

The series did get a pachislot spinoff in 2011, the series has cameoed in various other Konami games such as Pixel Puzzle Collection (a Picross-like game with puzzles depicting elements from and music lifted from various Konami games), the BEMANI series (mainly in the form of music remixes), and the second Zone of the Enders game (where it was depicted as a Transforming Mecha) and ports of the games get released from time to time (with the latest being Arcade Archives: Gradius III in 2020), but don't get your hopes up for a new Gradius game anytime soon. After that, Gradius just quietly went off the radar, outside of the aforementioned Otomedius. The last Gradius video game released was Gradius ReBirth (ironically enough) in 2009. Also compare Otomedius, an anime parody series which has a lot of breasts and Fanservice. And pumped with enough LSD to drop an elephant. note The first Gradius game was codenamed Scramble 2 before its final product release.Ĭompare Parodius, which is Konami taking this series and giving it a Cute 'em Up redesign. The first Gradius was released in 1985, but in a real-life Retcon, the 1981 game Scramble was declared part of the series in Gradius Galaxies. The power-up scheme was copied by a few other games, such as Apidya and Project X. It is because of Gradius that "Option" is often used to describe a powerup that provides the player with an Attack Drone.
GRADIUS 2 NES MINI UPGRADE
The traditional upgrade sequence is Speed Up, Missile, Double (a bidirectional cannon), Laser, Option, and Shield.

Gradius's power-up scheme is a staple of the series, and later games provided different upgrade loadouts for different ships, or the ability to customize the loadout before playing. This is in contrast to the system later used by R-Type, where there were multiple types of powerup each with a specific application. This allows the player to tailor their strategy as they play - for example, they may elect to skip a cheap upgrade and hold out for enough tokens to buy a more powerful one. Essentially, the ship is carrying its own shop around with it at all times. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows which upgrade they can purchase with the tokens they have collected, with the more powerful ones requiring more tokens. The Power-Up scheme in Gradius was particularly innovative for the time - destroying waves of enemies (or special Palette Swap enemies) drops glowing tokens, which the player can exchange at any time for an upgrade. The player controls the Vic Viper, a small starfighter, and faces off against the forces of the Bacterions, and generally destroys everything. You can also choose from the classic Gradius shield, which protects the front part of the ship, or a larger Force Field, which is weaker but protects the entire ship.Konami's Gradius (also called Nemesis in some incarnations) is one of the seminal side-scrolling Shoot 'Em Up series. Amongst the new weapons are a Spread Bomb, which drops at an arc and causes a damaging explosion when it makes contact the 2-Way Missiles, which fires both upward and downward the Tail Gun, which will fire shots in front of and behind the Vic Viper and the Ripple Laser, which is less powerful than the standard laser but much wider.

When you start the game or when you continue, you can choose your weapon array, which consists of four different arsenal variations. This ends with a battle against a gigantic mechanical spider, the Shadow Dancer, which is also completely invincible, and the only way to beat it is by dodging beneath its legs to find a safe spot until it leaves the screen. Later, the walls begin to shift and threaten to crush the ship if you’re not careful. The final stage is another base, which begins when the walls tear themselves apart and launch towards the Vic Viper.
