Review | Ganryu 2 - A Home Port Of An Arcade Game That Doesn't Exist Anymore
I played a lot of Shinobi III: The Revenge of the Ninja Master on the Genesis. A bizarre game when looked at from a distance. The sweeping title cards of other Ninja games, dressed in clothes that looks like any other psuedo-historical platformer (a genre that is strangely prevalent on earlier consoles)
that explodes into bio-horror and cyberpunk in the final chapters: it also feels really cool when you pull off Joe Musashi's forward dash into that little arcing jump and sword slash.
Ganryu 2 is built out of rewarding me for making that happen, constantly. There's a pattern to these love language homages - take the best fondest parts of everything that came before and execute them well. I can associate at least a dozen titles with Ganryu 2, all clever little bits of stuff there for the real die-hard platformer fans.
In our current era of every video game being a triple-A treadmill (treaaadmill?) designed to be played forever (and to get your money) it's ironic how much of the video game industry still recreates the effect of The Arcade and The Home Console now, an industry that never willingly grew out of the finance days of quarter munching skill-based titles with tilted difficulty and understaffed cab maintenance crews to keep things running smoothly. Our arcades slowly fell apart, driven to mismanagement and floated by only the largest titles. The absolute flood ("too many games?") of video games at the time often meant companies spent short, understaffed development periods to rush titles to market.
Ganryu is a home title to what the arcades offer: a parade of slooters and shooters, hero titles and open world action games polished into what resembles those barrels of polished rocks that you'd find: all industrially processed to a similar size and shape. Gift bags for kids, in other worlds.
With the advent of home ports, many arcade developers released versions of their own games geared at bringing a sliver of the arcade to the home carpet, or TV stand, or bookshelf - sometimes a kitchen counter on the only empty space next to where dishes dry. These home ports often had difficulties that stretched to absurd places, either stemming from wanting to monopolise the time of the player or simply being made to bear just on the edge of getting another quarter from a teenager hungry to see the last level of Ninja Gaiden. How hungry are you, on a day-to-day basis, to beat a video game?
Ganryu 2 is a home port of an arcade game that doesn't exist anymore, rifling around on the underworld of the most choked by shovelware online sale splatform in the world, Steam. It has a bevvy of negative reviews about the difficulty spike after the first level, yet I kept on with the game for the purpose of writing this review to see the face of history staring me back in the face. Online multiplayer shooters staring at me, tempting me back around the bend of the arcade to put one more quarter in. Is it better to play at home?
