 Arrow Fighters is one of those Super Nintendo games that's more well known for its price tag than the actual gameplay. The cartridge alone regularly sees prices of around $600 on eBay and Amazon, and don't even try and guess what it goes for complete in the box. It's one of those cases where it's almost impossible to know the real sales stats of this game, and therefore no real information on how rare this game really is. It's all, evidently, been lost to history due to Arrow Fighters being published by its development team's US office, a company thrown together named Miko River or Miko River. I'm not even sure the right way to pronounce that. But yeah, they were the US publishing arm of developer video system. They had plans to publish three Super Famicom games in the US, but only two made it, Hyper V-Ball and Arrow Fighters, also known in Japan as Sonic Wings. This is an arcade port that was originally made in 1992, and the only home console that got it was the Super Nintendo release the next year. If Arrow Fighters could be known for anything other than its current price tag, it would be that it's a fantastic two-player co-op vertical shoot-em-up, probably the best multiplayer shoot-em-up on the system. You have four different fighters to choose from, and your starting point depends on who you pick. You travel all over the world fighting military in the US, Japan, Russia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Sweden, and you fight over settings like a city, a warzone, a desert, and eventually outer space, with the city being memorable because various buildings get smashed up as collateral damage. Whoops, sorry folks, go ahead and continue your work day filing papers or whatever, just ignore that that wall doesn't exist anymore. Each plane has a different weapon, and a different power-up structure, and each pilot gets a clear screen attack as well. So it's not unlike many other shoot-em-ups in that regard. Arrow Fighters has a lot going for it, this game looks great, the sound design is fantastic, the music is exhilarating, and of course the two-player co-op option is awesome to have in a game like this. Each character has their own story here too, but they ultimately boil down to the princess is in another castle. The structure is also unique, in that the order in which you play through the stages is going to be different for each fighter, but regardless of which stage comes later, that'll always be ramped up in difficulty, complete with cheap projectiles that come at you at the last possible second. Unfortunately Arrow Fighters is a classic example of a short game that's made artificially longer by being brutally difficult. The levels are very short, I mean you're at the boss fight in no time flat, but in the meantime the action here is intense as hell and the boss fights are pure bullet hell. But if you get really good at this game you can beat it in something like 20 minutes, nope saves or passwords however. Now I played through this one with the Super Famicom cartridge titled Sonic Wings on my original Super Nintendo and while that cartridge still goes for like 50 or 60 bucks, it's a better alternative to taking out a second and third mortgage to get Arrow Fighters. A couple other things I should point out, like if you lose all your lives during a boss fight you have to continue back from the beginning of the level. Also several reviews of this game from back in the day complained of slowdown in certain parts and I can't say I saw too much of that that got in the way of gameplay. It did pop up here and there but it was gone quickly and it was nowhere near the levels of slowdown you saw in games like Gradius III and Super R-type. Arrow Fighters, or more accurately Sonic Wings, got a couple sequels on the Neo Geo and all three games were combined into one package called Sonic Wings Special released in Japan for Sega Saturn and PlayStation 2 and eventually being made available on the PlayStation Network in North America. Nowadays you can play this compilation on Android. So yeah, I do think Arrow Fighters is worth playing today. It's a short but intense shoot-em-up that you can play with a second player with minimal slowdown. I think it's easily one of the six or seven best shoot-em-ups on the Super Nintendo as well. But there's no chance in hell it's worth the price it's commanding not unless you're a collector with a Scrooge McDuck money bin. The best way to play this one on Super Nintendo hardware is either with a flash cartridge or by getting Sonic Wings for Super Famicom.