30 years of the Sega Saturn: Radiant Silvergun

On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, and what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

One thing that was a nigh-guarantee in a Treasure game was that the design would subvert expectations. The studio, formed by disgruntled Konami employees who were not allowed to make the game they wanted to make — the game that would turn out to be Gunstar Heroes — made a habit of developing titles that took a genre that had been extensively mined, and changing it in some way or another that made it feel new, made it exhilarating, made it special once more. Gunstar Heroes itself did something like this, with the Contra formula turned on its head a bit to include the ability to melee the many, many enemies with sliding kicks, or to straight-up pick foes up off of the ground and yeet them across the screen — a comparatively ordered, organized structure made chaotic, made more vibrant, in a way that allows it to still stand as one of the greatest examples of the potential of its genre, over three decades later.

Radiant Silvergun, released in arcades and on the Sega Saturn in 1998, is one of Treasure’s most extreme examples of subverting the expectations of its audience to create something unlike any existing game in the genre. In the case of Radiant Silvergun, the genre in question is the shooting game — STG, shoot ‘em up, whatever you want to call it. By 1998, the foundation for the vertical STG was Namco’s 1983 release, Xevious. There had been modifications to exactly how the games played, additions to that foundation, and so on, but at their core, vertical STGs were, by and large at the time of Radiant Silvergun’s release, extensions of what Xevious had laid out 15 years prior.

Masato Maegawa, one of the founders of Treasure and the studio’s president to this day (Treasure has not closed, but mostly exists to update and re-release its games on modern platforms, hence the preponderance of past tense in this feature) once explained as much in a 2001 interview.

Hiroshi Iuchi, the director and producer of Radiant Silvergun, was another of Treasure’s ex-Konami founders, and, like many others at the studio, possessed many talents. Given the studio’s small size, it was common for developers to be artists and composers and designers and programmers all wrapped up into one, which is how Iuchi ended up as not just the director and planner for Radiant Silvergun, but also worked on all of the game’s background graphics and its graphical effects, and wrote out its story as well. Don’t worry, the “composer” mention wasn’t just to make things sound more impressive than they are: Iuchi was responsible for composing the soundtrack to Ikaruga, which he also directed, three years later.

In 1998, Iuchi (along with Maegawa) gave an interview with Gamest magazine on the upcoming Radiant Silvergun, where he discussed the state of arcades and shoot ‘em ups. Like with Maegawa, he was not dissatisfied with the games coming out, so much as intent that if Treasure joined this particular arena, that they’d do so in a distinct fashion — in a way that made it clear this was a Treasure game, and not “just” another STG.

Toaplan was no more at this point, but the legacy of that studio dominated the STG portion of the arcade scene: Gazelle, Takumi Corporation, Raizing, and Cave were all expanding upon what Toaplan created at the end of their existence, which was the “shot + bomb” style of STG, with a growing emphasis on the danmaku, or bullet hell, elements that had first appeared in V-V and later leapt nearly fully formed into existence in the middle of Batsugun, the final shooter Toaplan released before its closure. And other studios saw what was being put out there, and made their own attempts to join that party. All of these games were following in the footsteps of Xevious, but had added, as Maegawa put it, “flashy and outrageous” graphical effects, and “intricate danmaku patterns,” and so on. Advances to the genre, yes, and not Maegawa nor myself mean this as a negative, but there was a sameness to the genre, as Iuchi put it, given this Toaplan-style of STG was everywhere, rather than more distinct styles as had been evident when there were more and more studios regularly putting out STGs during that genre’s golden age in the arcades, which occurred before Street Fighter II brought the era of the fighting game to them.

If you were or are very into STG on a granular level, you know a Compile game or one influenced by it, and how it differs from a Toaplan one, just by playing. You know a Seibu Kaihatsu shooter by how it feels and how its levels are designed, and what’s different about it from a Taito original — there were more house styles to try to copy and build off of, basically, in the late-80s and early-90s, and in the mid-to-late-90s, the emphasis was more on pushing the very concept of bullet hell to its limits. A worthwhile endeavor, to be sure, but one that looked inward and embraced the niche space that STG had inherited with the arrival of fighting games.

