[Header image by Hirofumi Nakamura taken from GAMEST MOOK Vol.113 PSIKYO ILLUSTRATIONS]
A little behind the scenes info before I get into the meat of this thing, but I’ve had an idea for a possible recurring feature where I try to explore the wider world of shooting games (of the scrolling & bullet hell variety) kicking around for about a year now. I only got as far as trying a couple of games that seemed cool and coming up with a tentative title for it (which is honestly the hardest part) but never got much actual writing work done for it. It wasn’t until I was made aware of the existence of Gunbird, an arcade shooter released in 1994 by Japanese developer Psikyo, that I started working on it again but as I was plugging away at it I realized I was way more interested in writing Gunbird than any of the other games I had set aside for this thing. I’ve done a disproportionate amount of research on it and I figured much of that would only go to waste if I tried to excise a lot of the things I’ve come to know about the game for sake of making it a concise entry in a larger thing.
So I spun it out into it’s own post, which gives me plenty of room to go off about this interesting little shooter.
Anyway, here’s Gunbird!
I first heard of Gunbird about a week or so ago when as I was doing my monthly sift through the copious amounts of upcoming releases on Steam I saw a listing for the game currently scheduled for a May 11th release. There’s a fair amount of new shooting games that release all the time that pique my interest but there was something about the art of Gunbird that made me want to look into it further. So I did and I ended up moving from casually skimming the internet for information about the game to deep searches for anything Gunbird related, including looking through scans of magazines during the time of its release to see what coverage of the game looked like in America. I also played every release and port of the game I could get my hands on but I’ll get to that later!
Before I start talking about the game I want to spend a little bit of time focusing on the art since that’s what got me interested in the game in the first place!
All of the character designs, along with some of the official 2D art for the game and other Gunbird related materials, was done by Hirofumi Nakamura who also worked on similar roles for Sengoku Ace / Samurai Aces which was Psikyo’s first game and another vertical-oriented shooter. There don’t seem to be too many pieces of official art for the game that were illustrated by Nakamura but I adore what little of it there is. Below are my favorite illustrations both of which seem to be the cover art and insert illustration from a Gunbird novel:
There’s just so much character to both of these pieces; I love the expressions on Marion (the witch) and Yuan Nang in the image on the left and the one on the right has so many little pieces of detail to it but retains a clear focus all without feeling like an especially busy piece of artwork. I’ll also say that Nakamura’s artstyle is cleanly rendered in the game itself via some incredibly crisp sprite work. Top to bottom, I’m a huge fan of how all the characters look both inside and out of Gunbird and I’m not even the type of person who’ll typically fawn over 90s anime artstyles!
Now, let’s begin with the history of Gunbird‘s many many releases both inside and outside of Japan! The very first release of Gunbird occurred via its release in Japanese arcades in 1994. Every subsequent release of the game is based on this version of the game in some way so I’ll quickly spend some time going through the overall mechanics and structure of Gunbird so I can bring up the differences and additions once we get to the later releases.
To put it succinctly, Gunbird is a fairly standard shooter in pretty much every way except how it looks. It’s not particularly complex in its mechanics, controls or scoring system nor is it notably or meaningfully difficult but there’s something about how formulaic it is in those regards that I find quite charming. Which isn’t to say there aren’t any interesting or distinguishable mechanics in the game, just that they’re very simple to grasp.
Starting with the very basics, Gunbird is a two button game. One button for shooting and another for deploying a bomb that clears the screen of enemy bullets and damages anything within its radius. There are five characters in the game: Marion the cute witch, Ash the jetpack-equipped scientist, Yuan Nang a Son Wukong-inspired warrior lady, Tetsu the muscular old man and Valnus the Russian automaton. They each have their own firing types, bombs and movement speeds that mechanically differentiate themselves from each other. The game has a set number of stages where you’ll shoot enemies and collect power-ups – one that strengthens your shot, extra bombs and coins that give you bonus points – until you face a boss at the end of it. Very standard stuff.
In addition to all of the above, Gunbird has a number of unique mechanics. You can hold the shot button to do a character specific attack that does a fair amount of damage to enemies and bosses. For some characters, this charge shot is a close-range melee attack and for others it’s some form of projectile. This wasn’t something I rarely had to do (or frankly remembered to do, even) but it’s still pretty neat. Of the game’s 7 stages, the first three are randomly selected from a pool of 4 possible areas while the final 4 stages are in a set order every time. I first noticed it after I cleared the game and the game I was playing shifted into it’s second round, where it restarts you from the first level on a higher difficulty level, and I noticed that I got a different order of stages than I did the first time around.
