Keio's Flying Squadron

Keio’s Flying Squadron is supposed to be a joke that made sense in 1993, but now in 2023 the joke maybe doesn’t make sense anymore. In the early 90’s, the “shmup” genre (short for “shoot em up”) was everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it. It seemed like everybody and their grandma was coming out with a new game where aliens attacked earth, destroying the planetary defense fleet, leaving only you, the lone star fighter, to single handedly fight the aliens and save humanity. Here are a few shmups I have beaten:

Android Assault (Sega CD)



Axelay (SNES)



UN Squadron (SNES)



Twinkle Tale (Sega Genesis)



Thunderforce III (Sega Genesis)



Lightening Force (Sega Genesis)



M.U.S.H.A. (Sega Genesis)



Darius II (Sega Genesis)



Trouble Shooter (Sega Genesis)



Battle Mania II (Sega Genesis)



Sokyuugurentai (Sega Saturn)



Cotton Boomerang (Sega Saturn)



Lords of Thunder (Turbografx 16 CD)



Here are more I have played but not beaten:

Gate of Thunder (Turbografx 16)



Coryoon (Turbografx 16)



Air Zonk (Turbografx 16 CD)



Biohazard Battle (Sega Genesis)



Truxton (Sega Genesis)



Gaiares (Sega Genesis)



Layer Section II (Sega Saturn)



Thunderforce V (Sega Saturn)



Abadox (NES)



I used to wonder why this genre was so abundant. My guess is that games like this were low-risk. It was assured that hardware of the time could handle them. I’m guessing they were also formulaic from a design standpoint, so companies could bang them out without needing to invent any brand new ideas. Something also tells me that the market was receptive to games like this. Players must have been consistently putting quarters into shmup arcades and buying Sega or Nintendo carts to play them at home. Otherwise companies wouldn’t have kept making them.

By the release of Keio’s Flying Squadron in 1993, though, the shmup genre was really, really crowded. So, I think by then game designers had to look for ways to make their shmups stand out. This was probably what gave rise to the “cute em up” sub-genre.



Upon booting up Keio’s Flying Squadron - a shmup about a ditsy anime girl in bunny ears and a leotard fighting an army of tanuki from the back of her pet dragon - I sensed that it was going for a punchline that might fall flat in modern times. Maybe a 2023 version of Keio would be like a Call of Duty Modern Warfare-wannabe where all the soldiers are V-tubers.



Mechanically, Keio reminds me most of Darius II. I found that I had to stay fully powered up for the entire game to have any reasonable expectation of completing it. If I landed at the “game over” screen, I would just turn off my Sega CD. Particularly in stage 6, it wasn’t even worth trying to build up my firepower to a viable level after losing all my lives.

Like Darius II, I had to memorize everything in Keio, but unlike Darius II, Keio just isn’t as good. I guess it’s because although Darius II’s “lone starfighter” premise is a cliché, it does a great job of that cliché, nailing all the qualities that made that cliche resonate with gamers in the first place. Keio, on the other hand, is trying really hard to stand out, but underneath it's rather average, making its gimmicky presentation seem trite.

I found Keio’s extra life system to be inscrutable and bizarre compared to Darius II’s. Darius II doles out extra lives every time you rack up several ten thousand points. I don’t remember the exact denomination, I just remember it was consistent, so I could “budget” how long I needed to survive before I’d catch a break. As best I can tell, Keio does this:

30,000 points - extra life (but only on your first continue??? This literally only works the first time, but never again. I don't understand why.)
180,000 points - extra life
300,000 -ish points - extra life

There are also hidden extra life “challenges” in Keio’s stages. There’s no text saying “do such-and-such to get an extra life”, rather I had to figure it out for myself. I found these:

stage 1 - I have no idea what makes this extra life appear. It just always seems to show up.
stage 3 - destroy all the blue tops for an extra life
stage 4 - destroy all the missiles during the 2nd wave of them for an extra life
stage 5 - destroy all the gun turrets (2nd wave I think) for an extra life
stage 7 – destroy all the tanuki trying to close the gates on you

I liked this. It added a layer of mystery and discovery, and made up for the otherwise bizarre points-to-extra lives exchange rate.



Keio’s power-up system is lousy. There are only 5 power-ups total, and all but 2 of them are useless. The Forward Shot is god-tier; Multi-Directional shot is awful. It doesn’t inflict enough damage even when fully powered up. The only time I needed it was for the “earn an extra life” challenge on stage 4. In literally every other situation it put me at a severe disadvantage.



The Explosive Throwing Stars are unstoppable. Ground Bombs and Homing Spot Juniors are pure trash. I always avoided them. There are even bosses I have no idea how to beat without the Explosive Throwing Stars, which I could aim omnidirectionally and has lingering splash damage, like napalm. This created situations where I’d pick up the other lousy weapons by accident and it would ruin my play-through, like inadvertently picking up the knife in Castlevania for NES.

