At Armless Octopus, we’re no strangers to a good shmup. What I believe turns most people off from the genre are two factors: 1) the absurd difficulty, and 2) how similar each title in the genre is. I mean it’s really just a ship shooting directly at things on screen, right? Wrong. Radiant Silvergun takes a few of the standard conventions you’ve come to expect from the genre and adds a twist. Originally released in 1998 in Japan for both the Sega Saturn and in what was then a thriving Japanese arcade scene, Radiant Silvergun has managed to stand the test of time.

That’s not to say that the steep difficulty curve gamers faced back then isn’t still present in this release, because it most certainly is. While enemies relentlessly fire upon your lightly armored vessel, you come to expect that you will die, and quite a bit at that. Your time is not spent in vain however, thanks to Radiant Silvergun’s persistent upgrade system, which carries over the experience and levels that you acquire with each progressive Story Mode playthrough. This comes as both the title’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness.

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