If you think Parodius is cute, think
again. Coryoon is an insanely cute shump with a cute little green
dragon trying to save the universe (well, at least the solar system
or something) from some evil dark shadowy thing. Apprently the evil
shadow enemy turned the beautiful Princess of your planet who is
also your best friend into an even cuter child-like SD version and
made everything else evil. Your job is to travel through the solar
system killing things and once everything's dead the world will
be normal again as usual. The killing, of course, is made complicated
by insanely cute bosses and large amounts of firepower.
Okay, so the plot is kinda dumb, but it's a shump, and a cute one
at that, so plots are irrelevant. As mentioned before, you're a
little green dragon. Your main mode of attack is by spitting small
fireballs. By letting go of the attack button you'll start to choke
on your flaming breath and then unleash a big fireball by pressing
the button that goes through stuff and is utterly useless because
it deals crap damage. Sometimes cranes carrying shiny power-up balls
appear, and they'd run like chickens once you shoot them and drop
the power-up behind. The balls cycle from red to blue to yellow,
each representing a different weapon. Red is the short range flamethrower
which is insanely powerful but, well, short range. Blue is the wave
gun which fires blue waves... very widespread. Yellow is multiple
shot which is the standard 3,5,8 way gun in most shumps and deals
no damage. If you have a weapon and get the same color power-up
you'll upgrade it, and if you get hit you lose all your power-ups.
If you get hit without a power-up you like, die.
Occasionally you'll see these shiny things pop out from enemies
which come in the forms of clovers, spades, hearts and diamonds.
Getting a Spade gives you a smart bomb which kills everything, including
bullets. (You can only have one bomb at a time.) Diamonds makes
you tiny so you can dodge easier. Hearts give you protective shielding
in the form of rotating faeries. I have no idea what Clovers do...
(Turns you Irish?)
Anyway, now the insanity and also the coolest part of the game begins:
everything that dies turns into a fruit. Kill something, it goes
PON (yes, the explosion is accompanied with the letters PON) and
turns into a fruit that arcs down. Catch it for yummy points. That
also brings us to the point of this game: points. To hell with the
universe when you have a few billion points! Every time you deal
some damage, no, not killing something, but just damaging it, nets
you 10 points. Killing them will reveal fruits that give you at
least 100 points. Some giant fruits yield a few thousand or even
tens of thousands of points. Try spraying a boss with an upgraded
flamethrower and watch your score grow! Also, every certain amount
of points nets you a new dragon, and you can get up 9 lives... Which
you would need when you're slaughtering millions of enemies in an
asteroid field with fruits (and bullets) flying all over the place.
It's insane! (Bosses give you so much points that you automatically
get at least 2 lives after killing one of them!)
Okay. The graphics. It's cute. Not detailed, but cute. (Really,
cartoon chickens don't really get that detailed...) It's a different
style from most shumps, and the scrolling is fast. (I remember it
boasting "advanced screening" stuff when they advertised for it
in a gaming mag...) But really, you're not gonna like it if you
don't like anime art. The levels have very interesting backgrounds,
though they kind of make looking for bullets heading toward you
harder. Only complain I have is that the boss battles are all in
this hyperspac-ish-cave background, which is boring after the 10th
boss or so... (Did I mention that the bosses are disgustingly cute
also?)
I'm half deaf, so I really can't say much about the sound except
that it's very very catchy and the PONs are kinda cool... Gameplay-wise
this is a great game. It has the insanity to make anyone go insane
if not for the huge amount of points you get. Also I'd say that
the difficulty isn't quite high as it was the first shump I even
finished (brings tears to my eyes...) and I kind of suck in shumps.
And once you beat the game you can try another diffuculty setting
(easy, as I recall, doesn't let you access Stage 8 and gives you
a crappy ending) or play the Time Mode. The Time Mode (2 or 5 minutes)
is exactly like that of Super Star Soldier (which I managed to get
to to final form of the final boss then died...) or the other PCE
games with this mode: you have a horde of enemies, your only weapon
is the multiple shot, the game ends when you run out of lives or
time, and you try to kill as much as possible. Very addictive. The
one thing that makes this game hard is that there are too many things
going on at once...
On a side note: Back 10 years ago in Hong Kong there were annual
shump championships where expert players would try to play a PCE
game with 5-minute Time Mode and get the highest score... Apprently
they didn't have Twinkle Star Sprites back then. =) Ahh, the days
when the PCE was king...
Finally, there is a tiny little thing about the game: Sometimes
there'd be glitches and cheats are activated for no reason. It only
happened on my huCard though, and I never had any problems with
the ROM. Now play this game, damn it!
Coryoon
- Naxat Soft