Toaplan’s extensive family tree made it so that there was a bit of Toaplan in a whole lot of what was out there in the mid-90s, and there was nothing wrong with that, but Treasure wanted to make a game that stood out as one of theirs, that would feel distinctly them as Compile games had, as Irem’s shooters did, and so on. So, Treasure looked inward, as well, but in a much different way: they pulled from their experience on other games that were not shooters to add to the “dodge and shoot” mechanics that Xevious had refined 15 years prior. And Radiant Silvergun was the result.

Alien Soldier released for the Mega Drive in 1995 in Europe and Japan, and then as a download from the Sega Channel in North America. It was a run and gun that took the concepts of Gunstar Heroes and pushed them to their extremes: the game was primarily a series of boss fights, with 25 stages and 26 bosses. The stages can barely be described as such, too: they’re mostly short — put even more emphasis on that word than you think you need — breathers in between boss fights that are meant to allow you to refill your ammo, while also giving you a chance to absolutely mess up by taking damage you can’t afford to take, because you need all that health for the next boss fight. You will not pick up Alien Soldier and complete it on your first try, or your second, or fifth, or 15th. You will play this game again, and again, and again, learning every nuance of its level design and enemy behavior and what the various weapon loadouts can do for you, where you should be standing and firing and when to dodge and when to attack. Only then will you be ready to actually give completing it a go, but the important thing here is that there is no wasted effort: every run is an opportunity to learn, to pick up something new, to refine your skills, and improve your chances at surviving this gauntlet.

In 1996, Guardian Heroes released for the Sega Saturn. This was a beat ‘em up, but not your standard one by any means. This was a beat ‘em up with RPG elements, branching paths, and an extensive storyline, and it’s those RPG elements that should be zeroed in on in relation to Radiant Silvergun. Like with Alien Soldier, there’s always so much going on in Guardian Heroes, and the need to master crowd control is as present here as in any other beat ‘em up that’s ever existed, but you get some help along the way by being able to grow the strength of your chosen character by getting through more of the game. You level up and have skill points to distribute, allowing you to tailor the experience a bit and lean on your strengths and a strategy that works for you with a given character — a run can be made or broken by your decisions in it and the way you decide to grow, and how you use that growth to your advantage.

Radiant Silvergun’s design often apes Alien Soldier’s, in that you are shifting from one boss fight to another, with small breaks in between designed to give you more opportunities to lose the precious lives you need — lives here rather than health, which Alien Heroes sported instead. These sections are also meant for you to build up experience points, however, which is something that Alien Soldier didn’t mess with, but Guardian Heroes did. Like with Guardian Heroes, there are ways to earn far more experience points than you would by just thoughtlessly crushing everything in your path as swiftly as possible, and your ability to successfully do this will play heavily into just how prepared you are to make it all the way through the game, or if you need to give it another try and go at things differently. Whereas in Guardian Heroes, the thing that can net you extra experience is mastering the art of literally juggling your enemies rather than just quickly disposing of them, in Radiant Silvergun, you earn more experience by chaining. More on that momentarily.

Your score is your experience in Radiant Silvergun, and whichever of your ship’s weapons you utilize will be the one that earns the experience gained from defeating enemy ships and weapons. This is where the real subversion of the STG occurs: Radiant Silvergun rewards you for not shooting everything that moves. For dodging more regularly than you’re shooting. For being mindful of every shot you take, and focusing on one specific color of enemy rather than everything that appears on screen. So, not only do you have these RPG elements and an exceptionally boss-heavy level design in Radiant Silvergun, but you also have to worry about accidentally shooting the wrong ships. None of which have any qualms about trying to kill you, by the way, no matter how passive you happen to be around them. Dodge and shoot, with emphasis on the dodge.

