Treasure games are mostly all the same. They’re lacking in the audio-visual department (Sin and Punishment being the exception here), there are a few mechanics that make them feel distinctly Treasure, like holding down a button and letting go or emphasis on timing, with tiny windows for success, and you shoot things. Lots of lots of things. At any given moment in Bangai-O Spirits there could be a thousand bullets on screen. Enough that the game, admittedly, won’t display them all. It’s not to its fault though, as they’re bunched close enough together that you’ll always know if you’re going to get hit. The framerate also suffers here - when you’re fighting just a couple enemies it will be at a delicious sixty frames per second, but when things get hectic, which is more often than not, it drops steeply.

That’s about where the negatives end, though. Bangai-O Spirits is 2D shooting at or near its best. It’s a pure, smooth combination of simple mechanics that work perfectly together. It feels like they weren’t just conceptualized, but realized first, and then came the level design. Your different offensive abilities (like bullets that bounce off walls, and ones that can shoot through two enemies instead of one), defensive abilities (like a bat that deflects projectiles if you time it correctly and the shield that protects one side of your body of your choice for the entirety of a level), special abilities (like freezing enemies, or reflecting attacks from all directions at once), and all the different types of AI harmonize beautifully.

Then the level design comes in. There are over 160 stages - some straight action, some puzzle (even without a single enemy), and many somewhere in between. They feel like proof-of-concept for the gameplay, and I don’t mean that in a chastising way, I mean it in the same way Super Mario 64 is a proof-of-concept for 3D games and the analogue stick. They’re also inspiration for the level editor, which has got to be one of the most intuitive and flexible ever in a game. “Little Bangai-O Planet,” as it’s been called by fans, is a bit of a stretch, but once you’re good enough to not die within five seconds of starting half the stages, it steals the show. Especially since you can share stages datacassette-style. Watching a video of a stage on YouTube and then downloading it from an mp3 file in its description is a wonderful convenience.

Bangai-O Spirits is undeniable if you don’t have any sort of prejudice against the genre you can’t get over, and if you’re patient with it. It’s a refreshingly hard game - one of few, actually, that doesn’t put me to sleep after an afternoon of NES games kicking my ass. So it’s fun, challenging, great in a group setting, and it fosters creativity. It’s the best handheld release in years.