The Darius Series has been around for at least 16 years. Since the original release of the original arcade game Darius, with it's 3 part screen in 1985 (or maybe it was '86?) it has had at least one incarnation on every popular system other than the Original NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), Nintnedo 64, and Dreamcast. Amongst Fans of the genre, the Darius Series is known for 4 things, It's progressive level selection System , It's unusual themes, It's gigantic Bosses, and it's unforgiving difficulty. Probably the first thing you will notice when you play this game is the fact that all the enemies look like mechanical marine life, this is not a coinsedence. The Belsar Empire (the main bad guys in the games) make all their ships look like marine life, These include all kinds of fish, Crustaceans, Mollusk, and even the Ocasional Starfish or Jelly fish, all mechanical, and very cool looking. The bosses in this game are huge and are usually never stationary, they move around the screen a lot.
After you beat each level you are presented with a map of squares representing levels laid out in a bowling pin fashion. After you have beaten a stage in a column, you can choose between the two most adjacent stages in the next column. There are seven columns in all and seven endings to this game depending on which stage you choose to complete last.
The game is dificult for two reasons, first, powering up your ship is a proggressive proccess of picking up enough like colored power-ups, when you get hit and restart, you only keep the power ups you had if you had managed to upgrade your weapon, if you don't get any more power ups again and get hit, then you downgrade, The other thing that makes this game difficult is the shear amount of bullets that will appear on the screen at one time.
Fortunately, you have a limited number of special bombs that destroy every enemy on screen (start with 3). These bombs also create a black hole effects and suck in all the bullets on screen, but of course, more bullets will come and the game gets really crazy.
All in all, the reason this game is the best is because it never fails to live up to the original Darius model, Unlike the two previous Darius games, both on Super NES. In fact, it adds to the model without inhibiting anything traditional.
