becoming the most expensive normal release game for the Super Famicom. Usually, it’s impossible to talk about Rendering Ranger without talking about its ridiculous price tag. Sometimes I think that the only thing anyone even knows about it is that it’s very expensive and very hard. That is a pity because the game is actually great.

Rendering Ranger gets its name from its pre-rendered graphics. Originally, the game was going to use all sprites, until the popularity of the Donkey Kong Country games caused a change in development. Because of this, the Rendering Ranger had to be coded very carefully to avoid many of the problems with frantic games of the time such as slowdown. Rainbow Arts really did a great job here.

The first level begins with our nameless hero dumped onto a post apocalyptic looking planet being attacked by flying robots that look like something out of an 80s sci-fi movie. The graphics look amazing, like the kind of thing you would expect to see on the Saturn. The best part is that the game has absolutely no slowdown. This is an SNES era game we’re talking about with hectic action and many enemies coming from all sides. With no slowdown.

The sound is equally phenomenal. Manfred Trenz, a huge force behind the Turrican Games, did an amazing job. If you look at the sound credits, he made every last song on this game himself. The songs have a lot of synthesizers in them and perfectly suit the mood of the situation.

While the graphics and sound are amazing, the best part about this game is the gameplay. At a glance, it’s just a standard action game that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a Contra clone or a Thunder Force clone. Once you actually play through some levels and get the hang of the game, it’s really something very different.

In the run and gun levels, little skull enemies will periodically pop up. If you can shoot them, they’ll die and drop health or weapon powerups. If you don’t have the weapon that they power up yet, then you gain that colored weapon. There are four weapons in total. I named them Red Spread, Blue Spear, Yellow Pulse, and Green Rebound. Red Spread will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Contra. It’s just like the spread gun, but much faster. Blue Spear is your power weapon. It only shoots in front of you, but it shoots extremely powerful blasts. Yellow Pulse Shoots forward, above, below, and diagonal simultaneously as you level it up. For such a range, it does less damage. Finally, Green Rebound is a lot like the green shots from the forgotten classic Gley Lancer. Your shots will frantically bounce off walls and fly everywhere. Additionally, you can press the X (on default controls) to unleash a supermove. Just be sure the batteries at the bottom are filled up before using one.

Knowing which weapon to use and when to use it is crucial to getting far in Rendering Ranger. This is especially true in the flying segments. Your gun works exactly the same as it would on the ground, but with a very interesting twist. You can pick up indestructible satellites much like the bits from R-Type that hover above and below your shit. They will additionally fire whatever weapon you have out at the moment. Be careful, though. When you die, your weapons go back to their lowest level. Many of the bosses have clear weaknesses and can be a real pain if the right weapon to defeat them is at a low level.

Speaking of difficulty, Rendering Ranger is brutal. Bosses are massive and can take multiple supermoves before going down. The levels themselves are very long. One level in particular has your ship going down a very thin tube that twists and turns like a snake while moving at very high speeds. It’s certainly not as hard as some of the other games on the system, but Rendering Ranger is still quite a challenge.

While not as good as classics like Gunstar Heroes or Axelay, Rendering Ranger is still an awesome game that virtually no one has heard of outside of knowing about its ridiculous price tag. It’s a shame that this game is so rare too, because it has some of the best graphics, sound, and gameplay you can find on one of the best consoles of the 16-bit era.