Past meets present: Assault Suit Leynos

It’s the summer of 1990, and the Sega Genesis has already been out for nearly a year in North America. Barely anyone knows this, of course — the original Sonic the Hedgehog wouldn’t launch until the next June, and that’s when Sega’s little black box would truly take off in North America. According to collected sources, it sold half-a-million units in 1989, twice that in its second year, but then 1.5 million alone in 1991 and another 4.5 million in 1992, before hitting its single-year peak — and a 60 percent market share — in 1993.

Before the summers of Sonic, though, the Genesis was already seeing some high-quality games that showed off what this 16-bit system was capable of. They just weren’t gaining much traction, which was a problem that persisted throughout the console’s life for non-Sonic titles, and the rapid growth of the platform itself didn’t alleviate this any. Just because, eventually, roughly 35 million Genesis and Mega Drive consoles were sold worldwide doesn’t mean that games released earlier in its lifecycle were given a new lease on life. Masaya’s Target Earth is one such release: despite it being the kind of tough as nails, arcade-style experience that you could associate with the Sega brand, it’s also a game that just kind of came and went back when the system was more anonymous. It very much deserved to be one of the million-seller Genesis games, but so did a whole bunch of other releases, and just 24 of its 880 official releases ever made it that far. Deserve has got nothing to do with it, and this is also why the system could be as successful as it was, challenging the SNES in head-to-head competition around the world, while also still being loaded with relative unknowns and cult classics decades later.

Luckily, Target Earth — known as Assault Suit Leynos in its original release a few months prior in Japan, where the Mega Drive was even less of an ongoing concern than in 1990 North America — didn’t just fade away into obscurity, giving it a chance to be one of those even if it couldn’t be a big seller. It took time, sure, but it got multiple other chances to be revisited or, more likely, discovered. When Sega agreed to have games from its pixelated past available on the Wii’s Virtual Console, Target Earth eventually made its way to that storefront — well, Assault Suit Leynos did, on the Japanese store — and it was added worldwide to the Nintendo Switch Classics service on the Switch and Switch 2. In 2015 in Japan and 2016 in North America, it received a remake, titled Assault Suit Leynos worldwide, for the Playstation 4 and Windows.

Either version of the game is one worth playing. The original 1990 release is a side-scrolling mech run-and-gun that attempts to inject the drama of a mecha anime into it by having actual stakes and consequences, including but not limited to failures that lead to the death of named and unnamed NPCs, while giving you a bulkier, “realistic” mech to control — it’s going to take you time to adjust to, well, how long it takes to adjust your aim in this thing. Your mech — your Assault Suit — might look like a normal-sized protagonist on-screen, but when you see it next to smaller machines or buildings or little space marines running around, you get a real sense of what the scale is supposed to be here, and understand why you move like that.

The remake highlights all of this even more by adding voice acting and restoring the cut sequences from the international release — apparently, publisher DreamWorks (no, not that DreamWorks) didn’t think American audiences were ready for some extra levels of on-screen violence, but Rising Star Games felt it was finally safe by 2016 — as well as some bits of advancement from the series that came from the indirect sequel/prequel, the SNES title Assault Suits Valken, which was known as Cybernator in North America. (Cybernator also had violent “adult” content cut from it for international release, too, which was restored in its own modern re-release. The panic over Mortal Kombat hadn’t even started yet, come on you guys.)

Here’s what makes Target Earth — which from here on out will be what it’s called when referring to the Genesis release, and Assault Suit Leynos for the remake — stand out if you’re a sicko. On “Normal” difficulty, which is for all intents and purposes “Easy” since there is no difficulty below normal to choose from, you get three lives for the entire game. You actually get three continues, as each death leads to a game over as you have just the one life per credit. Despite the lack of lives, you will still die often. The original game is notoriously difficult, as you recover health by avoiding taking damage long enough, but it takes about 30 seconds for the entire health bar to refill if it’s nearly empty, and the screen is not going to just stay empty waiting for that to happen.

You are almost always on some kind of timer, too, so it’s not like you can afford to just be standing around. The first stage only has one enemy that it’s required that you defeat, and it’s a massive warship that has breached the defenses of your base on Ganymede. While there isn’t a timer ticking down seconds, there is one showing how many miles from the actual base this behemoth is; when it gets there, you lose. You have to push through the mechs and tanks and artillery and bombers of the invading force, being careful not to lose too much health in the process because you’re going to need it against this base-destroying warship. You can defeat it, but you can even more easily be overwhelmed and destroyed by its many weapons or the accompanying ground forces that are following in its wake.

If you lose, you start the level over. Oh, and, except for your basic assault rifle, all of your weapons have limited ammo. You might love that spread shot since it lets you clip jumping enemy mechs at the same time it can take out a bomber flying overhead, but once you’re out of shots there, you’re out. The thing is, you’re going to want to use your limited-ammo weaponry, because the only way to get even better equipment in Target Earth is by scoring loads of points. And since you have what is essentially a timer in most levels, the way to score points isn’t by hanging around killing endless waves of foes — and they are endless, in many cases. It’s by completing the hidden mission objectives to score bonus points at the end of a stage.

For example, that warship in the first stage? You get 500 bonus points for every mile away from your base it is when you destroy it, so if it’s just 10 miles away you get 5,000 points, but if you down it at, say, 45, that’s 22,500 bonus points. Clear a certain points threshold, and you’ll unlock, at minimum, an equippable armor that adds four more notches to your health bar. You start with 16 segments in your health bar, and can double that if you unlock all the armor. That’s significant! But you won’t unlock it all unless you’re racking up points, and that means hitting those bonuses hard in each of the game’s eight stages.

