I wrote fairly recently that The Legend of Dragoon was more oldest remaining gaming challenge from my youth, and later thought that that was incredibly stupid, given that there are still several SNES/Genesis games which I had always wanted to retire. Perhaps the oldest of these (I may remember more) was Vectorman, a game that delighted me as a kid. I would go over to my friend's house across the street, and was absolutely captivated by the pretty pre-rendered graphics and smooth animations, and enjoyed the pounding EDM soundtrack. We never beat it though, historically getting caught up on the 4th or 5th level, or running out of time and needing to turn it off.
Vectorman is a run and gun platformer that is a bit of a hybrid of Contra, Sonic the Hedghog, and Donkey Kong Country. The core game play is very similar to Contra in that you move throughout a level, gunning down everybody you meet, and upgrading your firepower. The game borrows the non-linear and branching level structure from it's Genesis cousin, and the pre-rendered faux 3D graphics from Donkey Kong Country.
The game looks absolutely amazing, even today. The graphics look fantastic, with nice pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D looking sprites that have aged extremely well. The animations for the main character and bosses are great, with the titular character having very appealing animations, and the bosses taking on a more unnatural and robotic character that sells their villain nature well.
The levels are massive and feature ridiculous numbers of branching paths that put Sonic to shame. There's just so much to explore that I don't think I even scratched the surface of this one. Checkpoints are put at sensible locations, so you'll rarely be put back too far in the level upon death, and the branching paths offer real rewards for your exploration, encouraging you to do more on subsequent playthroughs. This theoretically gives the game a level of replayability that is definitely higher than for a game like Donkey Kong Country.
The music is just fantastic. This game uses the Genesis' excellent sound hardware to great use, and is to my knowledge rivaled on the system by only the games in the Sonic series (although my level of Genesis education is not as good as my Nintendo knowledge). The sound is also excellent, featuring really weighty sounds when you come back to the ground after jumping and excellent sounds for your gunfire and jumps.
The game, however, is definitely not as good as a game like Donkey Kong Country. It has sixteen levels, but several of these are bonus levels that can literally be finished in 10 seconds. Compared to a game with 40 levels like Donkey Kong Country, this feels pretty insufficient. It's hurt in this regard by not having a save function, which necessitates a more brief approach. I completed the game in slightly more than an hour after a few practice runs, so it definitely doesn't have the girth to it you would have expected from a AAA game in 1995, especially after the release of Donkey Kong Country.
The levels are also not as original and tightly crafted as the levels in Donkey Kong Country. Several of the levels feel like rehashes of older levels, especially as you go on in the game. Slight color changes are used to cover this fact, but the background art is essentially the same with different lighting, and the same enemies and objects are used, but rearranged in different combinations to give an original feel. There are "surprise" enemies littered across the stages, and your view is so limited that a simple jump up into an area can result in taking damage from foes you can't see, and the same is true when dropping down from a platform. This "Mega Man" style of challenge exists purely to drag out the experience and forces an iterative style of play, which is probably necessary in an hour long game with no save feature, but it just feels like 1995 offered greater technical ability to produce better levels, and more of them.
The controls are also frequently weird, with your ability to change your direction of fire not feeling great. Hitboxes are uncertain in this one, and the imprecise controls don't help.
The bosses are all incredibly easy once you know their exploits, and take way too many shots to kill. A shorter and more challenging approach would have been better for these bosses, in my opinion.
I feel like a Miyamoto-esque attention to level design and tight controls would have taken this from being an original game with a lot of charm and several flaws to an all-time classic. This game had a lot going for it, but ultimately feel short of the success of the high flyers on the Genesis and the SNES. I'd like to mention it in the same breath as the Sonic, Mario, and Donkey Kong Country series, but it doesn't quite get there. It'll always have a nice place in my heart, and I'll definitely circle back and play Vectorman 2 at some point, but I must admit that this game was merely good rather than great. I'll give it an 8.4/10.
Up next is a game I've already completed at the time of writing this (it was a successful weekend), and is definitely another one that predates The Legend of Dragoon. For shame!
-TRO
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