Thanks to ININ GAMES for the review code

Title: IREM Collection: Volume 1
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $29.99?
Release Date: 11/21/2023

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Prelude

ININ was on a pretty good roll for a bit, pumping out a lot of solid Ratalaika made compilations of obscure gems from classic publishers. Yet I couldn’t help but worry a bit that these were coming out a bit too fast, with some of the more recent ones being fiddled with silly bugs that, at least in the case of the Jajamaru sets, still aren’t fixed.

So needless to say, them announcing not one, not three, but five Irem Arcade collections all at once, and spacing preorders out over a year was pretty concerning to me. As of the time of this review, Vol 3 preorders are up for a physical edition, but almost nothing new has shipped from a SLG production standpoint since the spring of this year, outside of the recently released Air Twister, which was already in-hand.

That whole limprint line that most of these collections hinge their entire existence on seems to be in pretty rough shape, and while I normally don’t go off the main topic in my preludes, I do feel the need to at least issue some caution in preordering the physical version of this set, or even the future sets, outside of a retail environment. We’re just now getting the digital version of the first volume of a collection announced months ago, as they’re gearing up to announce the fourth volume in a few months time. So while you should be good to go for just picking this up on the eShop or through the upcoming Japanese retail release, I’d advise against picking up the SLG versions until we have a better understanding on when those versions will be in-hand.

Either way, enough rambling; this is a set containing three Irem shooters. Image Fight is one of my favorite shooters of all time, so I was stoked to see this announced, especially since Image Fight II had the very odd honor of being the final Wii U Virtual Console release ever in the US. Thus, that leaves the weird X Multiply as the oddball here that I’ve had zero prior experience with, and it doesn’t even have any console ports to compare differences to, while IFII is strictly a PCE CD Game.

Presentation

Usual drill here, of another Ratalaika compilation. Considering how outstanding their standalone Shockman ports were, I was hoping for more of the same, and we sorta got that here, but with a bit more polish in some places, and a lot less in others. Right off the bat we start off with the most impressive UI for any of these compilations to date, with a nice rotary selection of the three games and their many different versions; The World/JP versions of Arcade Image Fight and X Multiply, the PCE and PCE CD versions of Image Fight I and II, and the NES/FC versions of Image Fight.

Upon picking a version, you are then treated to the typical Ratalaika menus, with a lot of the usual options, including the new CRT filter presets found in Shockman 2, and these filters still look great. You also have the usual amount of screen size options (along with a new addition of vertical mode support for Image Fight) plus a very limited selection of borders to pick from, neither of which relate to the actual games in the slightest.

In a very confusing omission, none of these games have any sort of gallery content at all. Considering how the standalone Shockman releases plus the prior Wonder Boy Collection had lots of scanned goodies, I was immensely disappointed to see not a single thing for any of these titles. Not a single cartridge, box, or manual scan to be seen, nor arcade flyers or even game descriptions. These are just the games with some bonus toggles and nothing else. Image Fight II doesn’t even have subtitles for the Japanese cutscenes, which feels like a complete oversight.

When it comes to how each of these games look, sound and play, the Image Fight PCE games sound pretty spot-on, with nothing that felt too different from the Wii U VC versions of those I was familiar with. Likewise, the NES Image Fight sounds just as annoying as ever, and there’s even a funny option to disable the BGM outright for it. Arcade Image Fight appears to sound mostly the same as on ACA, at least to my basic familiarity with the game, but it definitely has more shimmering than the Arcade Archives release, unless you set it to the “Perfect” display option, which is annoying.

X-Multiply is a game I have no prior familiarity with, and at first I swore the sound effects were way off due to some aspects feeling a bit more muted than other Irem shooters. Well, the music seems to be as it should when comparing with Arcade Archives, though the sound effects still seemed a bit weird in a way I can’t pinpoint, so I’m gonna just assume that’s my general unfamiliarity kicking in. Ultimately I found X-Multiply to look and sound fine enough here, though it’s by far the game that hates the fast-forwarding feature the most; honestly, all of the games get real choppy when using fast forwarding or rewinding (yes, even the NES Image Fight), but X-Multiply really, really gets nasty to the point I hastily unbound the fast forward button the minute I heard how bad it cut into the audio. Rewinding is pretty spotty too, and you no longer have an option to adjust the Rewind speed, probably because of how it hurts the performance. I have no idea why this feature is worse than the prior Ratalaika implementations of it.

