Konami was once such a fun company. Beyond just being successful at innovating and even defining various genres, they had a strong interplay between their games that put even modern Nintendo to shame. Their development teams weren’t just skillful and talented, but they seemed to have real pride in their company. It felt like they were fans. And through that passion, it was hard not to become a fan yourself.
It makes the trajectory of modern Konami feel like that much more of a betrayal. They’re sitting on the games they made us fans of. Or worse. Some are just getting sent to the graveyard that they send all the properties they’re not interested in making new games for: Pachislot parlors.
Parodius Da for Super Famicom is a good example of this. The opening cutscene shows a crowd of penguins watching a screen showing all the milestones of the Gradius series. Amusingly, this spanned 1985 to 1992. Video games moved quickly back then. Eventually, an octopus bursts through the screen, and that’s just a hint of the weirdness to come.
All the challenge, twice the fun
First released in arcades in 1990, Parodius Da is sometimes thought of as the first game in the sub-series. Its title just translates to a blunt and factual “It’s Parodius!” However, it truly began its life on the MSX in 1988 with just Parodius. Parodius Da was the first one to hit arcades, however, and then in 1992 it was ported to the Super Famicom. Konami’s pretty stingy with the arcade ports these days, so the Super Famicom version is all I have currently. That’s okay since it’s the one with the bathhouse level.
As the name implies, Parodius Da is a parody of the Gradius series. Despite that, it has the same depth of gameplay. You have four selectable ships, but the biggest difference is that it’s just consistently outrageous. The sub-boss of the first stage is a flying pirate ship with a cat’s head, and it just gets stranger from there.
However, if you’re not familiar with Gradius, then I’ll explain. It’s a horizontal shooting game with heavy emphasis on not touching obstacles. You bank power-ups to choose how you upgrade your weapons on the fly, which is the biggest bump in the learning curve. Generally, the key to performing well at a Gradius game is to power up your ship quickly and then don’t die. If you die, you lose all your power-ups, and it can be an ordeal to rebuild your power. Death also can happen from the slightest misstep.
No laughing matter
I’m not a Gradius expert, but I’m also not new to the series. However, I found Parodius Da to be brutally difficult. The SNES version makes things as accessible as possible. You can choose your stock of lives, but even if you don’t, there are infinite continues and using one just places you at the last checkpoint. It’s entirely possible to just bash yourself against a segment of Parodius Da until you get through with some combination of luck, skill, and memorization.
The first stage is perfectly manageable, and the second isn’t too rough, either. The sub-boss on the second stage gave me a bit of problem until I memorized its movements. However, the third stage was a wall for me. There’s a segment in the middle where you need to blast your way through walls of Skittles, dodge bullets, and also know when to hurry to the next obstacle so you don’t get trapped.
It didn’t get much easier after that. Parodius Da really has a habit of screwing with you. And when it isn’t doing that, the screen is getting filled with projectiles and enemies. Again, the trick to getting through this is to stock up your ship and then just blast everything in your way.
Then don’t die. That’s really key here.
Don’t die
And if you do manage not to die, you get to see some choice weirdness. If there’s one benefit to the silliness of Parodius Da, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to predict. There are sumo wrestlers, for example, who come spinning into view. At first, they seem to just be a larger version of a typical wall-hugging enemy, but then they turn their back to the camera and whip at you with their mawashi. Naked ass staring you directly in the face. It’s absurd.
And then there are the bosses, who are fascinatingly varied. At one point, you just fight a huge woman. The Super Famicom exclusive level caps off with a fight against an octopus that is just trying to wash its hair. Even the sub-bosses have their own style, like the strangely evocative lips that fire entire rows of teeth at you. If there’s one reason to keep playing Parodius Da, it’s to see what else it throws at you.
Unfortunately, this also means that the difficulty curve is a bit all over the place, which I alluded to earlier. The last level, for example, was one of the easiest, following a string of tricky challenges. I’m not sure if the final boss is even a boss at all. I took it down before it could even attack, so maybe it was just the finish line. I’m not really sure, it was a strange end to a strange game.
The absolute bare minimum
The Parodius series would have a pretty extensive lifespan. Between 1988 and 1996, there were five unique titles and a turn-based offshoot. Then you could also roll in the two Otomedius games, as they too were parody titles of Gradius. And then, of course, the series went to the Pachislot graveyard. Thanks, Konami.
As I said in the beginning, Parodius Da really makes you mourn for the glory days of Konami. Right now, the company has been licensing out their properties to other companies, which is probably as close as we’re ever going to get to their internal culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s. At least most of these games are going to be designed by fans or people with some reverence for the titles. Whether or not they’ll live up to the source material is another question.
But if not, I at least hope that we can get some sort of Parodius collection. Some of the titles were released in Europe, but none of them made it to North America. But for that matter, Konami hasn’t been all that great about porting the Gradius or Twinbee series. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is a nice step in the right direction, but Konami really needs to do better for the sake of its legendary back catalog.
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