Yu Suzuki is, in my opinion, the single most talented developer who has ever worked at Sega. He can be attributed to a large part of the company’s early success. This is of course in the days before Sonic the Hedgehog. He had a unique style that was a perfect fit for the arcades. With such early hits like After Burner and Outrun it’s pretty obvious that he has a huge talent for game design. One of his forgotten properties is a series called Space Harrier. The original arcade release is one of my favorite games of all time. In typical fashion Sega ported it to their less powerful Master System home console. Unfortunately the system wasn’t up to the task, and this is a terrible and watered down version of the original masterpiece.
In this game you play as a character referred to as the ‘Harrier’ who sports a jet pack, red jacket, and blaster gun. The setting here is called Fantasy Zone, and it’s up to you to guide our ‘rad’ protagonist through eighteen stages to save the world with monsters coming at you every step of the way. It’s a weird fusion of science and fantasy. It works exceptionally well. There is nothing out there that quite feels like it. Space Harrier is a typical 3D shooter of its era. While the game is strictly two dimensional the terrain as well as enemies scroll at your character and you view the action from directly behind him. This creates a somewhat convincing portrayal of 3D environments.
You can maneuver Harrier up, down, left, right and diagonal in any direction. Enemies shoot projectiles at you, and you also have incoming terrain to contend with as well. You’ll be dodging trees, mushrooms, levitating rocks and more. This game is made extremely difficult by the fact that one hit will cause you to lose a life, but you can continue directly from where you left off. It’s very unforgiving but this can be traced back to Space Harrier’s arcade roots. You get additional lives when your score reaches certain milestones, but you’re never given any continues. Playing through eighteen levels of this already tough game in one sitting is a little grueling to be honest. This game holds no punches because it’s originally designed to eat your quarters. Sega opted to not tone Space Harrier down for the home release.
While I do love the original game this version is really hard to play. The arcade release featured some of the smoothest scaling of its time. The Master System simply could not replicate this to any degree. Enemies and hazards don’t animate, rather, they seem to teleport and shake instead. To make matters worse it is almost impossible to tell how far or close an enemy is from Harrier. There’s no depth perception because the 3D effect is just plain awful. Judging distances is far too difficult. I died a lot due because I cannot consistently tell how far away enemies/objects are. Another issue I have is with the lost sense of speed. The original game scaled quickly, and this version makes it look like Harrier is moving forward in slow motion. This problem is beyond lame, and makes the game less exciting.
For an 8-bit game Space Harrier is surprisingly beefy in terms of content. You have a whopping eighteen different stages and each features their own boss waiting at the end of each. They’re short and take only a few minutes to complete. the high difficulty ensures that you ‘ll keep coming back. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of difference between each stage. They all have separate enemies and patterns as well as different color combinations for scenery and backgrounds, but in general they’re all pretty similar. There just isn’t a lot of different enemy types nor will you find diverse scenery here with mere graphic changes used to signify a change of stage. Because this is an Arcade title I won’t harp on the game too much, but it’s still worth noting. Compared to home console based titles of its time this is pretty simplistic.
I’m a really big fan of this game’s fantastical art style. The enemies are inventive in design, and are all extremely memorable. The checkerboard pattern of the landscape and changing colors makes the game very surreal. This holds especially true in the areas where you have landscape both the top and bottom of the screen. As I was saying earlier I wish the game featured more diverse art for each stage, but it’s not a huge deal. It’s basically all a palette swap. The art style is good, but the engine itself is far too choppy.
As someone who plays a lot of classic games I can normally tolerate low framerates in psuedo 3D games. Here I can’t because it negatively impacts gameplay. Because of the aforementioned issues this is easily one of the worst versions of Space Harrier ever released. Except for maybe the Game Gear edition, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s frustrating when things warp into view and you aren’t sure when you’re about to be hit.
The soundtrack fares quite a bit better. The Master System’s signature bleeps and blips do a wonderful job of recreating the iconic title and main themes, and while they sound differently the re-creation is perfectly respectable. The only problem here is that there just isn’t a lot of different tracks in this game, but the wonderful repeating music never gets repetitive thankfully. It perfectly catches the ‘air of adventure’ atmosphere behind this title. What’s really impressive about the audio is the fact that Sega included a few voice samples, and they’re actually legible. This is quite the feat for an 8-bit game. Harrier shouts as he dies, and the announcer tells you to ‘get ready.’ I was really surprised at the quality of it, and though it’s only two brief snippets you’ll be hearing them quite a bit due to their circumstances.
Space Harrier is, and always has been, an absolutely incredible game. The port of it released on the Sega Master System however, is not. This release suffers because the hardware simply could not in any way shape or form support the game properly. The game is playable, but it’s just not all that smooth. It isn’t a total wash thanks to the excellent reproduced soundtrack, but that’s the only thing saving it from my lowest rating. I must say that Space Harrier is so amazing that even this terrible port is mildly entertaining. It’s better than a lot of games specifically tailored around the hardware. It’s not all that fun, but serious Space Harrier fans will want this one in their collection.
