by Amr (@siegarettes)

• R-Type Final 2
• Developer - Granzella
• Publisher - NIS America
• PC, Switch, PS4

R-Type Final 2 is a game banking on the poor memories of its returning players. It’s been nearly a decade and a half since the release of the original R-Type Final, plenty of time to forget the details of its melancholy goodbye to the genre. A premature goodbye as it turns out, with the last decade seeing a surge in the popularity of the genre, and R-Type Final 2 acting as a celebration of this fact, declaring the happy return of a genre favorite. For many, that’s a triumph in itself. Getting behind the controls of Final 2’s extensive arsenal of ships is a joy that will carry the experience. But come armed with clear memories, and all its flaws cast harsh reflections through the haze of its brilliant lights. 

What Final 2 ended up reminding me most of wasn’t the original Final, but Gradius IV. Subtitled “Resurrection”, Gradius IV made similar claims of a franchise revival, but ended up being a series of franchise refrains, grafted onto modern 3D tech. Likewise, Final 2 initially impresses with its new dynamic lighting, sending shadows reaching and crawling along its surfaces, and turning corridors into tunnels of violent color. The series staples appear to be intact, with the iconic dobkeratops returning alongside other biomechanical beasts and a stage long attack on a massive battleship. 

Every component of the series is assembled into a machine unmistakable as another R-Type, but an inspection reveals deep flaws in both parts and assembly. Basic operations cause the game to sputter and creak, and everything is ever so slightly off. Charge timings are mismatched with the pace of the game, to the point where it’s often more efficient to stick to rapid fire, and you’re better off firing 3 or 4 standard charges in the time it takes to fill the level 2 and 3 charge gauge. 

Filling the DOSE gauge required for special attacks takes even longer. On anything other than the easiest difficulty, it’s not uncommon for it to take an entire stage to fill up, and requires you to take massive risks, basically not firing your weapons at points and instead ramming enemies with your force pod. All to give you an underwhelming attack that’s likely to get you killed as it obscures enemy shots under a mess of particle effects. I lost count of the amount of times I spent a whole stage building up a special attack, only to get killed by some unseen bullet, or die and find out it was much faster to just fire off a few level 1 charge shots instead. 

And if I seem obsessed with efficiency, it’s because more often than not I found myself dreadfully bored by R-Type Final 2. Every stage is a combination of long periods of downtime followed by frustrating cheap shots, hammered in by bewildering checkpoint placement and punctuated by tiresome bosses that often feel more like you’re waiting out a pattern than engaging an enemy. 

There’s no ambition on display, no sense of setting or progression, with flat, unengaging level design that often fails the test of basic readability. The worst of these stages is the stage 3 battleship fight. What’s usually a highlight of each entry turns into a test of patience. Taking down each piece of the battleship is joyless–with part either bending like a dented car door, or disintegrating off the ship with no visible impact on the larger structure. It’s also home to the worst of the game’s collision problems, with ships moving in and out of the background with no solid indicator of when they’re entering your plane of movement. Even after several attempts I still found myself slipping up and getting hit because of how difficult to parse it was. 

Through the whole ordeal I kept questioning my memory. Has this always been what R-Type was like? Was the dreadful pacing and frustration I was experiencing exclusive to this game, or just part of the series’ design? I’d played the original Final less than a year ago, and Delta even more recently than that. 

With those doubts in mind I booted up my PS2 for a direct comparison. What I found was a meticulously crafted, ambitious and deliberately paced game, full of impressive set pieces. In comparison to its sequel, R-Type Final felt more dynamic, and often even looked better, thanks to strong art design and realization of setting. It’s idiosyncratic, but loaded with the weight, intentionality and atmosphere of a series send off. 

R-Type Final 2 is ultimately a game that’s come into a world flush with new entries into the genre, flourishing with fresh takes on old ideas. It’s a backwards looking game–not one that finds inspiration in the past and brings back old feelings, but one that cashes in memories of what the past was, without taking any lessons from it or returning to any of what made previous entries successful. It’s R-Type reanimated, not revived, still covered in dirt from its burial plot.