G-Mode Archives29 Zanac

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Zanac is a Shmup originally released on the Japanese-only MSX and Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1986 before coming to the West on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. However, while this game has been ported multiple times over the years to numerous platforms, the version that this release of the game is based on was a originally released on mobile phones in 2005 before being ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021

The presentation here is decent, with 8-bit style pixel art visuals and surprisingly catchy chiptune music. Oddly the game has no sound effects, which makes it harder to tell if you’re damaging enemies sometimes. Overall, this game very much looks like a Nintendo Entertainment System game stuffed into a smaller screen, for better or worse. This smaller screen is housed within a border designed to look like an old-fashioned cell phone, which is a nice touch.

For the gameplay here, there’s good and bad. On the upside, this game retains the original game’s power-up upgrade system, which allows players to power up their primary weapon multiple times as well as select one of eight secondary weapons based on the pick-ups they choose to grab. This system makes for some good variety as well as providing players with plenty of options for how to approach the game.

Unfortunately, problems are caused by the way this game was ported to the tiny cell phone screen. Players do not have a lot of room to maneuver on the screen, which can get extremely crowded with enemies. This gets to be so absurd that it becomes literally impossible to avoid enemies at times, and if you take a hit and lose all your power-ups in a particularly busy section like a boss, you’ll likely eat through your spare lives trying to finish the battle and quickly grab up whatever the next power-up you find is. These vicious difficulty spikes really bring down the enjoyment of the game.

I really wish this port included other versions of Zanac. It really would have been nice to have the MXS and NES versions of the game and the updated versions that were included in the Zanac X Zanac compilation released on PlayStation in 2001. Unfortunately, players nostalgic for this game looking to replay it on Nintendo Switch will apparently have to settle for what is, in all honesty, a port of the worst version of the game.

That’s really what it boils down to – Zanac is a great classic Shmup, but this is the worst version of it, limited by the small screen size of the cell phones of 2005 and as a result plagued by absurd difficulty spikes. If you’re a fan of the original game, this release on Nintendo Switch feels like something of a monkey’s paw wish – you can still get a sense of some of the classic quality of the original game here, but it’s clearly tainted by the sacrifices made in this port.

tl;dr – Zanac is a Shmup that’s a classic of the 8-bit era, but this version of the game is based on the 2005 cell phone port of the game, which squeezes the game into a screen too small for the game, resulting in absurd difficulty spikes.

Grade: C

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