M.U.S.H.A. / Musha Aleste [Hard Mode] (Sega Mega Drive/Genesis) - Full Game

MUSHA! Another Compile shooter and I've heard many times that this is the holy grail of vertical shooting goodness. I needed something that takes less than five hours of recording and something less boring than Golden Axe Warrior so this game was a good candidate for my next video and it has been on my list for a while. If you're interested in more Compile shooters, I have also done Robo Aleste and the Game Gear versions of Power Strike.

This game was one of the early Mega Drive / Genesis titles so it is quite amazing what they managed to get out of Sega's 16-bit hardware at that time. The amount of sprites on screen is impressive and many are fairly large. There is hardly any slowdown or flickering and you would only see that on hard difficulty anyway because on the other two difficulty settings stuff dies so fast anyway. The graphics are also very detailed, but the backgrounds repeat themselves very often during a stage. It's like an infinite loop of the same background tiles. The 6th stage is especially lame with just lava everywhere, but generally the game looks very good.

The sound, however, is a mixed bag. I find the sound effects ok, but the music is a bit too fast-paced and "hectic". Also, it lacks some "depth" which is generally a problem with the Mega Drive's / Genesis's sound hardware. Overall, the music is annoying.

So, how's the gampelay? The controls are great, the weapons are ok even though there are only three and they all have a specific purpose. You also get up to two "options" at a time which you can configure to shoot in different directions. They will not only shoot, but absorb one hit and get destroyed. I like the variety of all this. What I don't like is how it feels. I just can't get a feeling for the hit detection. It does whatever it wants. I can fly into bosses, fly through solid rock or pass through a barrage of missiles with my shield weapon. Especially if you fly through lots of bullets you won't know in advance if it will turn out well. It's a chaotic mess of junk on the screen and I don't like to feel as if the outcome of my actions depends on weird hit detection. MUSHA veterans may argue that this is all about skill, but still the hit detection is very inconsistent.

What I also find awkward is what is going on on the screen. Often the enemies are just there to fill the screen and to be shot down like in a shooting gallery. Then you get difficulty spikes with enemies that can absorb some ridiculous amount of gunfire. I prefer to have the difficulty raised by interesting enemy patterns and I absolutely hate it if higher difficulty modes just increase the hitpoints. It shows a lack of creativity.

I'm not bashing MUSHA, it's a very good game. It's just not that great and it's probably that it just hasn't aged very well. 20 years ago it must have been da bomb, but I never owned a Mega Drive / Genesis. Compared to Robo Aleste on the Sega CD, I'd prefer the CD version. The music there is just awesome, the graphics beautiful and especially the stages are well designed and interesting. If you took that and made the bosses in Robo Aleste as hard as in MUSHA, we'd have a winner and the true holy grail discovered, but unfortunately they messed up the boss fights for whatever reason.

So, all in all I liked this game and the issues I pointed out are not gamebreaking at all.

Feel free to comment on this video in the comments section below. If you'd like to request a game to be played through, just let me know. Cheers!