Space Harrier Neo (Feat. Valensia)
Air Twister is a 2022 mobile title developed by Ys Net, a studio headed by acclaimed game designer Yu Suzuki, best known as the director of a glutton of Sega arcade bangers and also the Shenmue series. After releasing Shenmue III in 2019 to a… mixed reception, the developer seemingly scaled back and shifted to the development of mobile titles, with Air Twister being their first.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the game was picked up by Apple for their then-burgeoning Apple Arcade subscription service. The game was locked to this subscription for roughly a year before ININ Games published the title on PC and consoles, where it had a very mild reception. …In part due to its $25 price tag. To put it bluntly, that is simply too much.
Positioned as a rail shooter rife for comparisons to the like of Suzuki’s Space Harrier (1985) and genre successors like Panzer Dragoon (1995), I was less interested in the title for its gameplay and more its aesthetics. The reveal trailer starts surreal enough with its giant swans, vague alien threats attacking floating cities, and floating mushrooms among a vast ocean. However, at the 20 second mark it begins playing some utterly bonkers prog rock music that completely recontextualizes the game as something insane.
The music of Air Twister was created by Dutch musician Valensia, an obscure creator who mostly found success in Japan of all places, and was brought in to give this game a more distinct identity, and it certainly worked for me.
Out of sheer curiosity, and looking for a game to decompress with while wrapping up a novel, I decided to check out Air Twister… and it’s somehow even stranger than I imagined it would be.
Air Twister Review
Platforms: iOS, Mac, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Reviewed)
Developer: Ys Net
Publisher: ININ Games
Part 1: A Space Harrier for Your Phone
Air Twister is an arcade style rail shooter where a woman with a magical crossbow floats through a series of 12 stages, blasting abstract enemies. Its core gameplay is pretty simple, only consisting of basic movement, firing slow laser balls, and locking on to launch a volley of homing lasers. Enemies come in waves, do their synchronized patterns, and launch their attacks, with the player being encouraged to blast them all away, both for general survival and for health bonuses offered at the end of the game’s 12 stages. (10 regular stages and 2 bonus stages.) During the boss battles that punctuate each stage, the woman, who I only learned was named Princess Arch through a trailer, gains the assistance of a flying animal friend— like a giant swan, fish, or winged elephant— but the aid is purely aesthetic.
The world moves at its own pace, you react, and there are not any significant mechanical girth to it in the game’s base form. Just shoot, dodge, repeat, and let the patterns sink in until you have everything down pat. This would be easier if the game had a stage select option, and there is, but it is obtained so late and does not let you choose specific stages for some reason. The core game is decently tricky, requires precision, learning patterns that move fast, and just not screwing up when enemies telegraph attacks. It’s not something I’m good at, or a genre I am all too familiar with, but I still think I am able to appreciate it on its base level.
While it is clearly designed around more modern sensibilities, I do mean it when I’m insinuating this was Suzuki’s attempt to revisit Space Harrier, as there are too many similarities. Even excusing things that are part and parcel of the genre, like the generally surreal environments, some things are just copied, and this much is obvious from watching a longplay. Certain enemies are lifted from Space Harrier wholesale. Some enemy entrance patters are almost exact copies of those in Space Harrier. Enemies fire the same radiating and rotating bullets as several enemies in Space Harrier. And if left unattended, Princess Arch will automatically gravitate toward the center of the screen, like in Space Harrier. Though, Air Twister is WAY slower (because it’s made for glass) and is not full of obstacles players are expected to collide with.
There’s also the matter of controls, which are worth interrogating, as they’re weird. Playing with a controller, Air Twister treats movement and aiming as the same function. Move Princess Arch to both aim and avoid obstacles. This is not a great system, as it is very easy to be blindsided by obstacles that you can’t see past her model, but it’s how Space Harrier worked and is not impossible to deal with. However, messing around with the controls to see if the mouse was more responsive, I realized that the PC, and possibly Mac version, let you move the Arch with WASD and aim with the mouse, just like a third-person shooter.
