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I loved playing raiden 2 in the arcades, and this game is the next step up from 2. The game itself is almost exactly like raiden 2, except that now the third power up is a green laser instead of the purple one you remember from 2. The game has some neat modes, such a dual stick mode, where one player steers 2 ships simultaneously using the analog sticks. You can also flip the screen sideways if you want to. There is also two player, which is lots of fun. If you like vertical shooters, this is a pretty good one to get.
I was so excited to play this game, after spending time with the mother of all shooters Raiden II which was one of the only games to ever leave me bug-eyed and with my heart pounding out of my chest! Could Raiden III possibly find a way to improve upon this classic? The answer is simple. No way. Not even close. Not even close to the original Raiden, for that matter. There are so many things that Raiden III gets wrong, and very few which it gets right. The best part of the game is the backgrounds! Out of seven levels, you have your perfunctory space level, battleships in the harbour level, no less than two asteroid levels. The levels have some new twists, such as walls that scroll and rise up in front of you as you shoot them. But you soon realize that the enemies are strictly 8-bit. They are small, with little detail. Most of their shots look the same, leaving you dodging the same white dots over and over again. The bosses look a lot worse than a typical Sega Genesis game from 15 years ago. You are given options, such as difficulty, screen orientation, number of bombs, and starting lives. There are options for two players, and a mode where you control two ships on one controller, although it would have been much better if each stick controlled each ship. The control feels nice and fluid with the analog stick, but here is one of the major problems with the game. You can dodge a little bit by leaning, but it takes forever to get from one side of the screen to the other- two to three agonizing seconds! Combine this with the totally weak weapon selection. You have one ship and two weapons. Three really but two are the same. You have your spreading out like a V weapon, which is the best, and you have your two squiggly strait-line weapons, which are absolutely worthless. This creates situations where you are attempting to avoid the floating power up icon at all costs. It is a sad thing indeed, when the most feared enemy on the screen is your own power up! One must over-come the urge to set all lives and bombs to the maximum of seven, or you might just blow through this in the first twenty minutes. I have heard that this was a short game, but not any more than any other arcade port. It has seven solid levels, and you earn your continues by picking up icons during play. This is the easiest Raiden ever on the default normal difficulty setting. I found that playing on arcade difficulty with five lives and four bombs to be the best set-up-while trying to beat the game using the continues that you pick up. But the worse thing about this game is the feel. There is no intensity whatsoever. Very little twitch reflex gaming at all. In fact the only twitching I did was when I kept almost falling asleep while I was playing it. There is very little faking out of enemies as in past Raidens, as most of them appear in quick Galaga type waves. There are so many annoying things about Raiden III. Such as the sounds, which seem to be used over and over, and which are tinny, and mainly sound like little cap-guns. The bosses are multi-segmented and it is annoying to have to keep fighting well after you think you have finished them off. Their bullet patterns look real nice, but you will be too busy blowing off smart bombs to notice. There is no boss in the universe who can withstand ten of these, which means that you rarely lose more than one life on them, or have to dodge or anything! .. This one will go back on the shelf forever!Read full review
I was hoping for a mindless, massively destructive, button-mashing shooter, and this game fills that niche perfectly. I decided to buy Raiden III because I love the arcade classic, Raiden Project, so I figured the third in the series had to be even better. The game is a fun way to waste a half hour here and there (playing it much longer than that can get redundant). People selling this game, however, need to be sure to list the game as a blue disc, which certain newer PS2's will not read. Luckily, mine does read it, and it's a fun game if you're looking for cheap thrills through colossal explosions and brainless button mashing.
Raiden is a series of horizontal shoot em up games. You only have 7 levels but it's one of those games that's easy to pick and play but hard to master. I don't own raiden 1 and 2 yet but raiden 3 got me into the series. You also have 3 power ups a blue laser, a green laser which is a bit tricky to control and your standard vulcan shot (my fav). You can also play 2 player co op. There are some neat features in raiden 3 that other shooters don't have like replay vids from an expert player so you can learn some techniques, level select, and other goodies. All in all this an old school straight shoot em up some ppl complained that it didn't push the series foward like with gradius 5 or r-type final.
This game is the reason I bought a Playstation 2. After growing tired of the Dreamcast shooters obsessed with flooding the screen with an insurmountable amount of projectiles, RAIDEN III was very welcome. Great controls, great weapons, and no matter how busy incoming fire becomes there is always a clear "way out". It's the shoot 'em up genre at its finest. Shooter fans should hunt this down...and a PS2 to play it, of course.
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