Another thing that took me a while to notice is that most enemies don’t actually hurt you if you make contact with them. Only bullets can damage you in Gunbird but there are certain enemies that will knock a power-up out of you (or a bomb if you haven’t collected any additional shot power) and stun you if they manage to ram into you. From what I’ve gathered, the extra round and the fact that you can only die by bullets are both qualities that began in Gunbird and carried forward into Piskyo’s other shooters. The last unique thing that I can think of is the game’s power system. You start as a base level shot and as you get power-ups you gain additional fire and an additional projectile based on who you’re playing as. Once you collect three of them you’ll max out but this max level shot is only temporary and you’ll fall back to the previous level after a while. You can extend your time with max power by continuing to collect power-ups while you’re at max level.
All together these mechanics aren’t especially complicated but were still interesting enough to elicit an “Oh, that’s neat!” from me once I noticed them. The relative simplicity of them all might mean that there’s less depth to the game overall but as someone with a modest amount of experience with shooters of this type, I’ve been finding it to be an inherently playable game due to how frictionless it is to just hop in and play the game. I don’t feel the need to put in hours studying and learning bullet patterns or experimenting with the mechanics at length to try and evolve my understanding of them. I’m just loading it up and having a good time!
Now, returning to the timeline of releases, sometime between the original Japanese release and its arrival on consoles – meaning sometime in 1994 or in early 1995 – Gunbird had an international arcade release that was published by Jaleco. The international version plays exactly the same as the original release except now all the story, dialogue and endings in the game are translated into English!
The story and writing of Gunbird, like most of the game, isn’t very remarkable on it’s own but is still fairly charming. Your character of choice (or duo if you’re playing cooparatively) goes from stage to stage collecting pieces of a magic mirror said to grant the wishes of whomever can reassemble it. Along the way you’ll continuously confront the Trump, a trio of villains lead by the silver-haired Rogue and her lackeys Claude and Ace, who also happen to be chasing after the mirror. Before each boss fight there are little interactions with them that change depending on what level you’re on and who you’re playing as. Between each stage you’ll either see a brief monologue if you’re playing solo or a dialogue between both players’ characters if you’re playing co-op. At the end of the game you’ll get a chance to make one of two different wishes if you’re playing solo, each giving you a different ending. Every unique pairing of characters has their own ending as well.
Earlier above, I mentioned the existence of a Gunbird novel but I haven’t been able to find many details on what’s actually in it. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s an adaption or at least partly based on the rudimentary story of the game but it could very well be a side story or something along those lines. In terms of alternate adaptions of the story, there was also a Gunbird manga written and illustrated by Masato Natsumoto that features all the playable characters meeting up and facing off against the Trump. That manga has been made available in English via a scanlation by Shmuplations.
be pretty goofy. (Image obtained
via VGmuseum.com)
All of the writing in Gunbird is, generally, very lighthearted and humorous. The endings are often some sort of gag where the genie misinterprets someone’s wish and I’ve found plenty of them to be pretty funny. There are plenty of typos and grammatical errors though which I suppose was often the case when it came to translations back then. Even so, they still add a bit of charm and contribute to the less-than-serious demeanor of the game.
There are, however, a couple things about the writing that I’ve derived zero enjoyment from. The first of them is that during the interactions between Ash and Marion, it is made apparent that Ash is attracted to little girls. This is ultimately played for laughs as it culminates during their ending where Marion, after her continued misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Ash’s interest in her, wishes to become an adult so she can be together with him and is shocked and upset when Ash suddenly isn’t interested in her anymore.
Considering what the disparity between translations for Japanese games were like back then, I was curious if this was an embellishment or not so I played through Ash and Marion’s route on the Japanese version of the arcade release. It actually seems like this aspect of Ash is more direct in the Japanese writing. When Ash calls Marion cute, in the English arcade release she asks if he’s into little girls whereas in the Japanese release shes asks him if he’s a lolicon, which is a lot less ambiguous to me. In a later scene, Ash asks Marion her age and she responds that she’s only 13 years old. In English he responds with “That’s cool.” and in Japanese he says: 「もぉ、辛抱たまらんなぁ！！」 which, from my admittedly limited understanding of the language, would approximately mean “Well, I don’t mind being patient!”. Additionally, in the manga adaption Ash repeatedly iterates that he’s only interested in girls 15 and under (you know, jokingly) and Marion also accuses him of having a lolita complex. I haven’t seen the original text though but I can assume it’s close enough to the original dialogue.
So, that’s the first thing that sucks. The other thing is that Tetsu is gay, which by itself is not an issue for me, but the game portrays it in the same jokey tone it portrays everything else with. It’s to be expected I suppose but there’s absolutely no doubting that he’s a gay man considering his wishes always involve him either resurrecting his dead lover or finding a new partner in some way. That’s not the full extent of my issue though because the thing that I’m actually railing against is that during many of Ash and Tetsu’s interactions, Ash continuously refers to Tetsu using a homophobic slur during most of their dialogue together. It’s incredibly jarring considering the overall tone of the game that I genuinely couldn’t believe that this was actually an accurate translation of the original Japanese. It never would have occurred to me to even dig into this if not for the fact that a lot of the English language writing around the game online flippantly repeats the same slur in their descriptions of him. This spurred me into rigging up the emulators I’ve been using to play the games to allow me to control both players with a single controller so I could see these lines in the game myself.
