Cho Aniki for PCE CD
Review #11017
Cho Aniki
Parodius meets Legendary Wings meets, well, Cho Aniki
Gameplay
Auto-fire.
Hard to tell when large enemies, including bosses, are taking damage.
Collect two options which sit above and below and trail behind you so it's difficult to place them just so. They take damage from some enemies or obstacles which feels random and unfair. All told you have to pay more attention to them than you'd like. It feels like you're protecting them rather than the other way around.
Powerup pickups for your main weapon are frequent but it takes seemingly a dozen or more to actually do aything. So this is mostly a peashooter game.
Movement is good but there are 8 adjustable levels for the speed. Pick the one you like because there's no way you're going to have time to ever cycle through that gauge!
Level Design
Stages have two minibosses and a final boss. The background can change half a dozen times during a single stage which is both impressive and disorienting. Stages don't have a consistent theme so they all meld together. They're also quite short. It's a boss battle followed by three or four screens worth of filler, followeb by another boss battle. Still, the sheer absurdity of the content on screen is worth experiencing.
Theme
Think Parodius meets Legendary Wings meets, well, Cho Aniki. Subsequent games took the homoerotic bodybuilder theme to its carnal conclusion, but this first one threw that stuff in only occassionally. Instead we got only the goofy atmosphere.
Art Style
Impressive sprite work, for the time, albeit with some flicker. No slowdown though. The sheer volume of backgrounds and enemy types make up for a lack of parallax and a poor visual language for what will give or take damage. Bosses are particularly detailed and impressive.
Audio
Sound effects are fantastic, but when it comes to the music let's go with, "your mileage may vary." Cho Aniki is nothing, if not unconventional.
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