30 years of the Playstation: Gradius Gaiden

On September 9, 2025, the Sony Playstation will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be exclusively covering games released for Sony’s first entry in the console market, with an emphasis on those that explain, in some way, its unprecedented success. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius was an arcade series. Sure, there were some original games on the MSX, the Game Boy had its own line of titles in the series, and the way that Konami handled development on the Famicom and NES meant that ports of the early arcade titles were effectively their own games, but at the root of most of this was the arcade. The series’ sensibilities came from there, not at-home play, and the result was more than just visual: Gradius games, as excellent as they were (are!), had a little bit of a balance issue to them. One you could overlook, on account of said excellence, but it was there. This lack of balance worked in both directions: “Gradius Syndrome” was named after the series’ penchant for being far too easy once you had powered up the Vic Viper… until you died, and suddenly were unable to progress at all because now you were far too weak to do anything after a certain point in the game.

Gradius Gaiden was different. Developed exclusively for the Playstation, it was created by a team at Konami without members of the standard Gradius development group, which is likely part of why it received the “Gaiden” side-story branding. As director Seki Teisaku put it in a 1997 interview, “The concept for Gradius Gaiden was, to put it simply, to pursue and refine the gameplay of the Gradius series. We want our games to progress along with the development of new technology and hardware.” The team at Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo wanted to honor existing Gradius games and tie the whole universe together in the process, bringing in elements of Salamander since they occur in the same game world, but they didn’t want to just rehash the series, as the Game Boy entries tended to do. Instead, KCET’s goal was to push Gradius forward — in its visuals, in its level design, in its complexity.

You cannot overstate their success in these goals with Gradius Gaiden, which is, if not the greatest Gradius out there, right behind Gradius V — another Gradius that was not developed by the core team, and was made with consoles in mind instead of the arcade’s hardware and potential audience. It is stunning to look at, as it utilized the Playstation’s power in a much different way than many shooters of the era. Instead of leaning on the system’s ability to render 3D objects through polygons, Gradius Gaiden supercharged sprites and sprite effects, loaded the entire game up with bright, deep colors, and filled the screen with as many objects and bullets as it could fit. Konami’s love for rotating sprites is on full display here, on scales large and small, with the entire screen rotating a la Castlevania IV sometimes, or KCET programming the broken Moai heads to be rotating objects that could fire off charged laser shots at unexpected trajectories as they fell.

There is always so much going on, and it’s part of what makes Gradius Gaiden so engaging. It’s difficult throughout, even when you’re fully powered up: you always have to be on your toes, watching out for foes to pop in from underneath or behind you, or for your options to be stolen away, for suicide bullets, or for the environment to attempt to much more actively kill you by changing shape or because there are moving crystals. Gradius Gaiden is not easy, no, but it was made more difficult by design instead of as a side-effect, with the idea being that it was meant for series sickos. It was made by them, too: you would never know that no one involved with the core Gradius titles put this game together, considering how much it honors and pays homage to the series, how clearly it understands what works best in Gradius games, and then ramps it all up. The approach is similar to how M2 has handled Gradius ReBirth and Salamander 3, except, as fun as those games are, they did play things relatively safe and work within the accepted bounds of what Gradius already was, creating a more approachable version of them for their audiences. Conversely, Gaiden redefined what Gradius could be, and made it all balanced… but also very difficult. Even more so if you make it through the first loop and onto the second, which takes some ideas the development team had that were deemed too tough and gave them a home rather than discarding them.

Gradius Gaiden doesn’t start you off with three or five credits as a default. You get nine. The math works out so that you can continue once per stage, basically, and once you run out of credits, that’s that, better luck next time. The rank system in place in Gradius remains here in Gaiden, with the game becoming more difficult the more powered up your ship is as something of a counterweight on you, so you don’t want to just continually upgrade yourself for the sake of it — if you don’t love traveling at max speed, or don’t have to, then don’t fully power up your speed, because the game will then be more difficult for you in two ways. If you’ve powered up your weapons to the max, and then add a temporary shield, it is guaranteed that you will need to use that shield. Which doesn’t mean you should avoid the shield, by any means. Better to have it on, since you don’t know if the bullets you fail to dodge would have been there regardless, you know?

There were some complaints from critics that Gradius Gaiden relied too much on fanservice, but that doesn’t seem fair. Fanservice [derogatary] would have been a lot of simply reusing existing stages and concepts to wrap players in a comforting blanket of familiarity. Gaiden concerned itself more with throwing you for a loop in those moments, of leaning on player knowledge in a way that could act as both a nod and a surprise, and maybe even a detriment. Hey, remember all these old Gradius foes? Here they are in a completely different context: as part of a ship graveyard. Hey, remember the Moai statues? They have been given various new forms and abilities, this stage and format only looks familiar, because it is actually full of new problems to solve that will kill you if you approach it as if it’s actually the same. There’s a volcano stage in Gaiden, sure, but the developers didn’t want to “just” do a volcano even if it was expected: instead, it’s set in the level called “Event Horizon,” where a stage based on the first one in the original Gradius is being ripped apart by a black hole, with the fluctuations in gravity impacting your missiles and enemy shots, causing them to move on an abnormal trajectory. The boss rush isn’t a trip down nostalgia lane — again, past bosses were broken down and exploded, you saw as much earlier in the game — and the high-speed ninth stage is unforgiving in its pacing, with the usual starting and stopping taken out for the most part on purpose to keep it adrenaline-fueled as much as possible.

