Silhouette Mirage | Sega Saturn playthrough (JPN) | Real hardware

Like every Treasure game, the controls have a very inventive gimmick that has never been done before or since in a game.
When you face to the right, you fire weapons of either Red or blue. If you face to the left, you will fire a weapon of the opposite colour. The enemies are also either blue or red. You can only damage an enemy by firing the weapon of an opposite colour.
Sound confusing? It is, and my brain never really got used to it.
You do find yourself in some situations where you cannot hit the enemy or block them if they are on the other side of the screen and you can’t get to the other side because you are the wrong colour when you face them. This is annoying at times,
You can actually swap your colours over, but this involves grabbing a normal enemy (which aren’t always around) and doing a slam on them. It’s not worth doing this because your brain gets used to one side being one colour and the other side being the other. You don’t need to add to the confusion of working out the colour of your own character while you are trying to concentrate on the colour and attacks of the enemy.
Against bosses you can either hit them with blue or red but one will take away their health and one will take their magic energy. Once their magic energy is depleted, they can’t use their magic on you which is pretty cool, but you make the fight twice as long if you concentrate on depleting magic before the health. Also, if you just go for both at the same time, you are wasting your own magic energy (weapon ammo), the fight is longer so they get the chance to hurt you more, and you only get the advantage once the magic energy is completely depleted, so you may as well just try to take away the health because it takes just as long to do this than take away their magic.
Weapon power ups are key to completing this game. There are a wide range of weapons, but I found in the end that only one is worth having and upgrading. It is homing scythe given to you by a yellow enemy with scythes in the shop.
You can carry 3 different ones at a time and I found the best tactic was to carry 3 of the same and to not waste my coins. If you die, you lose the weapon you are holding so the best tactic here is to equip a cheap level 1 weapon when you are about to die so you don’t have to waste all of your money again to power up your best weapon.

The shortage of coins here is the problem. The only way you can get coins is to steal them from enemies. Before you kill them, you can grab them and punch them to gain coins. This doesn’t hurt them and you are open to attacks from other enemies. You can also do this on bosses but it is usually very difficult and not worth trying.

There are 9 lives in this game and no continues. Maybe less lives on other difficulties. I put it on very easy, which wasn’t easy at all. It is a difficult game and I always felt like I scraped through every boss fight and didn’t really know what I was doing. The mechanics always confused me and I feel like if I didn’t cheese the game with the Scythe weapon and constant health refills, I wouldn’t have been able to complete it.
At least when you die, you continue from where you were rather than restarting from a checkpoint.
The graphics and animation really are top tier. Every character and boss is very inventive and very nicely drawn and animated. Treasure really did put a lot of effort in to the art here.
Some of the boss fights were so obscure that I had to stop and read guides as I wasn’t causing any damage.

The last boss was very difficult (of course) and I was just glad that I saved enough lives to use against him.
I even missed part of the fight in this video because I stopped recording to look at a guide and then forgot to press record when I returned. I think there is enough there though to see the tactics I was using. I still had 2 lives left so thanks to using guides I made it quite comfortably.

There is so much going on at screen at the same time in this game, it’s very exciting pretty much all of the time and this would have replayability once you get used to it. It’s bloody good game but the mechanics are just a bit too limiting and never quite feels like I ‘get’ it. Bosses are also incredibly inventive but again marred by obscure ways of hitting them which can lead to long and annoying fights. But then again, what can you expect from treasure. They only do hardcore games.

Rating 7/10

Original (JPN/NTSC) game played on PAL Sega Saturn with NTSC converter cartridge.
No cheats used
Very Easy difficulty
Box art from thumbnail is taken from my own collection

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More like this:
Sega Saturn - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXnIZkuKAW4OPiZauY1B3bdDwUoCsWDRt

Megadrive/genesis - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXnIZkuKAW4NqEf523ELXZBl1T_3j-E9M

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