Shienryu review for the Sega Saturn


Good old Shienryu....
Well, not that old,.. Warashi brought their arcade evort home in 1997.
It's a very solid shooter and it has a vertical arcade mode.
Check the How to.. section of this site for instructions on how to succesfully rotate your monitor.

The mood is pretty (g)rainy in this game.
And the charm of it despite the last sentence is hard to explain.
Maybe it's the solidness of this shooter?
Maybe it's the fact that when you shoot an enemy a couple of this can happen:
1) It explodes
2) Flying enemies realy crash down (scaling) burning and smoking and then explode when they hit the ground. And shrapnell and debree will be flying all over the place. And if you're flying over a very deep canyon it will take longer for the crashing enemy to reach the ground. This is a realy nice touch.

This is a complete 100% arcade conversion.
The guys at Warashi must've had a few laughs when releasing this game since I feel they didn't convert it whatsoever. This might've been due to fact that the arcade original was released on the Sega ST-V arcade board (which is a Saturn with expanded memory).
They just put the PCB code on a CD it seems! Resulting in arcade splendidness.

O.k. there's nothing realy super-great about this game.
But it's a game you don't wanna miss when you already own some of the top shooters released on the Saturn.
If you don't own Battle Garegga, Do DonPachi, etc. get them first, they're better.
But that doesn't mean this is a bad game. On the contrary, this game should be in everybody's collection.
Press DOWN or LEFT to access the option menu.
Turn difficulty to very hard and you should be fine.
You'll get a limited amount of credits.
You'll get 5 credits and you inserted that first credit when you press START. Meaning four remain.
And you'll need those four remaining credits.
the game has long levels with pretty good music.

The long levels have the Truxton set back system when you die.
If you die somewhere in the level you're brought back to one of four checkpoins.
So for instance if you die just before you encounter the boss you'll be brought back to section -4 of that level.
However when you do encounter the boss you'll continue on fighting him when you die, not bringing you back to another section. Even if you use another credit you'll still continue fighting him.

There are no aircraft to choose from.
Only three different weapons that can be upgraded.
They are:
1) Vulcan - You start with this weapon and it can be upgraded to a big wide spread.
2) Missiles - You shoot out a twin normal yellow vulcan fire and it is accompanied by homing missiles that when uograded almost fill the screen with missiles and smoke.
3) Homing lightning - Very chaotic lightning homes in on anything that moves and/or shoots.
I like the Vulcan best in this game.


Ratings:

Playability 10
Graphics 7,6
Music 8,7
Lastability 8,8

Overall 8,4



6 blown up screenshots: