Parodius

See that cute bunny girl up there? Do you know who she is? Her name is Hikaru and she is one of the characters in the Parodius series of shooting games by Japanese video game maker Konami.

Konami received nothing but negative news after the fallout with Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima. But as a shooting game fan, I cannot ignore the big contribution Konami has made to the shooting game genre with famous titles such as Gradius. Parodius, as the name suggests, is a parody of Gradius. So instead of a serious space shooter, the game goes for the weird and funny (by Japanese standards).

You can find playable characters like an octopus, an angelic pig, a tiny stick man in a paper airplane, and the aforementioned bunny girl Hikaru…who rides on a rocket! Enemies include penguins, creatures from Japanese culture, lots of moai Easter Island statues (which is a mainstay of Gradius), and giant women bosses. Yeah, it’s just whacked out.

The game itself is actually no different than the traditional horizontal side-scrolling shooter. You collect power-ups that you activate on a power-up bar like in Gradius, but also have access to the Twin Bee bell system as well. It’s generally not too difficult and not a bullet-hell shooter as you can see in the clip below.

There have been several sequels and spinoffs within the Parodius line. But I played a lot of Gokujou Parodius on the Super Famicom during the events of Part 6, which explains why Hikaru and the other characters showed up in my dream. It’s also part of the whole shooter sub story in that book. But since it’s so niche and not likely to be known beyond shooter fans, I wonder how many people even realized what was happening beyond the weirdness in those sequences.