Alpha Mission II

Alpha Mission 2 (ASO 2: The Last Guardian in Japan) was one of the earliest Neo-Geo releases, coming out about a year after the hardware debut in Japanese arcades. While 1991 wasn't a huge year for STG releases, there were some other bonefide classics released that year like Success' Fantastic Night Dreams Cotton and Taito's Gun Frontier. SNK, always the innovator, went to their back catalog and pulled out their 1985 sleeper hit Alpha Mission as the game that would get a generous update on their fancy new hardware rather than make an entirely new IP.

Upon release, Alpha Mission 2 garnered quite a bit of praise from critics and was one of the most popular games in Japanese game centers in May of 1991. Even in modern retrospective reviews, critics and gamers generally like what SNK did here. There's plenty of SNK innovation on display in Alpha Mission 2 even if some of the best mechanics get in the way of the game's full enjoyment. 

The general gameplay loop of the Alpha Mission series is most akin to Namco’s classic Xevious where you can shoot directly ahead of your ship and drop missiles on the ground below. Mastery of paying attention to both the foreground and background plane is paramount to excelling at the game. That said, unlike its contemporaries of the day, the Alpha Mission series difficulty is less to do with enemy placement and more to do with its obscure / innovative (depending on your perspective) power-up and armor systems. 

While traversing the hazardous stretches of interstellar space, the player must shoot small blue ships in order to gain basic power-ups for speed, laser shots, money, and missiles all while dodging enemy crafts and fire. Each type of power-up has 4 levels you can build, but there is no meter to let you know when you’ve reached the max. Rather than extra power-ups providing bonus points upon collection, once you collect all 4 power-ups of a certain type, the next power-up of that type will take away all upgrades you’ve collected thus far. Why the game punishes you this way is beyond me, and the removal of this mechanic would make the game far less frustrating to get into while still retaining the difficulty you expect from an arcade game. 

The power up system also borrows some cues from Konami's TwinBee in that you can shoot your power ups to change them into something else that might be more desirable. This doesn’t always work in your favor, so trying to dodge power-ups you don’t want while also dodging enemy fire can get tricky – especially at harder difficulties.

As if the game doesn’t sound difficult enough, you also collect money (indicated by a G power-up) to purchase armor for your ship in between stages. There are multiple types of armor that not only add protection, but also provide different types of guns or screen clearing effects like blackholes or a giant flame thrower (not really sure how a flame thrower works in the vacuum of space…). You can also collect armor pieces in the stages by shooting particular squares on the surface with your missiles. Each armor type has three pieces you must collect in order to add the armor to your menu. Beware, though, because if you have two pieces of one armor type and you pick up a third piece that is not in that armor's set, you lose the pieces of the prior armor you collected! 

To make this mechanic even more convoluted you have to equip your armor on the fly. In order to do this you have to press the C button to bring up a menu and use Right or Left to select the armor you want to equip. You then press the fire button to select your armor. While this sounds well and good, the game never stops, which means the armor menu takes up screen real estate and your selections on the menu also move your ship! This is inelegant to the say the least, and is a byproduct of “always on” arcade design. If you have a Unibios installed in your console I HIGHLY recommend setting your Speed, Laser, and Missiles to max, so you only have to deal with collecting money and managing your armor. It makes the game MUCH more manageable and enjoyable to play for modern audiences until you get used to the nuances of the game's design. 

Alpha Mission 2 is a showstopper graphically, with large detailed sprite work. There are some great sprite effects as well with multiple background layers running in tandem to create an effect that brings to mind Taito's1994 masterpiece RayForce. Your ship, with a full armor set equipped, is a bit larger than what is comfortable in most vertical shooters as your hit-box grows a bit with your armor. Aurally, the sound effects are generally good and what you'd expect out of an STG set largely in space. The music, though, is excellent! Stage 1's theme is a fantastic and heroic entry into the game. While the rest of the background tracks aren't quite as strong, the overall sound design is one of the game's best features.

Despite numerous frustrations, Alpha Mission 2 is actually a good game, and many people speed-run it or go on score runs to this day. That said, it’s a bit convoluted for my tastes with a few too many mechanics at play that get in the way of enjoying other aspects of the game. For the casual STG fan, Alpha Mission 2 isn't going to win you over outside of a few play throughs. If you're a hardcore STG nut, though, there's apparently a lot more to love here than I'm giving the game credit for. 

Do you want a phyiscal copy of the game? Well, you're in luck because Alpha Mission 2 is one of the most affordable STG's on the hardware. Well, affordable by AES standards. Both Japanese and US copies run around $400-$500. The US version has the highly sought after "dog-tag" on the spine making it a bit more desirable to collectors than the cardboard boxed Japanese edition. The MVS arcade version is a bit cheaper these days, but is getting increasingly uncommon. The Neo CD release, though, is part of a set of games that are generally more valuable on the hardware due to these earlier Neo games getting a small CD production run compared to later SNK releases.

Should you buy it? Well, that's tough. If you LOVE vertical shooters, you could do worse on the Neo-Geo (Ghost Pilots), but you can also do better (any others). If you're just building a Neo-Geo collection from scratch, save this game for a later purchase. The price isn't really in flux right now, and it's a rather common title. There are much more important games in the Neo-Geo library to go after well before you dive into Alpha Mission 2. Save your pennies and get Sonic Wings 2/Aero Fighters 2 instead.