So, I took a look at the original Japanese lines and did some translations of my own to measure the veracity of what’s written in English in the international arcade version. The first time the slur shows up is during a conversation between the two that begins with Tetsu saying “By the way… Oh, you’re kind of handsome.” this is pretty close to the Japanese line 「お！？ よく見ると、おヌシなかなかの男前じゃのう！」which I would translate as “Oh!? Now that I’m looking at you you’re a pretty handsome guy!”. The very next line is from Ash where he says “What? Old man are you a f—–?”. In Japanese this line is 「なんだぁ！？ジジィきさまか、ホ、ホモなのか？」the word here that got turned into a slur is ホモ which is literally homo (as in homosexual). I’m not terribly familiar with it’s use in Japanese (much less what its use was like in the mid 90s) but its use here is quite clearly derogatory. In that way, it’s similar to how some people will often make use of it in English. In later interactions, Ash calls Tetsu モーホー野郎, which combines モーホー another slang term for gay men with 野郎, a word that commonly gets translated as “bastard” and ホモジジィ which adds in ジジィ(old man). All of which become variations on the same slur in the English translation.
As for the question of whether or not the slur in question is an acceptable substitute for any of the terms above I’d say absolutely not, for a handful of reasons. The biggest one for me is that, broadly speaking, unless the original work in question seriously and directly addresses homophobia, slurs really shouldn’t be the final choice in a translation. In this specific instance, there are a number of other ways you could translate many of the pieces of dialogue I shared without using a slur of any kind. To jump the gun a little bit, I went through this scene in the only other English version of the game that I currently have access to at the moment (Gunbird Special Edition for the PS2) to see what the translation was like. In this version, the line「なんだぁ！？ジジィきさまか、ホ、ホモなのか？」 is translated as “What?! Say, old man, you aren’t…” which is a bit more subtle but it’s an alternative that conveys the same meaning without resorting to any unnecessarily coarse language.
Another reason is that there are definitely worse words in Japanese that are perhaps a bit more analogous but even then the actual history of these words and how they are (and have been) used is so deeply complicated and highly specific that they don’t, and cannot, neatly map onto or replace each other. For a further look on this topic by a professional J-to-E translator, I’d suggest this piece by Clyde Mandelin that examines the use of the word “okama” in video games and how it’s been handled in translations over the years.
With all that said I think I’m ready to move on to other other versions of Gunbird. But before I do that I want to share the sole piece of American video game magazine coverage of the game I could find. The February 1995 issue of EGM2 features a brief writeup on the international release and lots of screenshots and tips for the game. There’s one line from it that I really like that reads: “[people] who are familiar with Japanimation will feel right at home with the characters!” only because I was thrilled to see a sincere and genuine usage of the term “Japanimation”. The 90s sure were a different time weren’t they?
Following it’s release in arcades, the next stop for Gunbird was home consoles in Japan when in 1995 the game was released on the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. This home version featured a number of major differences compared to the arcade version of the game including a fully hand-animated opening sequence and matching theme song, full voice acting for all the dialogue and endings, character introductions / tutorial videos narrated by each of the characters, additional difficulty options, rebindable controls with an additional rapid fire button (so you don’t have to continuously mash the shoot button) and an art gallery featuring official art, guest illustrations and over 400 pieces of fanart! There’s also a video where they have the voice actors and actresses comment on some piece of fanart in-character too.
These home versions of the game are chock full of cool extras that more than make up for the fact that the act of actually playing Gunbird is less than ideal. There are load times due to the game now running off of discs and you can’t actually view the entire field of play while you’re playing the game. If you stay near the bottom edge of the screen, part of the top is cut off and vice-versa. The Saturn port includes a fullscreen mode that allows you to see the whole playfield but it does so by rotating the screen in such a way that you would have to vertically orient your screen to play it properly. A cumbersome but creative solution to that problem, I’d say.
Neither of these home versions made their way overseas, unfortunately, and I wasn’t able to find too much on it in terms of import reviews in video game magazines of the time either. There was one thing I found though, a half-page dedicated to a review of the Saturn version of Gunbird featured in the debut issue of the short-lived Game On! USA magazine that was put out by American manga publisher Viz Media. Unsurprisingly, the review also recommends the game to anime fans but, again unsurprisingly, avoids using the term “Japanimation”. Also worth noting that this was early enough that the manga featured in the magazine was still oriented in Western reading order (left to right) as opposed to the more commonly accepted Japanese reading order (right to left) that’s used nowadays.
