Contra: Shattered Soldier (PS2) - S-Rank No Death Run

Full S-Rank No Death Run of Contra: Shattered Soldier (真魂斗羅), aka Shin Contra/True Contra. This was played on a real Playstation 2 with the original disc, no emulators, cheats or hacks were used.

Stage Listing:
00:00 - Intro
02:11 - 001 - Fortress
07:22 - 003 - City
13:27 - 002 - Train
20:55 - 004 - Seabed
28:33 - 005 - Archipelago
34:52 - 006 - Sanctuary
40:01 - 007 - Final Boss
41:38 - Ending + Credits
44:33 - S-Rank "Secret Ending" - Contra vs Dog

Contra: Shattered Soldier is canonically the direct sequel to Contra III and Contra: Hard Corps, and it plays much more like those games than it's two predecessors on the PS1. Most fans despised Legacy of War and Contra Adventure, and even Konami basically pretends they don't exist with this installment in the series.

Shattered Soldier promises a return to form for the series and delivers what the fans of the older games were expecting, but not without making some controversial changes in the process. Specifically, there are no items at all in this game, and bombs and the slide have been completely removed.

The story takes place many years after the Alien Wars, with the hero of the series Bill Rizer (the blue guy from Contra 1) being framed for wiping out 80% of the population of Earth along with his fellow soldier Lance Bean (the red guy from Contra 1). It turns out Lance is still alive and is the one behind the new threat called Blood Falcon, an obvious nod to Red Falcon from the first game.

From there the story gets needlessly complicated but basically Lance was actually trying to stop the true villains of the game from doing something that isn't really clear to me with some sort of ancient weapon or something. Bottom line: nobody plays these games for the story!

In order to see the final few stages and best ending you must attain certain grades when beating the earlier levels. These grades are obtained by not dying and destroying all enemies and objects that are necessary. S-Rank is the highest rating and requires no deaths and 100% destruction rate.

It should be noted that you can replay levels or use a continue to retry a stage and you will still be able to get S-Rank on that level, so a strict no-death run is not required for the entire game to get S-Rank. That being said, I did go for a S-Rank No Death run which is probably one of the harder achievements in the Contra series.

As far as where Shattered Soldier stands in the pantheon of Contra games, I would rank it quite high. Maybe not as good as Contra III or Hard Corps but it is pretty close. Shattered Soldier also contains my single favorite music track in the entire series, which is played during the boss rush at the end of stage 5. It's just perfection.

On a final note, I should mention that I upscaled the awesome intro video to full 1080P for this video because the original video is actually rendered in widescreen and shrunk down to fit a 4:3 aspect, so it looks rather puny. I did not do this to any of the ending videos or secret Contra vs Dog video at the end, so they don't quite look as good.