The team at KCET wasn’t the standard Gradius team, no, but they were highly familiar with the games — that much is clear. It’s also confirmed, though, thanks to interviews. Kei Chigasaki, a designer on Gaiden, explained in the Gradius Portable Guide in 2006 that, “The Gaiden staff originally worked on the Gradius Deluxe Pack. So everyone was very knowledgeable about Gradius, and while we were porting the arcade games, there were a lot of strong opinions exchanged about how "I would have done this differently!" and such.”

Programmer Yukihiro Yamazaki explained that, “And of course we were very conscious of the fact that this was a console game we were developing. We added more power-up capsules than normal, and made the checkpoint recovery easier than the arcade titles,” which significantly helped with the game’s balance. Yes, Gradius Gaiden is more difficult by design, but that it went softer on you in certain ways allowed you to stay in it, whereas in something like Gradius II, if you died after a certain point in the game, well, you might as well just restart the whole thing since coming back from losing all of your upgrades might be too much to overcome. Keiichi Isobe detailed that the goal here was to allow players to ramp up their skills over time to match the game, instead of drawing them in with the first stage in the arcade before throwing a massive, quarter-munching wall in front of them in the second. “Unlike an arcade game, you don't need to use up a bunch of quarters to play. We didn't have to follow a "kill the player in the 2nd stage!" arcade philosophy (laughs), and we could pace the difficulty in a more balanced way, with the goal of progressively raising the player's skills.”

Chigasaki revealed in the same interview that KCET had wanted to make a numbered Gradius entry, even if it was going to be for the Playstation instead of the arcade, but in the end everything worked out better for use of the side story convention: it allowed far more freedom, since it didn’t “count” in the way that making what would have been Gradius IV for the Playstation would have — the team was able to do whatever they wanted, and just point to the Gaiden designation as an excuse for it. Which is why not only is the Lord British from Salamander in the game, but so is a brand new ship, the Jade Knight, not seen anywhere else in the series until M2 brought it back for 2025’s Salamander 3, and the Falsion β, which probably would have had to change its name if it were in a “true” Gradius title, since Konami had a shooting game on the Famicom named Falsion, in which you piloted a ship of the same name.

Rather than selecting a loadout to roll with, as had been the case in Gradius games since II, you instead chose a ship that had its own specific weapons and upgrade paths. In-game, you could switch ships when you needed to continue, so you weren’t locked into the Vic Viper forever for an entire playthrough if you wanted to give the Falsion’s auto-aiming weapon a try, or utilize the ripple laser of the Lord British, or see how the game feels with the super powerful — but dangerous to use — pulse laser of the Jade Knight, which requires you get in close to your targets in order to catch them in its circular shot pattern that emanates from the ship.

Given this, rather than changing which weapons showed up in a loadout, as had been possible in Gradius III, Gaiden gives you the ability to change the order in which they show up on your upgrade bar. Don’t ever plan on using a specific weapon for a ship? Set it to the end, so you don’t need to waste powerup orbs skipping over it to get to the upgrade you do want. Want a shield there at the start, so it’s easy to get the next one at any time? Put it there instead of the speed-up powerup. Want to load up on options as quickly as possible? Move that near the front instead of toward the back. It’s not a required thing — if your brain is set on remembering the order of the Gradius power-up skills in the bar, then just leave things be — but for those looking to tweak, you can.

Gradius Gaiden showed off both the talents of Konami’s development team — even the ones not normally associated with the series — as well as what the Playstation was capable of. The latter was significant, too, as the Sega Saturn, for any issues it might have been seen to have in comparison to Sony’s machine, was known as the system of the era for both STG and 2D games. And yet here was Konami on the Playstation, mostly eschewing polygons in favor of just an absurd display of sprites and sprite animations in a shoot ‘em up. Except no one in North America was aware of any of this, with Gaiden staying exclusive to Japan for nearly a decade after release: as far as console Gradius games go, there was nothing in North America between the SNES port of Gradius III in 1991 and Gradius IV’s release on the Playstation 2 at the system’s launch in 2000, as part of a double release with the arcade version of III. That’s a significant gap in terms of time, but also in quality: Gaiden is vastly superior to both outings.

It would take until 2006 and the Gradius Collection on the Playstation Portable for Gaiden to see a North American release, and that’s been it for it since. The Japanese version of the Playstation Classic included Gradius Gaiden, but the North American one did not — if you wanted yet another reason to be disappointed by Sony’s effort on that mini console, well, there you go. It didn’t receive a release as a standalone PS Classic on the Playstation 3 for international audiences, and Konami hasn’t included it anywhere else on the Playstation Network since, either. It’s not in Gradius Origins, which is entirely arcade-based save the brand new Salamander 3, and there has been no word — yet — on additional Gradius collections by M2 that would go beyond those arcade “origins” of the series. Which means you can either not play Gradius Gaiden — terrible decision, for the record — or emulate it. Playstation emulation is certainly a solved problem at this stage, in terms of both quality and the number of devices you could do that on, so, have at it.

In fact, if you get your hands on a North American Playstation Classic, you could mod it to play Gradius Gaiden like it always should have been able to do. The Steam Deck has access to an excellent Playstation emulator, Duckstation, and the Bluetooth capabilities of the Playstation 4 controller gives you a close-enough experience to the original Playstation pad if you prefer to emulate through a modern PC. The point is that, with no other option out there outside of finding a copy of Gradius Collection or having a Japanese Playstation and an import copy of Gaiden, this is what you have to work with. And you should work with whatever you have, because again, it can be argued that Gradius was never better than it was in Gaiden on the Playstation.

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