Gameplay

Usual compilation drill here, of listing the three games and going over their unique versions, differences and how they play here. Interestingly, this is the very first Ratalaika port with online leaderboards, a rather huge step for the team! Considering all of these games have a scorechaser feel to them, (and two are competing outright with Arcade Archives releases offering such modes) this was a no brainer, and I am happy to see such a feature added here, but frustratingly it seems to be a bit buggy; Image Fight keeps insisting I have enhanced controls on, despite disabling them in the options. X-Multiply thinks I have original controls on, even though I cannot turn off the right analog stick controlling the tentacles. You’re also still able to fast forward in all of the leaderboard challenges, and even use the in-game pause feature, which seems a bit strange.

Otherwise, these games don’t have much extra besides basic invincibility/infinite life toggles for all the games and difficulty presets for the online challenge mode, with not even a stage select option to play with. Despite how fancy the initial menu may seem, these are still pretty typical Ratalaika ports at the end of it all.

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IMAGE FIGHT– One of my favorite shooters of all time, and I fell in love with this one thanks to the prior Switch port of this game, way back in the early days of Arcade Archives. Here we have the Arcade, PCE, and NES versions of the game and their regional variants.

The Arcade game is still a fantastic shooter, with a brutally hard challenge level but brilliantly designed enemy patterns and a super satisfying powerup system, with various pods that fly alongside your ship and can either be locked into place or freely rotate as you move, depending on the color. Ratalaika added a QOL feature that lets you control these with the right analog stick, but I really didn’t like how it felt at all and quickly turned it off. Shimmering visuals aside, this still plays pretty decently and was a blast to go back to, though it has several downgrades from the ACA version that lead me to recommend that port more.

One oddity of Image Fight was how different rapid fire levels would impact your shots, and the ACA version accounted for this by offering several different kinds of speed options for your rapid shot. Here while you do have rapid fire toggles for both the normal shot and your pods, you cannot change the speed in any way, they are just a single speed. This port also has a laughably stupid bug when it comes to the default button mappings, in which if you ever decide to reset to the default layouts, the start button will unassign itself. You can still map it on any of the controller buttons or sticks, but you cannot put it back on the actual start button; it stays unassigned forever. Since you have normal, rapid, credit, and speed toggle buttons to all assign, you’ll quickly run out of room and have to shove it on a trigger or stick if you happen to unassign it on accident, which is just a stupid oversight. No other games in the set have this issue.

Speaking of oddities, let’s get into the home versions, which also act pretty funky in ways that I argue are rather gamebreaking. First up is the PCE version, which was a pretty good looking port back in the day. The sound and graphics are decent for the system, if a bit stretched due to needing a 4:3 ratio, and it offers different difficulty settings for you to play the game at your own pace.

I can’t play it for long because the pod button activates the speed change if I hold it in conjunction with the normal shot. Considering how this game has you switching between both of the shot types on the fly, this is a big problem and is very, very annoying. Even if I fully unassign the speed toggle from any button, pressing both shots will change the speed.

Yes, this even happens if you use the pod rapid-fire, which makes playing this port even worse as you’re changing speeds nonstop. I don’t know if the original release had this annoyance or not, but considering how another home port in this set acted up, I’m gonna guess it didn’t.

So let’s move onto the NES version! We press start, the sprites are small and the game is a bit too ambitious for the console, and… You have got to be kidding me. The same damn speed change issue is present here, too! So yep, even this other home port suffers from your speeds changing on the fly when pressing both shots together, but it gets even more annoying, since the rapid fire doesn’t work! Yes, even if you assign it to a button, it will never actually function, instead just acting like a normal button press. The rapid pods work fine, but not the normal shot!

So, yeah, this NES emulation is just laughably buggy, and this really bummed me out as I hoped to give these ports a good play to compare with the arcade original, but I really can’t when my ship is changing speeds all the time.

X-MULTIPLY– Only released in Arcades and thus with just two versions here, X-Multiply is a completely bizarre shooter tasking you with defeating alien forces inside of a human body. The environments are very creepy and the music is equally so. Here you have a singular shot button, with the main gimmick of the game being tentacles that your ship will sprout upon gaining a powerup. Sorta like how Saint Dragon or the late XEXEX did it, you can move your body around to have your tentacle arms damage foes and hit obstacles in your way, and just like with Image Fight, Ratalaika assigned controls to the right analog stick, which are the tentacle directions in this case.

