Japan Gaming Guide

From time to time we’re going to post videos of new titles that appear on the Japanese Virtual Console, and we’ll focus on those of them that are exclusive to Japan, as information on those might be hard to come by. Today we’re looking at Star Soldier on the NES, available for 500 Wii Points.

Star Soldier is the second game in Hudson Soft’s Caravan shooting series. It’s pretty fast paced, with plenty going on on-screen and features the power-ups and bosses we’ve come to expect from the vertical shmup.

This game is a staggering 21 years old, and as you can imagine, it shows its age a little. The music is reasonably nice, although repetitive, while the sound effects are horrible. The graphics are pretty horrifying as well.

In gameplay terms things aren’t that bad. Star Soldier is pretty fun to play for ten minutes or so at least. It will take some serious perseverance to get anywhere with the game though. Like many games of the era, it’s very unforgiving. We were surprised to find ourselves taken back to the start of a level for not killing the boss quickly enough, for example.

It’s worth bearing in mind that some of the later games in the series, Super Star Soldier, Soldier Blade and Blazing Lasers are already available on the VC and are probably going to provide a lot more entertainment than this. Not a terrible game then, but not worth downloading unless you’re a serious genre fan.

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