Game Review: Gradius III (SNES)

Gradius III is a wonderful game released in 1991 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Having been released across multiple platforms prior, and afterward, the game has experienced magnificent success throughout it's life cycle. The game, a side-scrolling shooter, involves navigating various landscapes that consist of ground material lining the top and bottom of the screen, and navigating passed enemies. If you crash into either, your ship dies and you lose a life. Further, the enemies fire and you are able to shoot, too. The goal is to clear each level and earn points.

Gradius III is one of my favorite games of all time, primarily for the game play; the story is rather short and uninvolving. To summarize, involves destroying things called Bacterions from the galaxy (Bacterion are basically a generic race of evil-doers). You, a man from the planet Gradius, fly your MAX Jet Fighter and destroy any Bacterion you come into contact with.

The graphics in Gradius III are magnificent! As a 2D side-scrolling shooter on the Super Nintendo, it makes gratuitous use of colors and nice, smooth animations and sprites, without the clutter and tackiness of today's side-scrollers' pseudo-3D bull-crap. All levels have amazing detail for the time period, enemies are unique and entertaining to look at, and backgrounds are vivid and beautiful.

While the audio in Gradius III gets a bit tedious and tired at times, it is still wonderful. The music always matches the scenario. The sound effects for things like firing and being struck, however, get a bit old at times; they're repeated throughout the entire time. In a game where all you do is navigate and fire, hearing the same shooting noises becomes tiresome.

The learning curve for Gradius III is rather short in terms of controls. All one does is strafe, fire, and navigate. Your weapons abilities consist of four basic types, as well as the ability to combine and edit certain types to your liking (a feature lacking in most other games of this style). Gradius III reminds me a lot of Gun Star Heroes, but in space, and with a ton of customization.

The difficulty of Gradius III is pretty intense. On a scale of 5, I would give it a 4. Projectiles are voluminous and consistent, waves of enemies increase with each stage, and boss battles can be ridiculously difficult (they fire even MORE projectiles at you, and you have to dodge their weird movement patterns as well as jagged parts of the environment)! Gradius III actually has different difficulty levels, the most difficult being a hidden "Arcade" mode (which is actually one step above the "Hard" mode).

The difficulty of Gradius III alone keeps me coming back, but if it wasn't for its amazing game play and consistently-good customization functionality it wouldn't be worth it. Overall, I would rate Gradius III a 5/5. This game is simply wonderful; pick up a copy wherever it's available.