Space Harrier II (Genesis) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
397A playthrough of Sega's 1989 arcade-style rail shooter for the Sega Genesis, Space Harrier II.
Played through on the normal difficulty level.
Space Harrier II was a launch title for the Japanese Mega Drive in 1988, and it reprised that role for the release of the Genesis in America the following year. As the name would indicate, it is the direct sequel to the original 1985 Space Harrier arcade game, and like its predecessor, was also designed by the legendary Yu Suzuki.
Space Harrier was one of Sega's famous super-scalar games that used scaled 2D sprites to approximate 3D graphics, and despite the Genesis's comparatively weak processing power, Space Harrier II did a solid job at recreating the look and feel of the iconic coin-op shooter.
The controls are tight and the gameplay feels faithful. Your hero nimbly zips across the screen ready to blast everything to kingdom come, and the speed with which the game moves creates some intense moments - it can be thoroughly exciting to weave through the rows of pillars and trees that regularly get in your way.
You can choose to play the stages in any order you like, but all twelve of the main stages have to be finished before you can head into the final boss-rush area. Once every few stages you'll also get to play a bonus round in which your hero takes to a hoverboard to blast stuff for points and 1ups, and not being able to die in these segments makes for a nice diversion from the main game.
But however fun it may be, there are a few quirks that stem from the game being on the Genesis. You are limited to just four shots on-screen at any time, so you do occasionally get killed because you couldn't rapid fire off enough shots at an incoming enemy. The fix here is simple - don't miss when you shoot - but that can be difficult for how hectic the screen can get at times. The other quirk is that, no matter how impressive this was for a 1988 console game, the framerate isn't ideal. It is consistent and it is fast enough to make the gameplay feel relatively smooth, but it never feels as fluid as the 32X version of Space Harrier or comparable SNES games that made heavy use of Mode 7 (HyperZone, for example).
Still, this would have been a blast to play when it was first released, and it was a real showcase for the power of the new 16-bit hardware. It just hasn't aged quite as well as some of its contemporaries - a fairly common theme among the earliest of Genesis titles. But if you love Space Harrier, this sequel is an extremely fun follow-up that provides more of the same over-the-top action. It's a fun, nostalgic throwback that I'm glad is going to be included on the Genesis Mini system!
Too bad it never got updated for stronger hardware - I would have loved to have seen it be given the 32-bit treatment!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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