#racdym

Heaven's Gate

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

This review was originally published in 32 Bit Library Volume 4, which includes coverage of Atlus’ games for the PlayStation, as well as several import titles. Check it out!

Heaven’s Gate (known as Yusha: Heaven’s Gate in PAL territories) is one of the PlayStation’s many 3D fighting games, this time an arcade port coming from developer Racdym. The company had previously made two other similar looking games, Shadow Struggle and Critical Blow, but while those were 2.5D fighters in the style of Street Fighter EX, Heaven’s Gate takes very heavily after Virtua Fighter. It uses the same three button setup to punch, kick, and guard, you can attack enemies on the floor (or roll out of the way if you’re down), and you can even knock your opponents off the sides of the stage for a quick victory. However, in this game, some stages have ceilings, which you can latch onto and bounce off of using a triangle kick maneuver, and you can hit enemies into it as well. It also features super gauges, here called Sol / Lunar Bars. When it’s filled up, you can activate it, which grants a brief moment of invincibility and lets you use a few extra special moves, including super attacks.

In case you missed it, we finally released a new episode of @curiomaticart​‘s Snowboard Kids 3 fan concept, this time focusing on Slash Kamei!  Here’s the artwork for his final design, hope you all like it! :)

‘Trap Gunner’ [aka: ‘Trap Runner’]

[PS1] [USA] [MAGAZINE, BANNERS] [1998]

Electronic Gaming Monthly, October 1998 (#111)

Scanned by E-Day, via RetroMags