The next home release of Gunbird didn’t happen until 2002 in Europe and later in 2003 in America, which saw the first home versions of the game available for overseas players… in a sense. For starters, only the PSX version of the game released. Please keep in mind that in 2002 and 2003, the Saturn had long since been discontinued in both territories and the PlayStation 2 was already well into the beginning of its lengthy lifecycle having released worldwide in 2000. The decision to bring over a port of a game for a platform on the decline is already questionable but what’s even more questionable is what actually happened to it. The game wasn’t released as Gunbird but instead as Mobile Light Force, complete with an incredibly misrepresentative piece of cover art that doesn’t match the actual game in the slightest.
Functionally, it’s quite similar to the Japanese PSX release of Gunbird except the art gallery and other extras have been removed along with all the dialogue and ending sequences as well. What remains is still Gunbird at a glance but it is far and away the worst possible version of it. The only possibly redeeming aspect of Mobile Light Force is that all of the characters (excluding Marion and Yuan Nang) have been renamed and Valnus is now designated “MILF 2000” which is incredibly hilarious to me.
There was also a Mobile Light Force 2 that released in 2003, which is somehow not based on Gunbird 2 but instead a renaming of a completely different game altogether that has no relation to Gunbird or Psikyo other than it is also a vertical-shooter: The Castle of Shikigami / Shikigami no Shiro by Alfa System.
Mobile Light Force remained the only canonical release of Gunbird in the US for a long time as it was re-released several times via the PlayStation Network in 2009 and a possibly illicit PC version of the game that was made available in 2015 on Steam but has long since been removed from sale on the store front. Europe, however, received an actually faithful release of the game on the PS2 in 2005 with Gunbird Special Edition, a compilation featuring the original game and the follow-up Gunbird 2. Special Edition features a new translation, a practice mode and the option to disable random stage select and enforce a set order. It’s pretty nice version of the game!
And that brings us into the modern age of Gunbird re-releases. Multiple versions of the game have been made available for the Nintendo Switch in the form of compilations of Psikyo games as well as standalone digital downloads. I don’t have a Switch so I haven’t been able to try any of them myself but from videos it seems like the standalone Switch version developed by Zerodiv, a company made up of ex-Psikyo developers, is a halfway point between the arcade and first home versions of the game. It seems to contain full voice acting, along with a (possibly different) full English translation. Haven’t been able to glean whether or not it has many of the additional features that were present in some of the other releases though.
The upcoming Steam release also seems to be handled by Zerodiv with additional credits by a company called CITY CONNECTION (named after the arcade game of the same name) that’s been responsible for re-releasing plenty of new and retro shooters on modern platforms. CITY CONNECTION was also responsible for the previously mentioned Psikyo shooter collections for the Switch as well as releasing an updated version of the Jaleco shooter Game Tengoku: The Game Paradise! called Game Tengoku CruisinMix Special. All this information would lead me to believe that the Steam version will be comparable to the Switch version. Seeing as how it’ll be releasing in less than a few days now, I suppose there isn’t much time remaining until I can personally find out the details myself!
Beyond the many iterations of Gunbird, there was also a sequel called Gunbird 2 that originally came out in arcades in 1998. The sequel hasn’t been released as many times as the original though. It came to home consoles in Japan, Europe and the US on the Dreamcast in 2000 and 2001 (where it featured Morrigan from the Vampire / Darkstalkers series as a guest character due to it being published by Capcom) and was later re-released again as a part of Gunbird Special Edition for the PS2. The sequel has also been re-released recently on the Switch in a similar manner as the original game which fills me with some amount of hope that it’ll come to PC somewhere down the line too.
I haven’t played it much of it but it seems a little bit more complex systems-wise than the first game. It also features a mostly brand new cast of characters designed by Masato Natsumoto, who I mentioned previously as the artist responsible for the manga adaption of Gunbird, with (a slightly older by the looks of things) Marion being the sole returning character. There’s also Gunbarich, another game that is technically in the Gunbird franchise as it stars Marion and I think the kid from Pilot Kids (another Psikyo shooter) in a colorful pinball / block-breaking (in the style of Breakout or Arkanoid) / shooter game. Marion also makes an appearance as a playable guest character in some versions of Sengoku Blade: Sengoku Ace Episode II / Tengai.
And with that, I’ve come to the conclusion of everything I know and have learned about Gunbird in the span of the past week or so. Chances are I’ll still be picking up and playing it here and there for a while so I can see every ending for myself. From there, maybe I’ll see about actually getting that shooting games feature off the ground. Maybe kick it off with some Gunbird 2? Who knows!
Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed this recounting of the involved history of this humble little shooter!
Fujoshi Made Me Nightcore 
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