Devastator [デバステイター] Game Sample - Sega / Mega CD

"Devastator" for the Sega (Mega) CD is an obscure action game developed by the jolly folks at Telenet Japan / Wolf Team in 1993 that is a small part of an interesting whole that was based on the first part of a two part obscure OVA by Takara in 1992 known as "D-1 Devastator - Contact Edition" which was part of a whole Takara-led multimedia project.

Warner Music Japan was in charge of releasing the soundtrack, ASCII was in charge of publishing the manga version, Wolf Team was in charge of the game, and Kaiyodo was in charge of releasing the garage modeling kits. Animation was contracted out to Dynamic Kikaku, which has close ties with Takara, and the actual production was outsourced to an external animation studio. The overall budget for this endeavor was over 500 million yen and Takara had limited experience leading such a large project, resulting in a lack of cohesion between the different works and it was ultimately a commercial failure. An SFC version of Devastator had began development by Telenet Japan and was promoted alongside the OVA but was ultimately cancelled as Devastator was not commercially successful and because Telenet, Riot and Wolf Team were restructuring in 1993.

The general story behind Devastator is that a young man, Ryou Yatabe, gets employed by Yaesu Motors to follow in the footsteps of his best friend, Masato, and learn more about his disappearance when he gets a mysterious transmission (allegedly from the executive director of the company) stating that if he wanted to learn more, to drive their experimental new car late at night on the oval test course. This car, called the "Vector Versus", is one of the fastest land vehicles currently known to man, and Ryou complies. As he's driving the test course, he pushes the car to its limits and once he hits 300kph, the car distorts the air and warps to a mysterious space. It's in this space where things are similar to the current Japan but this version is invaded by monstrous creatures being fought back by man-made super weapons. Ryou learns that his friend was killed by a vicious alien known as "Devastator" and through trials and tribulations, begins training along with a superhuman woman, Nami Hoshino, to use the Vector Versus properly which also has the capabilities to morph into a multi-faceted mecha. Ryou wants to save Japan and also get revenge for his fallen friend.

The game itself is a very orthodox seven stage side-scrolling action game with horizontal shooting segments interspersed on stages three, five and seven. During the Non-Shmup stages, the player can jump around, do an advancing dash (which can hurt certain enemies and deflect certain attacks, although it isn't really needed in the game) and shoot enemies with an anchor connected to three different weapons. There's some minor platforming involved, a small number of instant-death traps and a tiny smidge of exploration / secrets, but stages are generally very linear in design. The weapons include a Spread Shot, Bomber Shot and Laser Shot... the SS is overly weak and fairly useless, so the BS and LS are going to see the most usage... or so you would thing, but the BS is still weaker than the LS which is pretty overpowered, so the LS is generally the easiest weapon to use barring one or two very specific cases. Each weapon can be upgraded up to level 4 and the nice thing is that enemies with power-ups are easily identifiable (flashing) and the player can cycle between upgrades by hitting them as well as gain extra life, the occasional 1-Up and bonus points. Flying levels are the same except you're on rails, but the bosses are a little more dynamic.

The graphics aren't exceptional, but they're actually pretty good; levels are reasonably varied, there's a good degree of color and detail with the enemies and environments, and the effects are kinda nice from the different attacks and weapons. I like the zooming and scaling of the boss on stage two and the scale of most of the bosses in general which actually appear somewhat threatening, even if most of the game isn't too difficult. The graphics of the cutscenes is something you'll either hate or appreciate as a SCD/MCD enthusiast; instead of original anime cutscenes, the game uses highly compressed snippets from the first OVA... they're viewable, but fairly choppy and they've aged about as much as one would expect - they weren't cutting edge even in terms of the hardware. The soundtrack is nice as can be expected with Motoi Sakuraba, Ryota Furuya and Shinji Tamura at the helm and the game overall is a pretty decent use of an obscure license.

This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.

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