Unlike Jesse, I’m not a very big fan of SHMUPs. But also unlike Jesse, I am a very big fan of cute women. So my hopes have been resting on Otomedius Excellent for Xbox 360 to split the difference.

Otomedius Excellent is a Gradius parody, which I’ve never really understood since Konami already makes Parodius. The game has you command not so much a ship, but a woman holding onto a rocket booster with handlebars. It’s a bit surreal.

Excellent does feature a good deal of customization, for what it’s worth. Still, I didn’t fully grasp the depth of it with the messing around I managed to do. First of all, you can pick from a number of lovely ladies with names I can’t remember based on their inherent attributes, or if you’d rather, their looks. Then you can customize the kinds of weapons and abilities they get in the power meter.

A lot of playing around is ideal in finding something that works for you. The first girl I picked… well, I picked her because she was pretty. But her initial special weapon was a spread shot that had too slow of a rate of fire to be useful. Another had a really amazing weapon: rapid firing pink cutters in three directions. However, the Speed Up slot of her power meter was in the third link, making it pretty difficult to get her butt out of harm’s way. A third female in nearly all pink seemed to be made for novice players. Abilities in her power meter seemed to max out after just one power-up. This made her a force to be reckoned with in short order, although at max speed she was a bit tough to get a handle on.

Other than that, it seems pretty standard Gradius fair. You fly through stages and shoot ships, then face a boss at the end (which of course is piloted by a femme fatale, too). I played on normal difficulty the entire time. The first stage, a beach themed area, was simple enough that I beat it with no deaths as a couple characters. The second stage, taking place in a night time city, ramped up the difficulty a bit. Besides more intense enemies, I was also continually under attack by a couple twins in an odd, square-shaped ship and then a large, lobster-like boss ship at the end. This might change in co-op, which I unfortunately did not get to try.

Of course I can’t really say it’s enough to just buy a game for attractive women. Honestly, it is a tad embarrassing and I seldom ever saw all the demo units being used at once possibly for this reason. Though it was difficult to hear, the voice acting was all in Japanese with subtitles appearing in the lower left corner. This made them tough to read, but no one really ever said anything important. I’m not certain if English voices are available, though if it’s anything like Trouble Witches NEO I simply wouldn’t bother.

Nevertheless, Otomedius Excellent was still fun, and provides some challenge at least for a shmup noob like me. I’m not very familiar with the Gradius games and what makes them tick, but this one stands up to them decently if you don’t mind the non-serious presentation. Otomedius Excellent is slated to release on Xbox 360 on July 17th.

Tags: E3 2011, Gradius, hands-on impressions, Konami, Otomedius Excellent, preview, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 12:25 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.