Title: Toaplan Arcade 4
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Late 2024
Prelude
Here it is, the final set of Toaplan games! With this collection, all of Toaplan’s possible Arcade games have been reissued on Evercade. Pretty outstanding feat, as only a few JP oddballs and two canceled games weren’t included in the collections. We even get a singular NES port here to round out the lineup to an even 6 titles.
Presentation
Being a mix of Arcade and a NES game here, you have a good set of fun games here, all with continued proper sound emulation. Meaning that Tim Folin’s weird Sky Shark OST sounds as it should, along with Dogyuun’s wild instrumentation. Continuing the recent trend of excellent Arcade emulation, this is another set of games that I preferred playing here VS the Bitwave ports of the few games that are shared between them.
Gameplay
Like the prior three sets, I reviewed a good chunk of these via their Bitwave ports earlier this year! Also like those sets, this set emulates every Toaplan Shooter far better than those Bitwave reissues managed to, and we have the rest of their non-shooter output here, along with a very strange, home console port included to fill out the set.
Sky Shark (NES)- A rare home port in an Arcade collection! Presumably thrown in for the sake of rounding out to an even six games in the collection, (since Blaze sure as hell wasn’t gonna throw in Toaplan’s Lie Detector game) this western exclusive NES port of Toaplan 2’s Flying Shark is an interesting curio, having been made fully in the west.
Right away the most noticeable thing about this port comes from the music, which ditched a bunch of the tracks from the Arcade original in favor of wholly original music from Tim Folin. Sadly, this was before he really took off with some outstanding OSTs, and most of the tracks in this port are best described as wild in the old micro computer style. Lots of fluctuating instruments here, and a score that wouldn’t compare to his later, excellent scores like Time Trax and Silver Surfer.
So OK, interesting OST swap aside, how does the port play? Well, it controls like you’d expect, with shots and bombs, but the hitboxes here are just obnoxious. Many times I’d be attempting to dodging bullets and planes, only to get struck just a bit outside the shape of my actual plane, leading to many swift and sudden deaths that I would have not gotten in the Arcade version.
At the very least, this does have an in-game leaderboard like the Arcade version, but all in all, this is a sloppy, if admirable NES port. Compared to the other two NES shooter ports from Toaplan, Sky Shark is leagues better, but considering the many excellent Genesis ports they could have put here instead like Snow Bros MD, I treat NES Sky Shark here more as a bonus game than anything serious.
Pipi & Bibi’s– A very bizarre, single screen arcade game where the main goal is to plant bombs at monitors and then flee the building as it explodes, which reveals a segment of a clothed woman. Originally in Arcades, clearing each of the six worlds would reveal a full image of a woman, with them being fully nude to the point of exposed body parts. Pretty dumb thing in all honesty, since they have nothing to do with the game; it’s not like you’re saving them from the building after all!
So thus, and thankfully Toaplan made this choice back then, but there’s a DIP option that disables all the nudity in favor of clothing them, and that’s what you’re stuck with for the better on Evercade. Still makes the “reward” at the end of each world equally useless, but also means this game can actually stand out as a title with gameplay and score chasing. So how is Pipi & Bibi’s minus the lewdness?
Honestly, pretty damn overwhelming, and not in a good way. Sure, the concept is still simple, of finding the best route through the stage so that your final bomb is planted near the exit, and you have a stun beam that drops the enemy in front of you down one level of the building, but as soon as you hit the second world, the enemies begin to get overwhelming, so much so that you’ll die constantly even if you try to route as carefully as you can. In fact, at some points I had to even abuse save states to beat some of these levels solo, as even the infinite continues won’t protect you if you fail to escape the explosion. (dying during an escape sequence resets the stage)
It really feels like a game made for co-op first and foremost, but even then the game gets pretty unfair, and the scorechasing appeal wore off rather quickly for me. An interesting curio, but nothing I’m sad barely gets reissued nowadays. There’s at least a decent remake on Steam that improves these faults to an extent and even adds four player support, so just go play that instead.
Dogyuun– A vertical shooter near the end of Toaplan’s life, this one was made mainly to show off graphical prowess, but is still a pretty darn fun game. One of two of the last Checkpoint based shooters we had yet to get, Dogyuun is yet another example of a fun, masterful little game with clever checkpoint placement and fun bosses to fight, including a cool genre shift robot battle late in the game.
It doesn’t offer much in terms of secondary powerups, and you have a next to useless tractor beam ala Zero Wing, but the excellent visuals, decent music and pretty fun challenge makes this yet another solid Toaplan shooter. It also helps that some of the stages are fine tuned for a score attack focus, which I absolutely adore. There’s also local co-op, yet again, but this time you can combine both ships for a super powered shot, which is way more useful than just using a stupid enemy as a back shield.
Grind Stormer– The western version of Toaplan’s hit shooter, V-V! I mentioned in my review of the Bitwave port how both regional versions played very differently, with V-V using a Gradius style powerup system, and Grind Stormer using a typical bomb system.
Well, we have just the western version for Evercade here, meaning we get a pretty good shooter here, though it does lack the meticulous powerup system of the Japanese version. Still, that doesn’t mean Grind Stormer isn’t a ton of fun to play, even if I wish both options were available here.
