GAME CLEAR No. 16 -- Sexy Parodius

Sexy Parodius (1996, Multiplatform)

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Clear Date: 1/25/2021
Clear Platform: SEGA Saturn

Unexpected single weeknight GAME CLEAR! I busted the Saturn back out on a whim, and after struggling to get it to work for a bit, it finally kicked into gear. I played around with a couple games I acquired last year but never played. 2/3 work, and they were super cheap, so that’s fine. I also decided to play Sexy Parodius again, a game I bought years ago but never put much time into. What a mistake that was! It’s wonderful.

It’s weird as hell and obviously problematic in some ways, but I was smiling through most of its runtime. I played on the easiest difficulty and credit fed, and I had a blast. It’s got ludicrous bosses, an insane soundtrack of remixed classical music, and it’s a perfectly good shooter even setting aside those things. Flying around as an anime girl in a bunny suit shooting giant ears of corn and raccoons with a giant protruding ballsack is an experience I never thought I’d have and one I doubt I’ll ever see in another game. I feel better for having played this game.

As with other arcade style games, I don’t have as much to say about this game as I otherwise might because I’ve only cleared it once. I intend to play it more because it’s so insanely great, so I may revisit this piece once I have a more comprehensive view of the game.

Part of achieving that will be completing the games many missions, which most of the stages have. Aside from simply shooting/evading enemies and killing the boss at the end of each stage, the protagonists must collect coins or defeat certain types of enemies or race against the clock in different levels to satisfy their true win conditions. Mercifully, the game can be completed without doing these, but the game does punish the player with a very sad screen of the consequencse of the failed mission after each stage. A small price to pay for the reduced stress that helps make this shmup feel so casual compared to most games of the genre. Having said that, it also motivates me to return to the game to see if I can manage to knock any of them out. Solid replayability.

Anyway, that’s it for now! I highly recommend this insane game, and I hope to get many more hours out of it.

Oh, and meanwhile, Gradius V is in the mail to me as I write this. What a tone shift that will be!