You can change between assorted presets with the press of a button, but disappointingly despite my efforts to disable this feature, it doesn’t actually let you. Even with all the toggles off as they should, the right analog stick will still move your tentacle arms around, so you’ll have to avoid that stick entirely if you want to play with the standard controls.

Still, once I got into the hang of the game, it was a pretty decent, fast paced shooter, but one that was very unsetting and pretty tough the further I got in. The second stage throws a battleship at you, for crying out loud! Still, this game is fine, but after dabbling in it here, I think I’d much prefer picking up the Arcade Archives release if I wanted to play more, since there’s really not much to this port that makes it stand out, and once again there’s only one rapid fire speed. Still the least buggy of the games in this set, however.

IMAGE FIGHT II: OPERATION DEEPSTRIKER- This PC Engine CD title is a console exclusive followup to Image Fight, sporting the same sort of gameplay as the first game, only with tons of cutscenes and redbook music, plus a whole new assortment of stages to play. Speaking of those cutscenes, you’ll be very disappointed if you want to understand any of them, since not a single one is subtitled at all. This is just the Japanese version completely untouched.

Unfortunately, while it has some pretty decent bosses, Image Fight II feels insanely generic and stupidly designed. There hasn’t been too much added here, there’s still a penalty zone if you fail to do well in the first few stages, and really all this ends up feeling like is a bad batch of space stages, just with fancier music. The clever memorization and excellent stage design from the original game isn’t here, and some stages won’t hesitate to get real cheap and frustrating. You still have your various weapons and your pods to equip, but it doesn’t really bother with anything new or fancy, so it really comes off as a strange set of levels that are barely memorable.

Annoyingly, this game has another of the many odd bugs in the collection, with the pause/run button being mapped to the regular shot button, only kicking in after defeating a boss or dying. Yes, that means that if you hold down the shot button and defeat a boss, the game will just start pausing. No, I don’t get how that sort of mistake could have possibly happened and not get caught. No, the actual pause button doesn’t even work during normal gameplay like it should. Thus, I found myself dropping this port like a rock by Stage 3, since I was sick of having the game constantly pause anytime I died because I was holding down the fire button. Least the speed toggle doesn’t act up like in the original PCE port…

Image Fight II manages to be a neat way of getting more Image Fight, yes, but compared to the masterpiece that was the original Arcade version, this sequel feels more like an unbalanced level pack than anything else. Image Fight II still is insanely tough, and a lot cheaper than the Arcade original, and I just honestly wish that Irem added some new powerups or game mechanics to make this sequel feel spiced up, or at least adjusted the balance some more. As it stands, Operation Deepstriker is just a bland sequel, but one I would be happy to see getting a wider reissue, if it wasn’t for how this port is still just as buggy as the rest of the set. As the weakest of the three games in this collection, I feel you could skip this one entirely.

Conclusion

I really had high hopes for the Irem Collections. I really, really did. But being hit with so many baffling emulation bugs and weird design decisions really just made this whole volume come off as very clunky and not at all polished, especially when both Arcade titles here are already emulated in a far superior fashion via Arcade Archives for a total of $16.

The home ports would have been nice additions, if they didn’t have stupid bugs with random button presses, and if Image Fight II had bothered to add in some form of english subtitles (which, considering how the game has story-heavy cutscenes between the stages, was silly not to include when prior Ratalaika ports translated similar things), but as this set stands right now, the only things about Volume 1 I can remotely praise are the CRT filters and the Game Select screen. Pretty dressing doesn’t cover the fact these ports are really, really poor though.

They didn’t even get the rewind/fast forward features working at full speed, which considering how this also impacts the NES game, is utterly laughable! Also throw in some weird shimmering in Arcade Image Fight, lackluster autofire options, and the complete absence of any bonus material or even game descriptions, and you have yourselves a very promising pack of three great shooters crippled by poor bugs and weird design choices. Considering how the last bugged ININ compilation still isn’t fixed after nearly a year, I really do not have a good feeling that this set will get the polish it deserves either. Just ditch Image Fight II and spend $16 on Arcade Archives; you’ll be far happier than dealing with your ship speed changing constantly or your game pausing a lot. For the price these bugs are honestly insulting.

I give IREM Collection Vol 1 a 3 out of 10.