#famicom disc system

Gameplay courtesy of Takemetoaride.

The more I play Falsion, the more I want to play it. It's rough around the edges, as most 8-bit 3D shmups were. (The exception is Tetrastar on NES, which I remember being well-polished but boring.)

From a technical standpoint: at first, the middle ground of the sprite scaling is jarring. You can see objects far off for quite some time, but when they come close to you, it's sudden. This was my biggest hurdle to getting into Falsion, but the timing on this can be learned. And, since it's equally jarring for each object, I find dealing with it becomes more and more like second nature.

On the plus side, the enemies get some dynamic use out of the Z axis. In stage 1, spinning enemies will hug the screen and shoot at you from the side. In stage 4, lines of enemies will zoom at you and go behind your field of vision. A second later, these same enemies zoom forward from behind you--they turned around behind your back. (You can tell it's the same enemies because, if you shot any of them down when they were coming at you, those enemies will be missing from the line of enemies flying forward.)

At times, I find the game too lively. It can be a mishmash of unbalanced enemy varieties. You'll find lots of enemy formations in each level, but most of them aren't particularly complementary. Stage 1 is overrun by rocks, which clutter the playfield and are hard to predict; it's easy to trash your ship. Stage 2, on the other hand, only has enemies, making it a relative breeze.

Still, in all I find the dynamism more exciting than cumbersome. Often, it gets me to rethink how I play. I can't dodge the buildings in stage 5 on sight, since they're too big. However, there's always enough room to fly overhead. So, if I see a set of buildings coming, I hug the top of the screen and dodge enemies the best that I can from there.

The bosses are pretty fun, too. They'll shoot at you and do one other thing to keep the fight interesting. So, the third boss shot a constant stream of fire at me, but he also launched missiles which would lodge themselves in my screen for a few seconds. If I touched them while they were lodged, I'd crash, so I'd have to be more careful about dodging the boss' fire. Or, I could just shoot down the missiles before they reached me. It's simple but satisfying.

3rd target overcome. Feel like to have a cup of coffee!

2nd target was overcome.

It was wonderful fight. Good luck!