There are no items, no pickups, in Radiant Silvergun — Iuchi explained to Gamest that chasing items was so often the cause of his death in other shooters, so here, there would be no such distraction. You have all the weapons you will ever have from the start: a forward Vulcan cannon, a weaker homing shot, and the strongest of the bunch in terms of pure damage, an angled blast that fires slowly out of the top left and top right of your ship, thus limiting its overall utility unless you want to increase your own risk to make it more effective… which you will. These are all fired with one button: A, B, and C on the Saturn pad (or arcade cabinet) respectively. These can be combined into three other types of shots by either pressing two buttons simultaneously: one combination create two lines that, when they touch an enemy, will electrocute them, another takes the forward shot and remove most of it from the front of the ship and instead fire that out the back, and the last of them combine into a combination lock-on and homing spread that helps serve as both a close-up defense as well as a way to find some hidden secrets that will reward you with 10,000 points upon their discovery. (The X, Y, and Z buttons on the Saturn pad are mapped as shortcuts for these combination attacks, as well.) There’s also the Radiant Sword, which swings around your ship in an arc — it is usually a defensive weapon for close-quarter range, when one of your weapons isn’t going to cut it, and it can also absorb the slow-moving pink bullets shot at your ship, the Silvergun. After you’ve absorbed enough bullets, the Radiant Sword becomes nearly screen-filling, and will cause serious damage to anything it touches once you decide to deploy it. Beware, you can’t store multiple charges at once, and you’ll lose your charge for this attack the moment you die, as well. You want to use it at the right time, but you don’t want to be too precious about that timing, either.

As for the chaining, each enemy type is one of three colors: red, blue, or yellow. If you defeat three ships of the same color in a row, you’ll earn a chain bonus. Defeat another three ships of the same color, and you receive another, larger chain bonus. Another three, and this repeats, and so on, until the numbers are staggeringly large. Easy, right? While you’re chasing red ships around, there are also blue ships and yellow ships coming onto the scene, either in the same numbers as the red ships, or maybe purposefully placed in higher numbers than the color you saw earlier and made sure to pounce on as your main, or tucked away in a place that would be very easy to accidentally hit and destroy whatever god-like chain you’d established to that point in one go. This is why you spend so much of Radiant Silvergun dodging, and being specific about that dodging, in a way you normally do not. The purposeful lack of shooting is extreme to the levels of a Battle Garegga, which punishes you by making the game more difficult the more you hold down the fire button, through an escalation of its intense rank system. Radiant Silvergun doesn’t have a rank system, no, but if you are scoring less, than your weapons grow in strength less, and good luck getting through the middle stages, never mind the end-game, if your weapons haven’t been powered up enough because you’re thoughtlessly shooting at everything that appears on screen.

One way in which “thoughtlessly shooting” can also cause issues for you is in the game’s many, many boss fights. You see, you score far more points against bosses if you make things more difficult for yourself by not just taking out all of their health and defeating them as quickly as possible. If you instead focus on the various weapons of these bosses — and each boss has many weapons — and slowly break them down, piece by piece, until all that remains is whatever core the ship’s health belongs to, then you’ll score more points. Both more points upfront for the act of destroying all of these pieces, as well as bonuses for destruction and the overall rate of destruction of the boss. It will seem daunting to do this at first, but as your ship’s weapon grows more powerful and you become accustomed to the patterns of these bosses, you’ll be able to cause more damage per second and know what to cause damage to, and when, in a way that lets you rack up the 100 percent destruction bonuses again and again, even against foes that, hours earlier, were difficult enough to get through even if you just focused on melting their health as quickly as you could. And since those bonus points are so significant, and your score is tied to your weapon levels, you will want to take the risk of destroying as much of as many of these ships as possible each time out, even if it means upping the possibility that you’ll die more often in the process. This isn’t new to Radiant Silvergun, no, but in conjunction with the experience system, it feels even more vital, since it ties survival and scoring together in a way that can be rare in an STG.

