Capcom's Strider is a masterwork of character and game design. The hero, Strider Hiryu, is a ninja badass that flies straight into enemy territory with a hand glider. His sword, the Cypher, is so fast that its blade is like one continuous blur of light, slicing most mooks right in half. He can also somersault, and even climb on walls and ceilings. He even has robotic tigers and birds as sidekicks. The enemies, too, are well defined. The evil Grandmaster Meio is introduced as a cackling madman, with his twisted fingernails encircling the Earth. During the cutscenes, the villains each speak in their native language – Meio and the bounty hunter Solo speak English, the trio of Asian acrobats speak Chinese, and the Soviet premier (obviously patterned after Mikhail Gorbachev) speaks Russian, while Hiryu speaks Japanese. The game has a surreal Cold War theme, beginning in a territory that is clearly modeled after Moscow, where upon entering the central building, the entire government jumps out of their chairs and forms a massive hammer-and-sickle-wielding snake. The journey continues to Siberia, onto a flying battleship, through the jungles of the Amazon (where you fight dinosaurs), and finally to the base, Third Moon.
The level design of Strider is strikingly cinematic, with each stage consisting of many different obstacles and often several bosses. Throughout the second stage, you fight off a pack of wolves, destroy a giant robotic gorilla, climb a clock tower, fight a jet-pack wearing bounty hunter, race down a mountain as it explodes behind you, scale a tower charged with electricity, and leap between helicopters to hijack an airplane. The soundtrack is strangely dissonant for a game using FM synth, but the tunes change with each section, making it feel both dynamic and dramatic.
From a programming standpoint, it does feel like Strider bites off more than it can chew – it uses sloped surfaces, with a simple physics engine that allows you to build up speed when running downwards, but it feels glitchy. Plus, some areas are rough around the edges, and some enemy attacks are undodgeable. Even if it is unrefined in spots, the action is always intense, and the many checkpoints keep things from becoming frustrating. Strider was part of a multimedia project that included a manga, an NES game, and an arcade game. The arcade game was popular in North America, especially thanks to its Genesis port. The NES game, despite starring the same character, was completely different, and also incredibly glitchy. The manga tied in closely with the NES game, but wasn’t translated into English.
After leaving Capcom, Strider game director Kouichi Yotsui created a pseudo-sequel called Osman (AKA Cannon Dancer). It plays very similarly and has beautiful graphics, but is overly difficult and not as well-designed. Capcom released their own sequel, Strider 2, in 1998, due to Hiryu's popularity in Marvel vs. Capcom. It uses 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, which looks messy, and the loading times between stage sections makes it feel disjointed. Plus, unlike the original, which used checkpoints, you restart right where you die here, and with unlimited continues. The challenge comes from attempting a 1CC, since it was developed primarily for the arcades, but it still feels unbalanced. Regardless, the action is fast and tight, and the bosses are just as brilliant.
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