Horizontal and vertically scrolling shooters were incredibly popular in the arcades in the 80s, so naturally that popularity extended to home consoles too. In fact, by the end of 1985 the Famicom had already seen home ports of a lot of the popular arcade shooters of the time: Xevious, Galaxian, Galaga, Space Invaders, and Star Force. It only made sense that the hit anime franchise Macross, known for its mech/fighter plane hybrids, would be transformed into a horizontally scrolling shooter on the Famicom. Actually Macross had already had its first console shooting game on Bandai’s own short lived home console, the Arcadia, just about 2 years prior. Though this came after the aforementioned genre establishing shooters, it beat some others (such as Gradius) to the home market by several months.
And speaking of Gradius, anyone who has any experience with it should feel right at home here. Macross is a fairly simplistic horizontally scrolling shooter that doesn’t feature any sort of weapon power ups, but rather uses a system that allows your ship to transform into 3 different forms of various speeds and powers. These three forms are the Fighter (The form you start out in, your standard fighter jet. This provides the fastest scrolling, with the slowest ship navigation and no automatic shot), Battroid (The full upright standing robot. This provides slowest scrolling, with the fastest ship navigation and an automatic shot that can also shoot behind), and the Gerwalk (The form that looks like the Fighter with jointed robot legs. This provides slower scrolling than the fighter, but also faster ship navigation and an automatic shot). Understanding when to use each these forms is key to more easily making it through a level.
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| Come on guys, it’s Lynn Minmay! You can tell, right? | Form #1: Fighter |
It’s none other than the VF-1S Strike Valkyrie that the player pilots to take on the Zentradi and Meltrandi forces. The sprite representations of the VF-1S and the Zentradi/Meltrandi are good enough for a 1985 Famicom game, but that isn’t the only treat in store for Macross fans. The game begins with none other than Lynn Minmay striking a gong, then launches into Lynn Minmay’s “Shao Pai Long”. This song is very well replicated, and is one of the most notable features of the game.
Because this game was made in 1985, it isn’t surprising to see that Namco created it as they might have made an arcade game (they were well known for their arcade games after all). There’s no in-game story to speak of (though that’s not uncommon for a game from this time) and the same level loops repeatedly. This may be a turn off if you were looking for the story of the original Macross in video game form, but at this point games were largely played for high scores instead of stories anyway.
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| Form #2: Gerwalk | Form #3: Battroid |
The VF-1S also gets an energy bar, making this not the “one hit and you lose a life” situation that most of Macross’ contemporaries were. Combined with the enemy patterns not being too difficult and periodic energy bar replenishment, this a fairly playable game even for those not incredibly adept at shooters. But still, Namco could have taken a lot more advantage of the fact that this was a Macross game than they did. The boss at the end of each level (presumably the core of the Zentradi ship that you fly into shortly before) looks like nothing more than a pile of bricks shooting beams. It’s very clear that all of the attention was placed on the design of the various VF-1S forms instead of level or enemy design.
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| Hikaru Ichijo’s true rival: A pile of bricks |
While this first entry in the Macross game franchise isn’t a bad game, it’s just not very interesting or fun. And it’s definitely not as notable as some of the other entries yet to come. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than shooter or Macross game completionists. Unless you’re either one of those, pass this one by and check out one of the later entries.