In the arcade version of Radiant Silvergun, thoughtlessly shooting or going at bosses with no plan outside of wrapping things as fast as you can is absolutely detrimental, with no exceptions save one: if you’re intent on attempting to complete the game without ever shooting, which is possible given bosses eventually self-destruct and the final boss is a matter of survival rather than offense, but also not exactly something someone new to the game can just do, either. In the Saturn release, which was made concurrently with the arcade one but tailored for playing at home, there is a way for you to eventually make your way through Radiant Silvergun, even if you can’t quite master its systems. And that’s because the “Saturn Mode” of Radiant Silvergun allows you to save your score and your weapon levels upon defeat, and then head back into the fight from the start with your upgraded weapons. There is not a single wasted moment or decision or shot or even second of gameplay in the Saturn Mode of Radiant Silvergun, as it all builds to you eventually completing a run. Every run makes the Silvergun’s weapons stronger, and familiarizes you with the game’s level design, its waves, its bosses, its secrets.

And the thing about each second counting isn’t hyperbole, either: Radiant Silvergun has a pair of running timers, one for total time the game is powered on, and another for actual gameplay within Saturn Mode. Playing for an hour gets you an additional credit, and the number of lives per credit also rises. Which means you start out with nine possible lives total at the start, three per credit, but can get those numbers way, way up the more time you invest into the game. And by the time you’ve got, say, 50 lives to get through a run of Radiant Silvergun, you also shouldn’t even need that many, given your weapons have been powered up so much by this point, and your knowledge of the levels and bosses and their habits has been both introduced and reinforced through repeated exposure.

This is exceptionally kind for an STG, and what makes Radiant Silvergun, despite how daunting it is when you first boot it up, an excellent way for someone newer to the genre to be introduced to it, or to find the one game that will make things click for them. It is not an easy game, by any means, but it creates an in for even those who struggle to find what makes shoot ‘em ups work for other people, especially with its focus on not wasting your time. It’s the STG example of what Chunsoft had perfected with the foundational role-playing game, Dragon Quest, over a decade prior: sure, you were going to fall in battle in Dragon Quest, and probably often, but you were allowed to keep your experience gained to that point every time you fell, so that you could feel like each attempt at defeating that troublesome boss meant something, so that you were not only more secure in your knowledge of the fight and what was being asked of you, but that your character was a little more up to the task each time out. No one is confusing Dragon Quest for an easy game, but it’s a fair one, and sometimes that’s all you can ask for. Radiant Silvergun has the same philosophy.

Radiant Silvergun was not a commercial success in Japan, where it released exclusively on the Saturn in the summer of ‘98 — Sega was already gearing up for the Dreamcast at that point, which would land in Japan in November of the same year. It was almost instantaneously recognized as a landmark achievement, though, that did exactly what Treasure set out to do, in that it stood out from the crowd in a positive way that brought serious innovation to a genre that, while still thriving in its newer niche environment, had become hyperfocused on a particular style. It’s one of the greatest STG ever, one of the greatest games on the Saturn, and flat-out just one of the greatest games ever, and not just by Treasure. It might not have been iterated upon by either Treasure or other STG developers to the degree that Xevious and Toaplan-style games were, no, but it’s a masterpiece from a studio that understood what made games work, and how to subvert what worked into something new.

It’s also aesthetically pleasing, both visually and in its audio. “Warning: No Refuge” is right up there with Darius’ “A huge battleship is approaching fast!” in terms of instant recognizability. The character designs are classic Treasure, and the Silvergun itself is a beauty, with a unique shape and little animated flourishes of movement as you control it that give it that little extra juice it didn’t even really need to be memorable. The soundtrack was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who has written music for so many games with great soundtracks over the years, working with companies like Quest Corporation, Vanillaware, Raizing, ArtePiazza, and Sting, on series like Valkyria Chronicles, in anime like the two Tower of Druaga adaptations, and, most famously, on games like Final Fantasy Tactics. The sound of which was certainly an inspiration for Radiant Silvergun’s own soundtrack, and which helped to make Radiant Silvergun feel as epic in scope and meaning as it is. Radiant Silvergun actually tells a dramatic story, and does so a bit out of sequence, about essentially accidentally discovering God. And God is not happy about it, which sets off the rest of the chain of events that you will experience, a series that includes a whole lot of death, and clones, and bouncing around through time, and being caught in an endless loop with a one-on-one showdown with God at the end of it. This isn’t just stuffed in the manual, either, but is actively being told, including with inset portraits of the game’s various characters — designed by Treasure’s most recognizable in-house artist, Tetsuhiko Kikuchi, aka HAN. The whole thing has narration and voiceovers, too, and while none of that is translated into English, you can read a localized version of Iuchi’s screenplay, scene by scene, to see for yourself just what was going down in here.

