"Formation Z" - NES/Famicom

----- Introduction -----

What I learned on English Wikipedia: Formation Z is a robot arcade game made by Jaleco for the arcades, and ported to the Famicom in 1985. Cool.

The Japanese Wikipedia page is a little more helpful. It confirms that Jaleco did indeed in-house develop the Famicom port for us. Another fun tidbit is that the game was featured in an article in the Japanese 'mook' (a portmanteau of magazine + book) "My Way," called "死ぬ前にクリアしたい200の無理ゲー ファミコン&スーファミ". I'll spare you the translation details, but this roughly means, "200 Impossible/Unreasonable Games We Want to Clear Before We Die - Famicom & Super Famicom," which may give you a hint at how difficult/BS this game is.

Lastly, we have to have a look at the manual... Oh, wait a minute. This game didn't come out here! The entire manual is in Japanese! Well, I'm not good enough to read it in detail easily, but it seems to me that the goal in each round is to destroy an "energy core" at the end of the level (Edit: It turns out that is not even remotely correct).

So let's check it out.

That is... the lamest opening theme I have ever heard.

----- Playthrough -----

My first impressions and intuitions with the game were as follows: this is really hard and annoying.

I'll try to be succinct: the point of the game seems to be that you play as a character who can morph between being a jet and being a robot guy. You start as the robot, and to morph into the jet you hold up and A until the change is complete. At any time in jet form, you press A again to return to robot-man-form.

This is all good and well, except the catch is that being in jet form, while it makes you much faster and more mobile, constantly drains on your energy, which is displayed at the bottom of the screen. You have 99 at the beginning, and it turns out those "energy cores" I thought were targets are actually what you collect to replenish that energy. By comparison, being on foot sucks, which is presumably why it's the default form.

Taste the wrath of my onslaught of poorly aimed lasers! I can't hit you but at least I'm very consistent!

The other catch is that you can't (or shouldn't) burn that fuel up all the time. You're going to need it, because at intervals in the game, all the land will disappear, and you'll be stuck above water for some time. Turning into robot form during these sections is an instant death. Because robots can't swim. They just explode.

Think I'll just land gently on the surface of the water and stretch my le--

I played this about 5 times, and eventually I got into the second area after the first bit of water, but I really felt like I was missing something, and it was time to revisit the manual to see if I could selectively mine out any nuggets of information that would help me out. I went straight to the bottom where the "Technique" section is and started translating.

No thanks to Google Translate.

Here's what I got out of it:

パターンクリアーを重視する場合は空中形態、高得点を狙う場合は地上形態でプレイしよう！それぞれ違ったファイトが楽しめます。
- The air form is for clearing patterns, the ground form is for high scores! You can have fun with different fights in each form.

海を越える場合は、最低５０以上のエネルギーが必要。海上に出る前にエネルギーをかならずチャージしておこう！
- You need at least 50 energy to cross the ocean. Charge your energy before crossing the sea!

地上戦の場合は、できるだけ画面の中央よりに位置していると敵の攻撃が、かわしやさい。
- When fighting on the ground, stay near the center of the screen as much as possible to dodge enemy attacks.

へヴラムが出現したら、相手が弾を撃つ前に撃破しよう！
- If a [Hevram] shows up, kill it before it can shoot back!

空中形態の時、低空飛行を続けているとピグが飛んでくるので要汪意！
- In air form, when flying low to the ground, the [Pig] will jump up, so take care!

高得点になるほど、いろいろな敵キャラクターが出てくる！
- As your score increases, various enemies will appear!

There were three more tips but I got bored of translating and didn't feel like it was actually helping at all, so I decided to give it a couple more rounds to see if I could get a look at this "Gizilium" bad guy that seemed to be the boss.

Cue the music.

Unfortunately my Rocky montage didn't really help and I still wasn't able to clear the second sea section and see what the third land level looked like before I became too tired of playing Formation Z to continue on. I'm sorry to have failed you like this. The highest score I got was 20100, if you'd like to prove you're better than me. Feel free to let me know in the comments.

----- Review -----

Innovation:

Does the game show anything not yet seen on this system/ever before?

I guess so, in the changing between jet and man form. I don't know of another arcade game that did this before Formation Z, however it's possible it was inspired by something. This is certainly a first for the Famicom.

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Spitting Rage:

Does the game make you want to tear your own organs out of your body?

Yes. A lot of the enemy patterns are fairly erratic and difficult to deal with, and your range of aim on the ground is extremely limited (you can only aim up at about a 30 degree angle, forwards, and down at the same angle). The enemies on the ground won't jump until you get close to them, so you have to try to shoot above while also teasing the enemies on the ground to jump so you can go under. Sometimes they won't jump at all.

The jet is pretty hard to control, and shoots up or down at the same slim angle as the ground guy depending on whether you're moving up or down. This means that it's pretty difficult to get a shot on anything that's appearing in front of you while repositioning... and everything appears almost directly in-front of you.

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Intuitive Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

I think I pretty much understood everything about the game just pressing the buttons to see what they did. The first time I turned into the jet I was a little surprised, and it took me a second to realize how to recreate what I had done, but other than that, there's not much here that is confusing. The counter on the bottom serves to explain to you that you need energy.

Though one might also confuse it for a baking timer.

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Satisfying Gameplay: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel?

Shooting games are always satisfying, as I always say. This one is a little lackluster because of the sound (more on that in a second), and the general questionable controls. It's okay in this department though.

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Game Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

Arcade deep. Which is to say, shallow. Just walking to the right and shooting guys. It is cool that the backgrounds scroll and change to give you a feeling of progress. I'd like to see when the game loops, but I don't think I have the patience.

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Sound Design: 

How's the sound?

This is another eerily quiet NES game. The lack of any decent music probably indicates the lack of a decent available composer, and certainly isn't a hardware limitation, so I don't think this one deserves a break considering how well its peers were doing in this department in 1985. Thumbs down, Formation Z.

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Graphics:

How's it look?

It looks pretty much fine. The scrolling parallax style backgrounds are cool, and they actually look pretty convincing and set the mood when you're approaching the water. The character and enemy sprites are relatively simple by comparison though.

This guy is very handsome however.

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Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

No, not really. I like shooters, but this one is mostly just annoying. The lack of any music also deprives the game of any real character per se. Hard to want to rep something that feels so generic.

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Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

Nah, probably not. It's an interesting idea, but it's really not that well executed and the game is mostly just frustrating. I'd stay away, personally.

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