Harmful Park (English Patch | PS1) - (Very Hard | 1cc | Longplay)
1(Run has recording issues, hope you enjoy still!)
Harmful Park, someone showed this to me at a local game joint that's now shut down sadly. It's a sweet cute em up gem made by Sky Think System...who only made 2 games and this was their last one. Which is a shame really since I would've loved to see more of their works.
If there's a game that's just as silly as Parodius, you have this one. The plot is that mad scientist, Dr. Tequila made an Amusement park called heartful park in the pacific region. Just two days after the park was built, he's made all the rides go berserk and the attractions in the park into hostile environments, essentially a fortified base now with half a million in people held as hostage.
He goes on saying it's now and independent nation and sets forth for world domination. Dr. Cassis, being the only scientist who knows what the weakness of Tequila's creations are, orders her two daughters to stop him and rescue the hostages using her "crummy" invention, the Robo-Bikes.
Gameplay is pretty standard, except this time you start out with 4 weapons opposed to dedicating to one like in other shmups at the time. Your projectiles are French Fries, explosive pies, homing jelly beans and an ice cream laser.
Each of these weapons also have their unique bomb, all of them are pretty good really, the pie bomb is pretty strong, you can cream bosses with it quickly. Jelly is also good since you're shielded by gelatin for a few minutes.
There's only 6 stages which are the park Attractions, my personal favorite being the horror house and Animal Zone. Final stage is pretty rad too, specifically the area once you've finished the elevator free fall bit.
It's pretty generous with items too, from what I can tell you get a power up item and special bomb after destroying a certain amount of enemies. I found it out during the mid boss section of stage 2 where I was just shooting at hearts.
Difficulty? Pretty balanced too, you got a strong weapon load out already with good bombs and patterns that aren't too harsh. You can even cheese the final stage if you like, use the jelly bomb then the pie bomb on Dr. Tequila and bam, win.
At the end of the game, turns out our mad scientist made the park to show her love for Dr. Cassis, eventually the love he had started to fizzle out even when the park was finished. Which then leads us to events shown in the intro. Our two heroine's eventually head on home and show the Diary to their mom and it ends with a somber Fin.
Not much else to say really, it's a well balanced game even in very hard. Cute funny visuals, nice music and even animated cutscenes. Really just a shame the developers shut down a few years later after this was released, I would've loved to see another title revolving around Lesca & Lemone.
PS, there's the mini games but...I didn't really check on them yet so I might cover them in a future run...so as usual, just stay tuned!
If you like my runs be sure to check out the group I'm in if you want to see us play more good ol fashion retro games!
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