This is an objectively better way to play the game, as you can just have Arch circle around to avoid projectiles while quickly aiming at any threats coming on-screen with the precision of a mouse. Though, I could not figure out the best way to make use of the lock-on with this control scheme, so I just rapidly hit left click whenever enemies were in the reticle, and that worked pretty well. However, whenever you click a target or hold left click without holding a directional key, Arch gravitates towards wherever the cursor is. I don’t think I need to explain what that is not always ideal.
Beyond that, at its base level, Air Twister is a pretty simple yet honest experience. Learn the patterns, hone your reflexes, preserve the health that carries over from stage to stage, defeat enough waves to get a health bonus at the end of each stage, and strive to beat the game again and again, nabbing new upgrades.
…Wait, upgrades? I thought this was a straightforward arcade style affair. Well, it is if you play the game in arcade mode. But the main mode of the game, the standard campaign that it wants you to play, is the one place where upgrades can be used, and the main place where upgrade tokens— stars— are obtained. Well, that and the daily/weekly missions and “events” the offer rewards.
Sorry, you’re probably confused. I know I was. Because I was NOT expecting this game to be an offline single player live service.
Part 2: Air Twister is an Offline Live Service
When you first start Air Twister, you are put through the tutorial then the main campaign, not given the chance to really alter things. But when you inevitably die, because only freaks can clear an arcade rail shooter with just two credits, you are directed to the main menu. This busy page is full of icons begging for your attention with red exclamation marks— a live service trademark that I hate deep in my bones. You have a story codex to consult, cosmetics to put on, a list of dozens upon dozens of tasks that all confer some manner of reward for doing a thing, often one of the game’s hundreds of cosmetic items. You have a bevy of extra modes, from boss rushes to turbo mode to extra stages to this god awful lethargic clunk fest of a scrolling 2D shooter, and a reflex testing clicking mode. However, these are only fully unlocked by clearing the campaign many times.
To get most of these upgrades, you need to go to this overly complex web of hundreds of upgrade nodes, looking like a kitbash of the sphere grids of Final Fantasy X and the Crystarium of Final Fantasy XIII. It’s full of cosmetics, health upgrades that give you an extra fraction of a hit, and plenty of new combat upgrades. Such as barriers that protect Princess Arch from obstacles, the ability to slow down time, protective bonuses when at low health, and even additional weapons that you can only use in the main campaign mode. These weapons do everything the standard crossbow does, but have an added bonus effect if you hold down the button. Such as summoning a homing missile that lasts a few seconds or a laser that clears the screen of all enemies, which is so powerful you can rely on it exclusively for 90% of enemy waves outside of bosses.
These upgrades make the game dramatically easier, doubling Arch’s health, expanding what she can do, and applying additional safety nets for good measure. These types of upgrades are nothing unique… but they in what is a strictly linear arcade shooting games. The game offers modes divorced from this upgrade system, where you lack any cosmetics, alternate weapons, extra health, or upgrades, but I really have to question that design methodology. Starting the game with zero tools, then giving the players oodles, then denying them of theses tools, including visual cosmetics, for the “real game” is a strange approach. Especially when you need stars to unlock theses extra modes, and your main way to get stars is to play the main campaign or do your daily missions.
Why does the game need this? I don’t know! I get that they wanted even Apple Arcade users to come back to the title, but the game is simply designed as a live service, around daily retention, and making progress, which is bloody weird for an offline game. Is this a game about progressing and empowering your character or a score attack game? Because so much of the game is structured around the former over the latter and the only reward for the latter are some insane achievements.
I’m glad that happened upon this title as another example of an offline service… but nothing about its structure or progression or upgrades makes much sense. I do not understand how this game shipped in the state it is in, as its broader design, not level design, is simply not cohesive.
Sadly, this lack of cohesion can be seen in other parts of this game, as Air Twister has more big ideas, and I don’t think it executes them particularly well.
Part 3: The Musical Shooter
Next, let’s talk about Valensia. I had absolutely no idea who this man was when the game was first announced, and immediately sought out his music after hearing it in the reveal trailer. He is an incredibly skilled Dutch musician who has been putting out these utterly gorgeous high concept rock opera albums for the past 30 years, and I think he is also flat out insane. He’s damn obscure, to the point where I don’t know WHERE to FIND most of his albums, let alone buy them, and I really wish I could. Dude sounds like a Queen fan who focused exclusively on the weirder stuff until it became his own aesthetic. And what little I could figure out about him paints him out to be a fascinating character, a dope singer, and a fantastic composer.
