Zanac (NES) - Full Run ALL Clear (No Deaths/No Miss)
133Full, no death/no miss run of Zanac (ザナック) by Compile, for the NES/Famicom. I played through all 12 levels and did not use any of the warps. This was played on a real NES with the real cart, my final score was over 21 Million points.
Stage Listing:
00:00 - Start
00:13 - Area 1
05:08 - Area 2
08:22 - Area 3
13:59 - Area 4
20:55 - Area 5
26:05 - Area 6
30:45 - Area 7
34:21 - Area 8
38:48 - Area 9
44:27 - Area 10
50:04 - Area 11
56:00 - Area 12
58:50 - Final Boss + Ending
Zanac was the first shoot em up developed by Compile, originally created for the MSX computer over in Japan. After the success of the original game, it was then brought over to US with a port created specifically for the NES. Despite being their first game, I would argue that it is one of their best games ever, and ranks along side the best non-arcade shoot em ups of all time.
The basic foundation of the game lies in it's "A.I." system (noticed that in the title screen?), which can be seen as a prototypical form of rank. In other words, the game will adjust to how well the player is doing in real time. The difficulty, number of enemies, attack patterns, etc will be increased or decreased depending on several factors. As a result of this, Zanac is a long, intense, and frantic shooter that requires the player to be on alert at all times.
While the graphics are fairly basic, they are solid and clean, and serve the game well. One thing that was not common for games back when it was released (1986/87), is the speed at which the game scrolls. There are certain parts of the game where the scrolling is so fast that it becomes overwhelming. We are talking Recca levels of speed, and for a game that was released 6 years earlier. In many ways, Zanac is not only a great game to play, but was also a technical marvel for it's time. Oh, and the music is excellent as well.
Zanac was where Compile established it's standard formula of cycling weapon upgrades being dropped at certain intervals to the player. There are 8 different weapons in addition to your basic shot. Some of them are great for certain situations while others are nearly useless. I find that weapon 7 is easily the best in the game, as it first extremely fast, can cancel bullets, and can veer to the sides to cover your flanks.
There are also numerous secrets and cryptic things to discover in the game, including level warps, attack rate increases (The red smiley faces), and the elusive "super gun" (maxing out your basic shot). Figuring out how all of these work can help tremendously in handling what the game has to throw at you.
As far as challenge, Zanac is both difficult and easy at the same time. For a first time player, the game will appear to be extremely hard, with deaths coming early and often. However, once you figure out a few tricks and the power of weapon 7, you will be obliterating everything in sight in no time. I say the game can be easy because extra lives come VERY frequently, so frequently that you can rack up literally dozens of lives even after the first few stages.
When you die you get fully powered down, and recovering to full strength can be tricky, but you get so many lives that you shouldn't really have too much trouble making a comeback. I decided that I was dead set on going for a no death clear, as this game had me coming back for more over and over again. It proved to be quite difficult, as the game is very long (nearly an hour) and you cannot lose focus for even a second.
The final thing I want to say is that if you haven't played Zanac then you need to give it a shot. It's truly one of the best games on the NES, and arguably the best shoot em up on the system.
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PEG presently has 15,710 views for Zanac across 7 videos, with the game making up 8 hours of published video on his channel. This is 5.87% of the total watchable video for Zanac on PEG's YouTube channel.