gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Announced last week and released today on Switch: FINAL EXERION, a revival of Jaleco's 1983 fixed-screen arcade shooting game Exerion (of x-in-1 NES multicart fame) and the first in a planned three-part series of "FINAL ____" Jaleco revival titles.

This series is being developed by Happymeal Inc., a studio founded by former Cave employee Junji Seki that made their bones during the galakei era and have recently found success with the Mystery Annai series of Famicom-style adventure games (the first of which was just localised as Retro Mystery Club Vol.1, and one of Seki's particular quirks is that, for whatever reason, he just really likes Exerionβ€”he made a fake Exerion minigame for one of these ADVs and was such a stickler that he went and got the actual Exerion license for it, even, and now they've gone whole-hog and made a full-on sequel with modern game systems and a story and all sorts of junk. I do appreciate that they've identified Exerion's key defining traitβ€”unnatural, disorienting parallax backgroundβ€”and committed themselves to presenting as many new and exciting ways to nauseate the player as possible.

(Incidentally, Seki also runs Famicassearch, a collection & database of second-hand, hand-labelled cartridges that might one day be reunited with their original owners, which I wrote about a little while back.)

City Connection and Happymeal have some other collabs in the works: one, which they fully revealed a couple weeks ago, is an ADV based on OMEGA 6, the recent comic by former Star Fox steward Takaya Imamura, and I believe there's one more, separate from the Final Series, that's due to be announced this weekend...


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

out now on Steam (but it's controller-only...)


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

I like Exerion! Yes, even the weird parallax scrolling, which I thought was reasonably effective for a 1983 release. However, the footage I've watched of Final Exerion just looks like something from a pop up book. Sometimes a confluence of flat objects can be used to create a convincing simulacrum of 3D movement, but whatever they did in Final Exerion just does not work for me at all.