However, I do not think that Valensia is a particularly good fit for a game of this sort, because I cannot understand what the hell this man is saying half the time. And not just when he isn’t speaking English. To grasp what his music is about, you need to focus on it, really focus on it, and Air Twister just isn’t the kind of game to facilitate this sort of focus. This is a score attack rail shooter where you need to be quick on your feet, watching for enemy spawns, but also relying on sound effect cues. You are listening for the sounds of enemies spawning, of them blowing up when your homing laser hits them. The audio landscape is used for mechanical purposes, the game is not forgiving (until you get upgrades), and if you are focusing on the game, you are not going to be focusing on the music.
It’s a mismatch that… should have been obvious, same with determining the purpose of bringing on a musical artist like this to create a soundtrack of new and remastered music. You want to either curate the game around his music, or curate his music around the game. And a rail shooter IS an excellent choice for a game driven by its soundtrack. I know this because I played Rez Infinite a few weeks ago, and Rez Infinite is the greatest album I’ve ever played.
If you have not played Rez Infinite, PLEASE play Rez Infinite. It’s shorter than a movie and a better rail shooter than Air Twister.
Air Twister is also a great fit for a curated soundtrack as stage progression is more or less fixed. You can only stop moving when you hit an object that knocks down Princess Arch. The game only has need for music in a fixed number of spaces: The main menu, the results screen, the four/five cutscenes, the 12 stages, the 10 boss battles of varying length with introductory cutscenes, and the credits. That might sound like a lot, but in total, the game would only need about an hour of music. The music would need to be designed around these timestamps, but that should not be a problem for such a seasoned and skilled composer. Valensia can make short 3 minute tracks, he can make moody interstitials, he can make 8 minute long power ballads. I know because I have listened to his work, for years, and he is good at all of these things.
Instead of doing this, the developers settled on a series of 21 tracks, with a total runtime of just under a hundred minutes. Very few of these are truly timed around the length of the cutscenes and none of them are timed around the stages. Were there cuts? Did Valensia over-produce music because he was having a good time? I don’t know, but it really sounds like the game design and music design happened in different sides of the Earth, and not just because they literally did. There was a way to make this better, to use this available music to create something more sonically cohesive than what we ultimately got with Air Twister. The album rail shooter is a concept that can, and does, work, they just did not really do it right.
I would ask if Rez director Tetsuya Mizuguchi just have some sort of magic touch that nobody else does or something. But he doesn’t. They were also doing this in Panzer Dragoon (1995).
Part 4: A Tale of AIR and Collapse
OKAY! Time to talk about the LORE!
What, you thought this rail shooter didn’t have a BUNCH of lore behind its world, all of its vague abstract enemies, and every one of its bonkers environments? Guess again, because Air Twister has some of the most bonkers lore I have seen in a game in a hot minute.
Aside from Valensia’s lyrics and one voice clip at the very start of the game, there is no dialogue in Air Twister and there are only a few lines of text, sprinkled through to give a vague idea of what is supposed to be happening. You can gather the basics from the visuals alone. That the protagonist is a warrior trying to fight against some invading alien force by shooting at them and using her animal friends. But where you are going, why you are going there, and what exactly you are doing or fighting, that’s all left vague unless you access the expansive lore of the game. And because I doubt ANYONE has cataloged this, allow me to regale you with the true story of Air Twister.
Let’s start with definitions, as the game is pretty opaque with this. The worlds of Air Twister is are created from a “White Hole” that froths out bubbles of extradimensional spaces known as AIR. AIR are, I believe, planets, and represent the main settings of the game, with the construction, purpose, and geography of these worlds all vary, to the point where it’s simply not clear what an AIR is. Part of this is due to how difficult it is to distinguish the literal text of the lore versus the prose.
