Gradius

The Good
In the early 80s, Konami already ruled the genre with Scramble. It was a simple and very satisfying game. Then they made Gradius, which brought the power-up system to the space shooter formula, among others. Most features I will praise about it will probably sound trivial and standard to the point of cliche, but bear in mind: this game revolutionized the genre and everybody ripped it off, sometimes well, but most often badly. (I could be wrong about my facts, still it was very influential.)

In Gradius, each level begins with a prelude, where you have to be quick to soup up your firepower to the challenge. Then comes the main part of a level. Here, each enemy type and obstacle is well defined and unique. The environment is lively, all the levels are distinguishable and evolve as you progress forward. It's like going on an adventure. Why is there a tunnel of land in space, where things walk below and above you? Even volcanoes erupt there! Why are a bunch of Maori statues in space, spitting fireballs? The game world has its own logic. Even in such limited possibilities, it presents itself so interestingly, that you want to see more and more of it! Then the levels end with a giant boss to face off. They may look the all the same big ship, but each require some different tactic to discover in order to beat them.

The difficulty is high but reasonable, the developers calibrated it carefully. You have to fight for every inch of progress. It always tests your skills. It may look like there is a lot of open space for you to move, but the happenings are so intense that you have to do crazy patterns most of the time. If you make a little mistake, you are set way back to the nearest checkpoint. But when you prevail, it is cathartic!

As for the port to the 8-bit MSX 1 computers? Oh boy, Konami surely put their love into this conversion! Gradius is recreated on this far more limited system, has most of the content the arcade version has to offer! Technical wise too, this game is crafted as well as reasonably possible. I love when an obscure system like the MSX gets such a good treatment. It even has an extra level: The Graveyard.

In the MSX port, you have infinite continues, so you don't have to hang so anxiously to your lives or waste coins to be able to explore more of the game. The challenge and difficulty is enough to keep you hooked for a looong time (at least it did me).

The graphics may not rival the smoothness of the arcade or the NES for technical reasons, but it is well crafted and does everything to look good, without being overworked.

The sound effects are cute, and a well engineered feedback. The music is so fitting, memorable, and sweet! It's got that epic anime spirit to it (from the time when those were exotic and innovative, rather than a fan-service and joke). The whole soundtrack is intact and comes trough the chippy sounding little noisemaker of the MSX flawlessly! The sound chip has limited number of channels, so the music and effects could have gotten easily butchered, but they bridged over this by playing the complete tune in the first loop and then taking away a channel for sound effects.

There is also a special cartridge version with advanced sound that features the SCC sound chip. The reworked soundtrack and effects for this are so phenomenal that I would not believe that this is coming from an MSX or any 8-bit system, if I didn't know! It's even better than the arcade original. Konami was spoiling MSX users!

The game can be controlled with a joystick or the keyboard of the MSX, so there is that.

The Bad
Scrolling is not the strength of the MSX, and thus the environment goes left by gradually jumping 8-pixel tiles. The sprites move smooth though, and it doesn't really get in the way, so I can easily forgive this.

The Bottom Line
"Shoot-'em-ups" are a pretty ubiquitous and primitive action genre. Coming from the Commodore 64, and later mucking about with emulation of other home computers, I did not like them. There are dime a dozen of this stuff, all the same. You uselessly pound the fire button with zeal, tryng to hit the same-old useless enemy formations, then you uselessly die. Then there is Gradius on a whole new level. It's got that Japanese game design genius, precision, and creative weirdness, starting from the audiovisuals trough the level design down to small details.

The Gradius franchise is to the shootemup what Super Mario franchise is to the platformer. They revolutionized their genre, laid down the basic formula to be followed by so many, and are some of the best games of their kind. Took a long time for the west to fully understand and get close to it. The first Gradius may not be the pinnacle of the franchise or the genre, but it is very solid!