It’s a sad fact that the Japanese indie scene doesn’t get much coverage outside of a few localization projects such as Recettear, or the occasional english-friendly freeware release. Usually relegated to the dustier corners of the internet, most Japanese indie studios aim their products solely at their local market, sometimes even selling purely through hobby stores or convention stalls.

Fortunately, a few studios are branching out and making an attempt to sell their wares digitally to the global market. Astro Port is one of them, and their latest game (released late 2010), Gigantic Army, has universal appeal; big, stompy, chunky robots and thunderous explosions. But can a singleplayer, arcade-style platform shooter get away with a $20 price tag?

Only knowing a few spoken words in the language, and not being able to read Japanese at all, I can’t tell you anything about the plot, other than that there’s a war going on (apparently in space), and you’re launching right into the middle of it, riding the GMR-34 Saladin assault suit, a big chunky humanoid war machine capable of loading a variety of remarkably effective weapons systems. Fortunately, knowledge of the plot isn’t at all required to progress in this game. It’s a pure, arcade shooter, and the only Japanese text is the few screens of backstory that pop up between levels, which can be safely skipped if you can’t read them. All the menus are in English.

The weapon select screen. All the important info is in English.

If you’ve ever played Konami’s SNES classic Assault Suits Valken (released in heavily censored, plot-reduced form as Cybernator in the west), you’ll feel right at home here. This is about as close as you can get to a homage without actually calling itself a fan-game. The look, feel and sound of the gameplay is almost perfectly replicated, with a few key differences. This feels almost like a coin-op arcade version of Valken, with the focus being on blazing through the levels as quickly and efficiently as possible, egged on by a ticking (but never too restrictive) level timer. Weapon loadouts are limited to whatever you choose at the start of the game (3 primary weapons, 3 ammo-limited secondary weapons), and powerups are limited to slight boosts to your main gun, and health/time extensions. It’s a spartan, focused offering.

Owing to it’s arcade stylings, GA isn’t a long game. A single, successful playthrough will take you around half an hour, but this is somewhat easier said than done. It’s designed with challenge and replay value in mind, and it’s unlikely you’ll see the credits roll on your first, second or even third try. Through the whole game, you have a single life. Every hit you take gouges a chunk out of your precious health bar, and while there are small health pickups to find along the way, they seldom patch up more than a single hit worth of damage. You regain a generous 20% of your energy upon completing one of the 5 levels, but if you took a few solid hits from a boss, you’re still going to be starting the next level in a fairly sorry state, so cautious use of your shield is highly recommended. Secondary weapon ammo is fully restocked between levels, though.

You're constantly under attack from all directions. Missiles help deal with this.

The game throws you a bone in the form of 3 continues, but these will only let you restart a level at full health and without any weapon powerups. As is standard form for arcade games, continuing will also demolish your hard-earned high score, which is something the game focuses quite strongly on, giving you large point bonuses for picking up powerups and health items if you’re already maxed out. You won’t see the whole game in a single completion, either. Initially, only Easy and Normal difficulties are unlocked, and by completing Normal, you open up Hard mode. Graduating to Hard changes quite a lot. New enemy types are introduced, bosses become notably more aggressive and tougher, and an extra final boss awaits.

Beyond that, there’s a fourth difficulty mode called Insane, which further increases the aggression of enemies. While generally quite well balanced, one fairly major reservation I have is that the Beam Cannon secondary weapon is straight-up overpowered. If you save it for use only on bosses, it can almost immediately knock them right out, continuing all the way to the special secret boss. It has the most limited ammo of any of the special weapons – pairing it with the weak assault rifle, you get 3 shots - but as each level has 3 bosses at most, it tends to feel a bit like a ‘win’ button, and will stop you from seeing half the interesting boss attack patterns if you fire it off too early. The game is definitely harder if you use one of the other secondary weapons, but arguably more fun.

In Soviet space war, Spider squashes YOU.

As you can see from the trailer above, it’s a fine-looking game, in a pointedly retro fashion. Sprites are clean and clear, and the designs on the various mechs are highly varied and it’s often immediately clear what they’re capable of doing from just a glance, as missile pods, cannons and big metal claws all work just as you’d expect them to. While there’s a great amount of background detail in some levels – the massive running battle in the background of the first level is a stand-out moment - the foreground sprites occasionally seem to lack depth, with insufficient shadowing or shading to make them feel deeper than cardboard cutouts, but for the most part they look fine.

Audio is, as with visuals, solid. A satisfying mix of stomps, explosions, metal clanking sounds and general sci-fi war noise. The music is fairly catchy as well and fits the mechanized war aesthetic nicely, although the first level theme makes amusing use of American police radio babble to simulate military battle chatter. Unfortunately, it’s a little too clear that they’re talking about officers in parking lots inspecting vans to be entirely convincing. You can even hear in in the official trailer. Aside from that, there’s no other major linguistic faux-pas moments.

'Giant' Robot is a relative term. You're big. He's bigger. Gigantic, maybe?

Gigantic Army is a solid, fun arcade shooter that I’d gladly recommend to fans of the genre, especially if you’ve got a special place in your heart for Valken/Cybernator, and a willingness to replay for glory and high scores. The big question, though, is ‘Is it worth the money?’. At $20, Gigantic Army is actually on par with other digitally distributed Japanese indie games, at least in it’s native market. However, games in general tend to be more expensive in Japan, and while I’d easily say ‘yes’ if this was half the price, a short indie arcade shooter doesn’t usually command such a price-tag in the current recession-wracked market, especially given that there’s a growing number of similar games popping up on XLBA and PSN for $10 or less.

In the end, it’s down to whether you think your personal budget can stretch a little. You can buy Gigantic Army for $20 over at DLSite.com English. They also offer a two-level playable demo, which you should probably give a shot first. I highly recommend against browsing through the rest of the store, as the vast majority of their stock is adult in nature, and terribly drawn to boot.

You can also buy three of Astro Port’s previous games (all traditional scrolling arcade shmups) Supercharged Robot Vulkaiser, Armed Seven and Witch-bot Meglilo for $10 each at Direct2Drive. They’re all officially translated, though not particularly well.

As an aside, while playing the game for this review, I recorded a full one-life playthrough on Normal difficulty. See it on YouTube here.