When an AIR is described as being “at the end of time,” is that meant to be interpreted literally, that this AIR is an environment that transcends time, or is this merely flowery language meant to describe how the world is largely dead? Some worlds are probably meant to be interpreted literally, such as Dimple, where all knowledge is stored in a world of machines. But hearing that the forest AIR is where mental images are made real, and it’s largely a garden with topiary sculptures, I genuinely do not know.
This is a world where memories, dreams, and souls all have seemingly supernatural powers, and that can be seen with the main antagonists, the Needles. The Needles are born from the crystallization of memory particles and are described by the lore as demonic, but the soundtrack regularly refers to them as aliens, so I’m choosing to believe they are both. The Needles are the ten bosses of the title, and all of them have their own quirky background of what they represent, and the more I read about them, the more confused I became. For example, the final boss is described as an ultra-high dimensional structure created by the redimensionalization of eight angel spirit bodies, flatten into two dimensions, that burns human souls. I have so many questions from that one description.
This only becomes more confusing when considering the Vanguard, the common enemies you fight, who have their own oddball collection of backstories. The floating jellyfish are actually deformed mushrooms, the floating rhombuses are vessels containing and seemingly powered by human souls, some enemies are just the manifestation of human memories full of malice, while the giant bees… are just bees, dude. Everything represents something, except for when it doesn’t, and what it represents often raises further questions about the world. Such as… what the hell even is an Air Twister?
Well, an Air Twister is someone with the ability to control AIR, and the only Air Twister we know of is Princess Arch. I believe this is what gives her the ability to fly through the sky without so much as a jetpack, and gives her the strength needed to defeat the Needles, but she actually needs the help of her animal friends, known as Winddy. So, can only the Air Twister use Winddy? No, we clearly see regular soldiers flying Winddy in the opening cutscene, and it is stated that humans can use Winddy through the use of Buddy Crystals. What are Buddy Crystals? I have no idea. I don’t know what a Buddy Crystal looks like, how big it is, or where the hell it even comes from,
The four Winddy that Arch uses throughout the game are not given much of any significant character throughout the game, but the lore around them is as weird as everything else. Giant white swans are basically the horses of Earth, and Arch had a pet white swan she raised from a young age named Gamet. Ga’Reon is the captain of the Chameleon Corps who seeks revenge on the robotic Needle who destroyed his allies. Also, don’t ask how chameleons can fly now. Nature works in mysterious ways.
Phang is a winged elephant who was part of the royal circus and was blessed with many children who became circus performers like their mother. Then all of her children and fellow performers were killed by the Vanguard/Needles, so she joined the Reserve Forces, wishing she could turn back time to happier days. And the giant fish with wings… has no backstory. The writer just wrote a gag anecdote about humans using fish for a weapon of war.
An effort was made, there is clearly a fat bushel of ideas in the mind of… whoever wrote this. (There’s no writer credited on this game.) However, I have long since established that I do not give points for ideas, I give them for execution, and there’s no reason why someone couldn’t have just written down the full story, without this confusing piecemeal approach. I have not even covered everything there is here, like the Bubble Queen who was defeated by the Needles offscreen, granting them access to the AIR, or the implications that the Needles might be 2D beings trying to invade this 3D world.
What we got is a conceptually bloated mess of a story that took me far too much effort to understand at a base level, and even after reading everything and taking notes, I still don’t fully get it.
Conclusion: Air Twister is Interesting, but Just Fine
Air Twister is a game that mystified me for its eccentric aesthetic sensibilities from the jump. Now that I’ve hunkered down and given it a few hours… it’s somehow weirder than I imagined, but not necessarily in a good way. The structure around the main play experience is needlessly opaque with its live service like structure and complex upgrade system that does not mesh with the genre, or the game’s sub-modes. While I think the soundtrack is dope, it is not used nearly as well as it could be, and fails to do things with the same grace as games 20 years its senior. And the story… is a bunch of captivating nonsense with no real meat to it.
Looking at it as an arcade rail shooter, I think it’s pretty good. The gameplay is simple yet functions well, and with a short campaign, it does not overstay its welcome. Air Twister offers players a surreal rail shooting experience with enough vintage game designer knowledge to remain engaging throughout. But there are so many layers of questionable choices made that I’m left concluding that Air Twister is interesting, but fine. Just fine.