#thexder

Silpheed was the first STG I ever played where the controllable ship felt like a fully realized character; the lovingly created polygonal wire frame model, the detailed art in the cutscenes, the diagnostic illustration in the load out screen and side bar, and even the on screen representation in game had seemingly more thought put into its design and had more personality showing through than in any other game I'd seen or played up to that point. The only other that I played around that time that came close was (unsurprisingly) Game Arts' own Thexder, though I never liked having to transform out of robot mode, which makes Silpheed the cooler ship of the two. My experience with the game obviously wasn't on a PC-88, but rather on a cheap IBM compatible as a childthing (of a sort). As cool as Silpheed and Thexder were, had I known of its existence, I would have lost it over Arsys Software's WIBARM back then, which gave you a rad transforming robot like Thexder, but also super technology pushing full polygonal dungeon crawling as well as side scrolling combat against awesome fleshy creepozoids... and was the brain child of the legendary trans game dev Kotori Yoshimura <3

WHOA, THIS EXISTS!? HOLY HELL, I WANT ONE OF MY OWN.

Thexder December 19, 1985 // Family Computer