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There's a noticeable lack of arcade shooters in the world today, and up until now, none have been available for the Nintendo DS. However, developer Shin'en has come to the rescue with Nanostray, and delivered an all-around solid shooter experience that's also one of the prettiest games on the system. Though not a perfect game, what it does is accomplished well enough that the flaws can mostly be ignored.
Nanostray is an absolute bare-bones shooter, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's no story, no real purpose to shoot the bad guys (other than them shooting back), and no "bullet hell" to wade through. Just waves of enemies and their shots to avoid, firepower to manage, and sweet eye candy to marvel over.
Every shooter needs a gimmick to set it apart, and Nanostray has two of them. The first and most obvious one is playfield perspective. Instead of using the conventional top-down view, the camera is angled slightly towards the horizon, as seen in Shin'en's previous shmup release, Iridion II. It's a nice effect, allowing Shin'en to really work the fantastic 3D engine it has pushing the game along. Whether it's an asteroid field, sunken city, lava flow, or jungle, the sights are remarkably rendered, albeit repetitious on occasion, and populated with a bevy of enemy types to shoot down.
The other gimmick is the weapon system, and it's here that the game's only major flaw shows up. First off, the obvious mistake was using the touch-screen to change weapons. There are four different weapons with which to lay down the firepower, and each one has an extra-strong alt fire as well. Switching between weapons, however, involves moving the thumb from the face buttons over to the touch screen while diverting attention from the top display to the bottom. This just doesn't work very well, so instead of rapidly switching weapons to adapt to any situation, most players will pick a mode of fire and stick with it throughout a level, possibly only changing it during a break in the action. Radiant Silvergun and Thunderforce V both used a much simpler, adaptable method where each weapon corresponded to a specific face button on the controller, and it's disappointing to see such a player-friendly system ignored in favor of an unwieldly touch-screen gimmick.
The final problem with Nanostray is the scoring system, which all but negates the alt-fire weapons. Larger enemies generally appear by themselves while the smaller ones show up in strings. Shooting an entire string earns a large blue coin, and collecting it either refills the alt-fire power gauge or nets a nice 500 points multiplied times the number of blue coins received without needing a refill. Because clearing chains near level's end can easily get coins worth 15,000 points or more, the formerly helpful secondary fire function gets completely ignored until the boss fight, when there are no more strings of enemies to clear.
Despite all this complaining, Nanostray is still a fun game. It's got plenty of things to shoot at, a generous selection of scenery, solid controls (aside from the unfortunate touch-screen thing), and a solid soundtrack to go with the amazing visuals. Also worth noting is the generous enemy variety, with each stage having its own selection of baddies to shoot down. Most of them are well designed with their own set of behaviors, from the usual assortment of small ships that can be shot down with one bullet to larger carrier craft mounted with guns or mechanical space-whales that swim along the firing plane. The level bosses are also nicely done, each consisting of multiple battle forms and challenging fire patterns to wade through.
With all those enemies, it's good to have a reason to revisit them now and then. Nanostray caters to the replay value factor by offering three single-player modes as well as a multiplayer option for head-to-head melees. Adventure is the standard story mode, pretending for a minute that there's an actual story in Nanostray. The arcade mode allows players to pick a level completed in Adventure mode and shoot it out for high scores, which gets a "Nanocode" that can be entered at the official Nanostray page to compete for the global high score. In my opinion, the Challenge Mode offers the best replay value, in which your objective is to get through a level under certain criteria. Beating these challenges, (and most of them really do provide a good workout), can unlock goodies such as 3D enemy renders, concept art and level background tunes. Fitting in with the entire theme of Nanostray, they're not great but they are pretty fun to see.
And that's the whole game in a nutshell right there. Although its faults are few, they affect the entire game and hold it back from being the truly memorable experience it could have been. On the other hand, it does have the most impressive 3D the DS has seen yet, and there really aren't as many shooters around as there should be. There's enough good, solid gameplay in Nanostray to make it worth picking up for fans of shooters, though, and the only major negative thing about it is that it could have been better.
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