 Ts … … That's drunk. During the Super Nintendo's heyday, PAL regions sadly missed out on a lot of games that North America and Japan got. But they did at least get a few interesting titles that North America missed – everything from Terra-Nigma, the Firemen, a couple Dragon Ball Z fighting games, and this game titled … … Civilian? Sava-Lion? Syvalian. Oh, thanks, I appreciate that. Cyvallion was originally made for arcades by Taito way back in 1988, and it was designed by the same person who created Bubble Bottle, Fukio Mitsuji. It got a home computer port in 1990 for the Sharp X68000, before finally getting a Super Nintendo release in Japan and in PAL regions in November of 1992. It was also released for PS2 as part of Taito Legends 2 in 2006. I should also mention that the original arcade version of this game used a trackball, whereas of course you'll be using a D-pad when playing the Super Nintendo edition. On the surface, Cyvallion looks like a regular old shoot-em-up just fly around as this cool-looking golden dragon and killing everything with fire, but there are at least a few things that make this game unique. For one thing, there is a surprising amount of text in this game, right away we're met with paragraphs of exposition, telling the story of a person getting abducted by aliens who plan on conquering Earth, but your character manages to hijack this gigantic gold spaceship that looks like a Chinese dragon called the Cyvallion, and of course it's up to you and only you to thwart the invasion and save the Earth and all that. But it doesn't end there, between each of the game's five levels you get more text explaining how the ship's food supply runs out so you're forced to eat this rancid monster meat to survive, but it turns out eating this stuff actually upgrades and powers up your ship. Uh, sure, okay. Here's the thing though, the mazes you navigate in this game are all randomly generated, and not only that, the story is random too. There's a set number of different scenarios you can play through, and each one is different every time you boot up the game. Sure, they might not always make sense or be all that engaging, but it's pretty dang cool and it's not something you see too often in this era of gaming. One scenario has you contending with a clone of yourself for some reason, another has you rescuing a scientist, one gives you more information on the alien race you're fighting called the Varia, and you get all sorts of weird details about them, like how their bioengineering experiment gone wrong and they ended up as outcast. It's seriously a really interesting idea, but I gotta say it's pretty unfortunate that the entire story is laid out in text instead of some cutscenes or maybe weaving the story into the gameplay somehow. Still, I admit I ended up playing through this one a few times just to see what story prompts I would get. Supposedly, the original arcade game has over 100 different story prompts, and I'm not sure how many the SNES edition has, but it does seem like there are a lot. And also, I've read that this game is somehow related to the Darius series, but I'm not really sure how or why. If anyone knows the connection, leave a comment below. Like I said, the mazes for each level are also randomly generated for each playthrough, and that's cool and all, but unfortunately, the gameplay itself is pretty limited. You have your fire breathing attack, which has a throttle meter on the bottom of the screen, so you gotta let go of the fire button every so often to make sure that your attack recharges. But other than that, you're pretty much just trying to carefully make your way through each maze without dying. Your health meter is the color of your ship, so once you turn bright red, that pretty much means your ship will go boom with just one more hit. You do get upgrades to your ship as you progress through the game, like spikes that fly out of your tail, but ultimately, there's not much else to the gameplay that's all that interesting. This is a really short game with only five levels, but at least there's three different game modes to choose from. The first is called Basic, which is pretty much just a tutorial with all five levels being permanently set to help you practice. The real combat series mode is the randomizer mode where you get different scenarios and mazes for each playthrough, and the third mode is a time attack where you just try and get the most points possible within a time limit on one life. Like I keep alluding to though, this game is ridiculously short. You can easily finish this one in something like 15 or 20 minutes, and this game is extremely forgiving too. If you die, you pick up right where you left off, and there's unlimited continues as well. I gotta point out one other thing, a major strength this game has is the music. This first level music alone is friggin' awesome. So yeah, Cyvallion is an interesting novelty. The fact that you get random mazes and a random story scenario to play through is really cool, but this is such an incredibly short playthrough, there's just not a whole lot of meat on the bone with this game. I dig the ideas here, and I get that having a shorter playthrough can encourage a player to run through this game a few times, just to play through different scenarios. But still, the core gameplay here is kinda bland. I mean, if you're into arcade-style games where you're always gunning for the high score, then you might enjoy this one. For me, if there was more to the gameplay or the basic level in enemy design, then this would be an easy recommendation, but as it is, I can only recommend this one as a curiosity. Alright, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.