Gradius 2 lasers boss series#

We created the second stage somewhere in the middle. But if you just give the player a bunch of power-ups, it will be boring, so we wanted something where skilled players could get powerups easily, and where the more you tried to power up the more dangerous the enemy attacks would become. The point of that stage is to give the player a chance to power up. After that we made stage 1, the artificial sun stage. The idea for the stage was to stuff it with as many Moai as possible. We did that because the Moai are a mainstay in the Gradius series, and their character design is already established. The Moai stage was the first stage we made. For skilled players, after they clear the first loop with one of the stronger weapon selections, they can challenge themselves with a different setup. Our goal was to allow players to freely choose the weapons they like and develop their own strategies. Each of the 4 weapon selections has their speciality, and I think for each stage there’s one which is more advantageous than the others. Another way we strengthened it was when the Ripple Laser hits an obstacle now, it gets a little smaller, but continues onwards. But most players only selected the Laser, so by making the Laser weaker this time, the Ripple Laser should now appear stronger. In Life Force you can select the Ripple Laser or the normal Laser. The reason the laser is weaker for Gradius II is that we thought it was too strong before, so we made it a little less powerful. The 4 choices were meant to be equal, but the 2-way missile option was considerably stronger because it could fire upwards, I think. The goal for our staff was to make each option about the same power, so that in the end, after trying out each one, you’d return to the first selection you had gotten used to in the original Gradius.

Eventually we settled on the current scheme of 4 separate power-up selections. Things like a ground laser, or homing missiles. We had a lot of ideas then, regardless of whether they could actually be achieved in the programming or not. Various ideas were suggested, and we decided that we should let people freely select their own power-ups. That was the selection from the original Gradius, but we later added more choices. That was the first one (speedup, ground missile, double, laser, option, shield). So naturally there was a sense of wanting to provide a challenge from the developers to the players.Īt first we only had one selection for power-ups. Lately there’s also been an increasing number of skilled players, so we want to make it difficult for them.

There are many people on the Gradius II staff that personally like the STG genre, and there was a sense that we’re all here to make STGs. The power-up system also gives it a distinctive flavor.

I think that probably comes from design of the character ship and the enemies. One person remarked that the essence or appeal of Gradius is that its a smart, stylish game.

Gradius 2 lasers boss series#

Hearing their perspective on the series brought out a variety of ideas. On our Gradius II development team, we have people who joined Konami because they played Gradius in the game center and liked it. So we tried out all our new ideas, while trying to keep things “Gradius”-ish, and I think we succeeded in making a game that will be difficult enough for fans of the series–one that even skilled players can enjoy. The difficult part was that it needed to resemble the Gradius series, but at the same time, it couldn’t just be an exact copy. Gradius II is the 4th game in the series, following Gradius, Salamander, and Life Force.