These bonus objectives are varied, too. In the second stage, you’re escaping Ganymede along with the rest of your forces stationed there. The base is lost to the then-unknown enemy, but the plan is to get out and head to Earth to begin the counterattack. You meet a particularly powerful enemy Assault Suit on that route that downs one of your own warships basically instantaneously, and have to chase it away with your own weaponry while a slew of its allies come at you from above and the side. When you reach the shuttle, you might want to hop right on and escape to avoid any further terrors, but that would actually hurt you in the long run: no, you should stay and risk it, allowing as many of your allies to board the shuttle before you as possible in the limited time given to you before you have to bail. The more friendlies make it aboard, the more bonus points you get — 600 per unit — and that means more unlocks at the end of the stage.

The third stage tests your willingness to take risks, as there’s another escape shuttle that you need to board in order to make atmospheric reentry on Earth work without bursting into flames, but if you get on it too soon, then you risk the shuttle being destroyed by the enemies swarming it. So you need to defeat enough enemies fast enough to get on board with plenty of time remaining, so that you get more bonus points — 600 awarded for each second left on the clock. Oh, and in this stage, you’re flying around in space instead of on a planet, so the controls and even some of your weaponry both feel and will act differently — zero-G affects your movement as well as that of certain projectiles.

Stage four rewards you for completing it as fast as possible. Stage 5 for killing as many enemies as you can before time runs out. And the last few stages move between no bonus points and ones for destruction, but since the timer is not in play — and it’s more about surviving lengthier stages and difficult boss battles — you’ll want to take it slow and rest to heal up while conserving your limited ammo whenever possible. By this point, though, you’ll also have a great feel for what everything in your inventory does. The upgraded assault rifle is a legit force of unlimited rapid-fire rounds. The upgraded spread shot has fewer rounds, but packs more of a punch. Maybe you like having the arc of a grenade launcher at your disposal, or maybe you prefer a high-powered missile. The D-D fires an explosive round that turns into three falling, damaging clouds — that’s great for larger foes, especially stationary ones, and also lets you shoot and then dodge while it does its area of effect thing, rather than standing around firing continuously on your own.

There’s a lot of strategy to be found, both in and before the levels when you’re choosing your loadout. Sometimes you need your B-Pack, which is a rocket booster that lets you gain additional thrust in the air on and jumps, and sometimes it’s a waste of an inventory space. Armor is good, but too much armor also limits what else you can carry — none of this equipment stacks, four armors means four slots being used up by armor. The shield can be held in front of you and cut damage in half, but maybe you decide you don’t need it since you can heal if you stand around… or maybe it’s exactly what you need so you stand around less, or in stages where you don’t have time for that but do need to avoid the full brunt of waves of shots fired at you.

Assault Suit Leynos retains all of this and more: there is a revamped game mode designated as “Arcade” which adds in checkpoints and reduces the difficulty, while adding an actual “Easy” difficulty to it. It’s still plenty challenging for newcomers, so don’t feel bad if you start there and work your way up. If you just want access to the original game’s feel and flow, good news: there is also a “Classic” mode where the checkpoints aren’t there to get in the way of you having a good-slash-bad time. Everything is polygons now instead of sprites, but developer Dracue made good use of the extra horsepower of 2016, filling the screen with loads of baddies and bullets and explosions. You can still get the game to the point of slowing down some in certain segments, which is impressive and a reminder of just how much was going on in Target Earth back in 1990.

In Target Earth, you play as a mech pilot on Ganymede, Rex, who is part of the force attempting to repel an invasion by unknown assailants. They have tech similar to your own, but it will be unclear until late into the game just who it is that you’re fighting. All you know early on is that they got the jump on the entire Sol system, and have already made their way to Earth — you escape Ganymede, head to Earth to free it from the mystery forces, then start your counterattack once you have the warships to bring the fight to the outer reaches of the system.

Target Earth is plenty fun in 2026, but your best bet for experiencing all that this game attempted to be is with the 2016 remake. If it’s because you want the checkpoints, that’s fine, but the real reason is because it’s the complete version of the original game in terms of story, and in English. The cut content is no longer cut, and while it certainly adds to the proceedings that it was cut is one of those things where you wonder what, exactly, was objectionable — you mean that people can die in a war? The children can’t know that!

The remake also unlocks more and more as you play it, based on what your overall score is. The more you play, the more you score, the more you unlock. These include options like the original BGM, weapon and accessory unlocks for practice mode, stage selection to pick up from anywhere you’ve completed — including from specific checkpoints within a stage. There is also the ability to influence the direction of the story, based on how well you pull something off — you can save a comrade from burning up on reentry in the third stage, for instance, but only if you have enough armor equipped to act as a human — well, mech — shield for them. Which means having unlocked enough armor to do it, and knowing to equip it for that stage, and dealing with the repercussions of having that much armor but fewer weapons for it while you play.

Target Earth is great, and unrelenting. Assault Suit Leynos is also great, and relents a little, but only if you want it to: it’s still very much the 1990 game, just jazzed up and not looking to punish you for dying in ways beyond cutting into your end-of-level grade. That does have an impact, since it means you will unlock fewer accessories and weapons with a poorer performance, but you do, at least, get to keep playing instead of running out of lives and having to start over the whole thing. And that a version of the original exists within this remake, with the visuals being the biggest difference, is just a bonus for those who don’t want the game they know to have eased up even a little bit.

Give this one a shot — Masaya games are worth your time, and the Assault Suit ones, especially. Dracue did an excellent job of bringing Leynos into the present, and if you don’t want to bother with a remake, and just want the true original? Well, if you have access to the Genesis portion of Nintendo Switch Online, then you can try your luck there, instead.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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