Retro Reboot SHMUPtember | Phalanx: The Enforce Fighter A-144 (SNES)
You know, that SNES game with the silly box art...?
RETRO REBOOT
"ColonelFancy" Mike Lind
9/8/20264 min read
Developer: ZOOM, Kemco
Published by: ZOOM, Kemco
Release Date: October 1992
This...is a weird one. Once you get beyond the incredibly wacky box and promotion material, you have a pretty unassuming side-scrolling space shooter. This isn't one I grew up with. I rented it a few times, but when my library already contained games like Life Force, Super R-TYPE, and Thunder Force, Phalanx was just another one. As the years went on, I eventually added it to the growing collection. It was for a handful of dollars at a reseller store, so of course. I'd play it from time to time, and it just never rises above being...merely okay.
Its full title is Phalanx: The Enforce Fighter A-144, which a more striking name. And the brief history behind the old banjo playing gentleman is the advertiser Matt Guss's friend Keith found nothing spectacular about the game itself. So they opted instead to go for broke with being unorthodox and hired professional mall Santa Bertl Valley (that name rules) to pose as the prospector, hoping to catch people off guard.
Okay, I get that. And granted, this was the early 90's. When it came to advertising some of the more strange or unconventional Japanese games, us Yanks generally took an approach to make things seem KEWL through a North American lens. Things like cover art for Circus Caper, Dragon Power, and Hydlide come to mind. But perhaps the question of the game appearing boring is something that should have come to the table BEFORE plans to distribute it come to fruition!!
The game itself, as mentioned, is strange. Not eye-popping strange, but where it stands as a SHMUP. It's playable enough, feeling like a combination of Darius Twin, Spriggan, and Arrow Flash on the Sega Genesis, I feel. for my history, space shooters can be a little awkward on the Super Nintendo. There's just something about Phalanx's execution that keeps it at a mid-level bar. Probably most and foremost, the challenge. It can be a rather forgiving difficulty on low settings, but that escalates quickly, shooting it up into frustrating.
Deaths result in losing all of your cumulative power-ups, and considering that almost every enemy comes at you at high speeds and intermediate ships taking more than a handful of hits to destroy, you can become effectively weaker than almost every foe you encounter. There's no force shield to mitigate damage, but you do have a life bar. And being perfectly honest, SHMUPs with life bars usually throw me off. I'm caught off guard when my ship isn't immediately destroyed upon contact, and it takes me a moment to regain my composure. It's strange, I know, but it's an awkward adjustment period.
The weapons are adequate, and follow the established formula that the genre is known for; upgradable main gun, missiles, and generally an auxiliary option-like device that provides a wider range of firepower. And of course screen clearing super bombs, which comes at the expense of your weapon slot, a fatal mistake that cost me dearly. Only use those if you absolutely need to. Upgrades are not super common, so I don't try to.
Phalanx just lacks a satisfaction of acquiring your upgrades; there's zero fanfare or circumstance. The action is so hyper-fast, that when I grab them, I barely have time to appreciate or get accustomed to it. One of the cannons is a chargeable laser, which is slow as shit. Perfect for a game where things are flying at you as fast as possible, and you want to clear the screen.
The Enforce Fighter's graphics are a little underwhelming, and this can also be one of those side-by-side comparisons to serve as an exhibit of why Sega SHMUPs are overall better. The sprites don't really look very clean, and the backgrounds can be blurry, making me dizzy when the action picks up and the screen gets cluttered. The A-144 just lacks the personality and presence of Silver Hawk, Vic Viper, and the R-9A Arrowhead. Even D-Force has a blue helicopter. Nope, in Phalanx, this nondescript aerial craft just cruises along.
Enemies and bosses are just unspectacular hunks of metal that can eject smaller hunks of metal that fly at you. There's interesting ideas presented, like a jet stream that pushes your ship back, making good use out of the on-the-fly speed shifting. Too bad the range it covers is 90% of the screen, obscuring my vision and making it even more frustrating to evade bullets. Then there's a stage where you have to infiltrate an enemy battleship. A cool idea, but the is rather cramped and narrow. And since Phalanx has jerky movement and imprecise hitboxes, this can lead to cheap damage. Similar with Mission 3 sending you on a high speed tunnel run WITH ZERO WARNING.
Phalanx: The Enforce Fighter A-144 ultimately sits at around a C-tier SHMUP for the Super Nintendo. It's actually distressing seeing the X68000 version running smoothly and boasting cleaner, more dynamic visuals. With developer Kemco, you're really rolling the dice. Phalanx is like the video game equivalent of the commercial for the boardgame Crossfire; there's no way the hands-on play has a shot in Hell of living up to what the advertising established before it.
But even with the meme of the banjo-dude (rest his soul), I'm surprised it's maintained a legacy. But I never really found it all that unorthodox at the time, when magazine publications in the early 2000's revisited and poked fun at it, or even when the internet found it fascinating. It's not even a Faxanadu situation, where the box art masks an amazing game. Just mediocre. Until next time...
