After being deafened by the sturm und drang of so many “epic” RPGs in recent months (and I haven’t even played Xenosaga yet), I’ve found solace in Ikaruga. The latest in a long line of vertically scrolling shoot-em-ups, or “shmups,” has made its way to the GameCube and into my grubby little hands.
Ikaruga displays a minimalism of design that is belied by the manic on-screen action. The story of the game’s world, such as it is, fits onto one page of the manual, and can be safely ignored. This is abstract gaming at its finest. There are no plot twists, no romantic interludes, no mad villains out to destroy the universe as we know it. Instead, there is a screen containing your ship and a horde of other ships that must be either dodged or destroyed. That’s it.
There is only a single twist to the basic “shoot everything that moves” mechanic, and that twist drives everything in this game. Your ship is either black or white, and can change color at any time. Enemies are either black or white, and shoot bullets of the appropriate color at you. When your ship is black, it absorbs black bullets, but can be killed by white shots. When you switch to white, the reverse is true. The key to the game is to switch back and forth between polarities at the right times. This is especially important when the screen is literally full of ships and bullets.
Unlike the story-driven games that are so popular nowadays but are only good for a single playthrough, the durability of play in a neoclassical shooter like Ikaruga lies in repetition and the quest for perfection (or if not perfection, then at least a new high score). To this end, Treasure has seen fit to include not only an online registry of high scores, but even a training mode that lets you study enemy patterns and hone your technique for any given sub-level.
Once you’ve learned the enemy patterns and practiced your steering and maximized your combos, you can experience the true joy of the shooter, as your ship weaves in and out among the flocks of enemies, switching colors in rhythm with the game and only firing when the time is right. When this flow is achieved, the game becomes not a struggle to survive but a dance or a fugue, as you and the machine create a counterpoint of lasers and explosions. More than just about any game not named Rez, Ikaruga demonstrates the sheer pleasure that comes from letting yourself play with the game, rather than against it.
After all my whining about Dark Cloud 2’s lack of focus and the operatic ambitions of all the Kojimas and Sakaguchis in the game industry, it’s so nice to see a game that knows exactly what it is and simply concerns itself with being the purest possible incarnation of itself.