Keio likes to “sucker punch” the player, striking from out of nowhere with bullshit nobody could have seen coming. In stage 1, a large boss falls from the sky with no warning, like an anvil from Loony Toons. If you’re under him, you just die. Another boss appears in stage 2 - an octopus with tentacles made up of segmented, spheroid sprites. Then he punches you from out of nowhere with them. There’s no preliminary wind up or even color change telegraphing that it’s about to happen, either. He just lashes out, unceremoniously killing you with no warning. The end of stage 6 has a post-final boss sucker punch, too. Guess what happened to me the first time I beat the stage 6 boss?

I already mentioned that I had to completely memorize Keio in order to clear it. It has “haha gotcha” bullshit, but at least it’s consistent bullshit I could learn and master. But I found this clashed with parts where I could just park Keio in one place and hold down the fire button while barely moving at all. These parts weren’t as bad as the lulls in “Trouble Shooter”. But they had a way of making me drop my guard and get killed later.







When I died in Keio, it was rarely just once. The deaths would stack up to 2, 3, or more because I would often die in an area flooded with enemies and bullets, only to come back from the dead in the middle of the fray with less firepower needed to suppress the flood of enemies. But sometimes it felt like Keio just had this weird psychological effect on my brain where dying would mess up my state of mind, causing me to screw up and die even more.

In Keio’s defense, it does have one interesting gameplay mechanic I’ve never seen anywhere else. If you stop shooting for a few seconds, up to two “helper dragons” will spawn nearby, trailing you as they fire projectiles of their own. These augment your firepower and cover more of the screen than you ever could individually. If you press C, your heroine shouts yabei! (“This is crazy!” in Japanese), firing a “destroy everything on screen” attack and sacrificing one of your helper dragons. The only way to recover the sacrificed helper dragon is to stop shooting for a while, which can be dangerous with incoming foes. This was a neat “risk - reward” dynamic. I don’t know if some other shmup came up with it first, but Keio is the first I’ve seen to do it. I wish I could say that about Keio more often.



I am hardly the first person to criticize the Sega CD for costing as much as a Sega Genesis while routinely failing to deliver experiences that were any better than those found on ordinary Genesis cartridges. I’ve made peace with this by viewing the Sega CD as a product meant for Sega fans with more money than sense.

That being said, Keio’s graphics struck me as unremarkable. They aren't bad, but they sure aren't great. Most in-game creatures and buildings are depicted from a flat side view, with little attempt at dynamic perspective, interesting angles, or lively poses. “Workmanlike” kept coming to mind for me. Maybe since 90s nostalgia and video game remasters are all the rage now, Keio would be a good candidate for a modern facelift, or at least a faux 32-bit one like Sonic Mania. I don’t think that will actually happen, but at least Keio would be more worthy of it than something like The Last of Us (PS3, 2013.)



There’s one particular sprite in Keio which I can’t let go of because it highlights something I want to say about Keio’s graphics. In stage 1, there is a hut. The sprite for this hut is obviously mirrored from left to right. I have a passing awareness of the Genesis’s memory limitations, and techniques such as mirroring which artists needed to fit their game within the tight technical constraints. But the Sega CD has 700 MB per game. And ROM sizes aside, didn’t the CD module have additional RAM supplementing the 64 KB in the basic Genesis? I kept wondering if Keio was really built from the ground up to be a Sega CD game. Personally, I’m not sure it was.



I kept wondering the same thing about Keio's sprite flicker, which was frequent. 16-bit game consoles like the Sega Genesis could only display so many sprites on screen at once. If this limit was exceeded, sprites would begin to flicker on alternating scanlines, trading visibility every other frame and creating square-shaped holes in the bodies of large enemies. This happened a lot in Keio. It never caused me to die unfairly, but it didn't look very good. Does the Sega CD have the power to make this problem go away? Or is it just good for grainy anime FMVs at the start and end of the game?



Even if we were to let Keio off the hook from competing with other “lone starfighter” shmups, there are shmups on the bog standard Genesis thematically similar to Keio, namely Battle Mania 2 or Twinkle Tale, both of which mop the floor with Keio. Battle Mania 2 isn’t cutesy, but it does have two kickass female protagonists fighting goons to save the day, all while being completely superior to Keio in every way. Twinkle Tale actually goes for a very similar “cutesy anime” aesthetic, and it slam dunks Keio, too. I can only recommend Keio to two kinds of people:

1) Lovers of 16-bit shmups. Keio is not the best in its genre, but in the end I begrudgingly enjoyed it. It felt “NES hard.” Clawing ahead a little farther each time I played it felt satisfying.

2) Lovers of the Sega CD. Maybe someone with an affinity for the hardware, for whom Keio’s mere status as as Sega CD game would elevate the experience. If I’m being honest, I only made as much of an effort to play this because it’s a Sega CD exclusive. If you’re that kind of person, though, something tells me you’ve long since played Keio’s Flying Squadron. You may even own a CIB copy which sells for around $2600 on eBay these days. You’re out of your mind if you buy it for that price now, though.