Last Alert (TurboGrafx CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of NEC's 1990 run-and-gun shooter for the TurboGrafx CD, Last Alert.

Last Alert is one of the earliest games to be created by developer Laser Soft, a Japanese company mostly known for the CD-based Valis and Cosmic Fantasy games before being absorbed by Wolf Team in early 1991.

It's a run-and-gun shooter that, at the dawn of the CD age of gaming, sought to do something that couldn't have been done beforehand. Mixing a lengthy, cutscene-driven story campaign with an arcade shooter infused with light RPG elements, Last Alert gives us a true 1980s-era action movie in a game that tests the potential of the CD-ROM format, and incredibly, it achieved this in the 1980s.

The core gameplay feels like Bloody Wolf (   • Bloody Wolf (TurboGrafx-16) Playthrou...   ) or Final Zone II (   • Final Zone II (TurboGrafx CD) Playthr...   ), but this time, your score is directly tied to your "class," and acts like an experience counter. You level-up several times throughout the game, and every few levels you earn will see you rewarded with increasing powerful weapons, including fun things like rocket launchers.

The stages are spread across six "worlds," or maps, and you often are allowed to chose the order in which you play them. There are three primary types: blue stages follow the standard Contra-style "get to the end and waste the boss" design. Red stages encourage stealth play, and using your heavy weapons in these stages will draw hordes of guards alerted to your presence. And finally, the yellow stages have unique objectives, often involving things like planting explosives or rescuing hostages.

For an arcade-style game, Last Alert is quite lengthy, but the variety in its stage designs keeps it from ever becoming dull - almost as much as the story itself does. And oh boy, the story.

Last Alert, like its cousin Final Zone II, is completely absurd. The storyline is pretty much the summation of every dumb 80s action movie trope ever, but the hilariously cheap sound production of the American version ensures that the delivery of that story remains... impactful. Memorable. And bat-sh!t insane.

The cutscenes have become the game's calling card, and it's not hard to laugh to the point of tears while playing. But meme-worthy as those moments are, it would be a real shame to forget that there's a very good game underneath it all.

If you have any appreciation for top-down shooters, over-the-top Cold War-era Hollywood antics, Z-grade voice acting, or Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, I give it my highest recommendation. Fantastic stuff here!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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