You still have a good variety of weapons coming at you, and means to take out enemies in a pinch thanks to those aforementioned bombs, which work pretty well here, and I didn’t feel that this different weapon system broke the game the same way it did with Salamander to Life Force when the reverse change happened. All the different weapon types get dropped frequently, they can all be powered up for a stronger shot, (along with your little option ships being able to spread as a wider shot or combine into a stronger, thicker one) and if you happen to game over, you can even get a super special upgrade to give you a boost upon continuing, very useful if you happen to get stuck at a boss or particular rough patch while trying to beat the game.
Really, I found myself growing more and more comfortable with this western version of V-V. I still like V-V a tad more due to its spiritual successor nature to good old Alcon from Toaplan 1, but Grind Stormer is still a pretty excellent shooter, with local co-op, great scoring secrets, a fun set of stages and bosses, and outstanding music. Easily the best game on the cart, in my opinion.
Knuckle Bash– Originally made as a means to get into the Fighting game genre, Toaplan would shift this to a belt scroller with a focus on Boss fights, and I find it works surprisingly well! Starting with three characters, you soon grow to gain a total of five over the course of the adventure, and engage in several pretty short stages to beat up some foes.
If you wish for a challenge right off the bat, you can even jump to the final few stages of the game, but at the expense of one of the unlockable characters. Regardless of where you choose to start the game, the action is pretty solid, with two buttons and your usual jump/attack control scheme, and each character having their own unique set of moves. Add in local co-op, and you have yourselves a pretty solid brawler.
You might think that would make Knuckle Bash a great experience in the same tier as their shooters, but in all honesty, the game feels pretty generic at the end of it. The brawling is fun, but quickly gets brutal, with the final stages bordering on cheap difficulty, making that stage skip option even more tough to deal with if you aren’t prepared. There’s really not much of a scoring focus here like their shooters, and even starting from the very beginning of the game, you’ll be finished with it in under a half and hour, without the game looping.
I can definitely see this being great fun to pull out with a local co-op partner, but I definitely don’t feel that Knuckle Bash matches up with Toaplan’s other games, or even other brawlers available on Evercade. Definitely great to have it reissued, but this is a game I can understand why Toaplan didn’t push much.
Snow Bros 2: With New Elves– The sequel to Snow Bros, and Toaplan’s final Arcade game, this takes the two player snow throwing concept from the original, and adds in three new characters with their own playstyles! You thus can now do four player local co-op here, and weird character select art aside, this is a pretty decent followup to that original game, one I had been longing to play for years.
And indeed, it is just more Snow Bros, and the differing characters add a nice layer of extra technique to the game due to their different shot types. Tons of score bonuses to find and try to get just like the original also makes this a fun score chaser ala the first one, and there’s even stages that change up the action by having you try to climb a vertical stage in a time limit.
Unfortunately, the biggest issue with Snow Bros 2 happens to be the short length of the game. Compared to the first game, you breeze through these stages, and they’re all incredibly short worlds to clear. Some worlds are nothing more than a singular stage even! To make up for this, the game sharply ramps up the difficulty in the last few worlds to the point of absurdity, so either you’ll be credit feeding constantly to see that ending, or trying to hope that your 1CC doesn’t get screwed over by enemies getting the jump on you or a boss getting in your way. I was able to finish the game in under 30 minutes, which is a far cry from the near hour it took me to finish the original with a friend.
Still, short length and difficulty spikes aside, Snow Bros 2 is still an incredibly fun game, and I can easily see it being a blast with a full set of four players. If you happen to have the means to make that happen at a local level, this one is a no brainer, and you can still have pretty good fun challenging your local high scores and seeing how high you can get with those special score bonuses. For Toaplan’s final game it feels a bit rushed, but at least they went out on a pretty good note.
Conclusion
With this cart, we have the logical conclusion to Toaplan on Evercade. There’s little, if anything else they could add besides a couple of the Genesis ports, and there’s nothing Arcade wise they could pull from besides two canceled games in the hands of PCB hoarders and a weird Mahjong game nobody here will be able to play or read. Thus, I’m confident in saying this is the definitive end of Toaplan on Evercade, meaning for once you can have a publisher’s complete western catalog all on the same platform by collecting these four carts. What a great deal!
But is Toaplan 4 by itself worth picking up if you aren’t already a completionist? Honestly, that’s rather tricky to answer, since this has a lot more of their non shooting oddballs, with only one of them being the same excellent quality as their shooters. Still, the two arcade shooters you have here are great, and the NES port oddity is fascinating at best. So half the collection being absolute blasts to play, one being pretty decent if tough, and the others being frustrating to the point of sucking some fun outta them makes for a value that’s still easy to recommend for the current price you pay, but compared to the no brainer steals of Toaplan 3 and 1, I think this is just a little bit down the quality scale.
Still, Toaplan itself is pretty damn quality, so when this lower end of things is still as much fun to enjoy as it currently is, I think that says an awful lot about how great these sets are, and you’ll have tons of fun in four player with Snow Bros 2 if you have the means to get a session set up. That alone may be worth it to you!
I give Toaplan Arcade 4 an 8 out of 10.