Darius Twin (SNES) Playthrough
235A playthrough of Taito's 1991 shooter for the Super Nintendo, Darius Twin.
I played through the game three times to show all of the stages and endings.
1:21 Game 1, best ending (finish the game taking the route shown, not losing any lives, and not allowing Super Alloy Latern to escape)
26:51 Game 2, regular ending (finish the game by taking a different route and/or dying more than twice, and not allowing Super Alloy Latern to escape)
52:21 Game 3, bad ending (allow Super Alloy Lantern to escape)
1:21:32 Ending 4 (die once but otherwise fulfill the requirements for the best ending)
1:23:26 Ending 5 (die twice but otherwise fulfill the requirements for the best ending)
Darius Twin was the third game in Taito's series of robot fish-themed shoot 'em ups, and being an SNES exclusive, it was the first Darius title developed specifically for the home audience.
Having come out just a few months after the North American launch of the SNES, Darius Twin is not one of the console's better remembered shooters, but I think it deserves far more credit than it's often given. Its surreal sense of personality, excellent soundtrack, 2P co-op play (hence the "Twin" in the title), and replayability were all reason enough to give it a chance, but I think that its lack of next-gen flashiness limited its appeal at the time. Ironically, that's also what has made Darius Twin age so much more gracefully than its popular contemporaries: no matter how many sprites flood the screen, it runs at a locked framerate with no slowdown whatsoever.
Darius Twin is my personal favorite shooter on the Super Nintendo, and it's one of my favorite games in the genre, neck-and-neck with Air Zonk.
My friend Mike and I were nine the year the SNES launched, and we both got it for Christmas that year. His parents bought him Darius Twin with his, so we played it whenever I'd bike over to his house after school. He was always playing the ever-living hell out of it, and I loved it as much as he did. Weird, trippy music set to exploding robot fish? Power Rangers wasn't around yet, so this was badass. I bugged him over and over to borrow it, but he wasn't interested.
He didn't get F-Zero like I did that Christmas, though, so I finally convinced my parents to allow me to swap games with him (it was, after all, a $60 cart in 1991, and I'd only had it a short while), and so I finally got to play Darius Twin at home! We both tore into those games, and within about two weeks we had both completely mastered them - he won the championship mode on the hardest F-Zero mode, and I beat Darius Twin without dying for the best ending.
Then we traded back, and I was happy to have F-Zero back so I could beat it again for the millionth time. I always did miss Darius Twin, though, and whenever my parents were like, "Hey, do you want a game?" we were never at a store that had it. And seriously, I was 9. It's not like I had the willpower to say, "No thanks, I don't want a Super Nintendo game. I'll wait until we find a copy of Darius Twin, if we ever do." Yeah, right.
But anyways, I loved it back in 1991, and I still do in 2024. It's awesome.
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