Player: Dawn
Difficulty: Hard
Endymion Mk.II
It's been 10 years since I've played Einhänder, and it's still one of my favorite shooters of all-time along with R-Type Delta. The graphics are incredible for the PS1 era, and the music is top notch, thanks to the awesome composer Kenichiro Fukui. Square has done an exceptional job for making this well-polished shooter, and they're mainly known on making Action RPG games like the Final Fantasy series. I seriously would want to see an HD remake of Einhänder on the PS4/PS5.
Einhänder is a unique 2.5D shooter where you play as its namesake where you can steal the gunpods from enemies and use them to your advantage. You can pick up different kinds of gunpods such as simple, decently-powerful Cannons, chargable lightning railguns known as Riots, or guided missile launchers known as Wasps. The Wasp is a 127mm missile launcher that has two firing modes, and it can fire either powerful missiles that go straight ahead or missiles that home in at enemies including the ones that are either on the foreground and background.
This game is also one of the more challenging games on the PS1 because unlike other shoot'em up games, the weapons that are dropped from enemies have limited ammo, so the player has to use them accordingly. The default machine gun built-in the pilot is the only weapon that has unlimited ammo, and it's built inside the pilot. Also, Einhänder is one of the shooters where if the player dies, he/she will be sent back to the checkpoint, forcing the player to adapt in order to progress.
The graphics of this game is so remarkable for the time, and I would say that it's easily one of the best looking games on the PS1. Einhänder runs at 60 frames per second without much slowdown, and the detailed are impressive looking, even the smallest enemy aircrafts are carefully crafted with such detail. The background scenery is simply gorgeous, and the game is filled with countless levels of scrolling (until level 5), complete with colored lighting and effects. If this game could get a remake on the PS4/PS5, I could easily imagine that it would look incredibly stunning.
00:00 - Introduction (Einhänder)
01:18 - Stage 1 (Imperial Capital)
06:18 - Stage 2 (Armored Trains)
13:43 - Stage 3 (Supply Tunnels)
20:21 - Stage 4 (Subterranean Base)
27:14 - Stage 5 (Aerialport)
36:18 - Stage 6 (Stratagem Spacecraft)
41:47 - Stage 7 (Hyperion + Ending)
Einhander (c) SquareSoft 1997-1998
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