It is not the defining experience of the game by any means, but it adds to what is already one hell of a gumbo along with the gameplay, soundtrack, and visuals. The last of which look as if they pushed the Saturn to its limits, insofar as being able to deftly combine 2D and 3D objects together on screen — and lots and lots of them, often in massive sizes — together in a way that fills your vision. Iuchi’s backgrounds are distractingly detailed, the bosses are these huge 3D mechanical monstrosities that call to mind the giant, multi-sprite behemoths of Gunstar Heroes in terms of how they’re strung together and animated, and the bullets and lasers are well-defined and varied, in ways that let you know immediately upon seeing them what they do and what you need to do around them. Radiant Silvergun is basically a perfect experience for every sense that can experience it, a testament to what a dedicated developer could do with the Saturn. So of course, like so many other titles, it remained in Japan rather than releasing worldwide.

There’s only one area where Radiant Silvergun, release availability aside, could be arguably improved, and that was in the chaining: not shooting is great and all as far as subverting expectations goes, but there are plenty out there who prefer the chaining system of Radiant Silvergun’s successor, Ikaruga. In Ikaruga, so long as you complete a chain of three, another enemy color can then be attacked, with the chain and its scoring bonuses persisting so long as you then defeat three of that type before switching back to the other color. Later releases of Radiant Silvergun, starting with the Xbox 360 edition, utilized this Ikaruga-style chaining as an option for those who wanted it, and it’s persisted into the present, with the game now available on Switch, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 4 and 5, and Steam. To compensate for the fact that chaining could now be performed for even longer and more regularly, the size of the chain bonuses was decreased, so that you’re not just powering up your weaponry at an outsized rate. Your weapons, by the way, all top out at level 33, but it’ll take you some time to get to that point. And you should have already completed the game before you get anywhere near that, too — getting to that point is for people trying to clear the game on as few credits, or even lives, as possible.

It’s notable that there’s a recent mod of the Saturn version of Radiant Silvergun out there as of 2024, that introduces the Ikaruga-style chaining system, as well as a two-button play style previously exclusive to one arcade variant of the game. Since the visuals for Radiant Silvergun were updated for its post-Saturn releases, if you want the original look with some of the modern play (as well as another bonus), then you’ve got an option for that, too.

Besides Ikaruga, which clearly pulled from some of Radiant Silvergun’s design choices while becoming clearly its own thing as well, there are some notable inheritors of at least some of its design philosophy out there. Judgement Silversword was one of the earliest, and made its intentions very clear from the outset with a name like that: this Qute STG, first released for the WonderSwan Color, is broken up into a number of smaller, intense engagements and loads of boss fights, where recognizing patterns over repeated playthroughs is vital to maxing out your score as well as surviving at all. The weapons you begin with are the weapons you have throughout, and oh, you have a sword attached to your ship, of course.

There’s also Pawarumi, a much more recent edition to the STG canon from 2018, which is inspired a bit by both Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga. Developed and published by Manufacture 43, it assigns three different weapons to three different buttons, each assigned a distinct color, for more effectively tackling three different colored enemy ships. In order to get through the game, you will need to fire the correct weapon type at the correct enemy ships, in order to deal additional damage, recover your shield, or recharge your special attack — like Treasure’s classic shoot ‘em ups, this one requires you to do more than just hold down fire, and instead think through every situation in front of you in order to approach it in the way that will serve you best in the short- and long-term.

Still, there’s nothing quite like Radiant Silvergun itself, which was true at the time and a purposeful statement by its developers, and remains true to this day. It’s an exceptional achievement, one that would have justified a purchase of a Saturn all on its own back in 1998. If you’ve never played, then it’s never been easier to do so in the present, given its wide availability. And if you have played before? You already started thinking about playing again a few thousand words ago; you have no need of a parting message here.

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