Past meets present: Changeable Guardian Estique

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.

If you’ve been reading these features for at least a couple of years now, then you probably remember an entire month of looking back at the shuttered studio, Compile, and the key role it played in the history of shooting games, aka STG or shoot ‘em ups. It closed out with an essay explaining that Compile was no more, but that it also lived on in the form of successor studios of various sizes and focuses.

One ongoing project mentioned at the time was being developed by Cat Hui Trading, a small studio in Japan founded by Takayuki Komabayashi, who had previously worked at M2 and served as the director and planner (and sometimes more) on various projects of theirs, from the Aleste Collection to Namcot Collection to both the Sega Genesis Mini and the Turbografx-16 Mini. Komabayashi left M2 to form Cat Hui Trading, and continued with similar work — some for M2, some for Capcom, and some just for Cat Hui Trading. Changeable Guardian Estique fits in the last of those: it’s the first original game from the studio, and the developer roster might be relatively small, but it’s full of heavy hitters.

Komabayashi worked as director on the game, and was joined by Satoshi Fujishima, Takayuki Hirono, and Hiroki Kodama, among others. It’s unclear just what Fujishima did in Changeable Guardian Estique — he’s credited with “Jemini Yūdō & SE” — but given “Pac’s” career as a programmer, sound designer, and artist, it could have been anything. In his career, he programmed the SG-1000 and MSX horizontal shooter, Gulkave, and Guardic — the first game in the series that The Guardian Legend spun out of — as well as the original MSX version of the action-adventure title, Golvellius. Additionally, Fujishima worked on the art for all three, and the sound for Gulkave, so again. A little of this and a little of that in Changeable Guardian Estique isn’t an uneducated guess.

Kodama is credited as concocting the story for Changeable Guardian Estique, and is one of six artists listed. He most regularly worked on the visuals on Compile games, whether it be graphics or character design, such as with Puyo Puyo 2, Robo Aleste, and GG Aleste, the last of which he also served as the planner for, along with another Game Gear STG, Power Strike II.

Then there’s Hirono, who, along with Fujishima, came up with what would end up being the house style for Compile’s many vertical shoot ‘em ups when the two took over the development of Zanac from an unnamed developer at the studio. The impact of Zanac cannot be overstated, given how it introduced a complicated adaptive AI system for enemy rank to STG, while also bringing the many, many power-ups and power-up systems that Compile shooters became known for into existence. Essentially, everyone was aping Xevious to a degree at the time, and Hirono and Co., through Zanac, found a way to become a pillar of the genre themselves that differentiated itself from what so many other studios were up to. That’s far from the only thing Hirono has done in a career that’s piled up nearly 60 credits in roles from programming — the thing he’s done the most of — as well as directing and planning and designing as well as art and audio, but it’s also literally Zanac. Do you need more than that to get the idea?

That’s an impressive trio of ex-Compile developers, brought together with someone who worked on reviving a number of Compile games for M2, but it’s also not all there is to this roster. Junya Inoue (Toaplan, Gazelle, Cave) served as “Petit Adviser”. Kenki Fujioka (Gundam series Advance of Zeta, Medabots) worked on the visual design in a game filled with mechs. The sound team is just as ridiculous as the ex-Compile one. Shinichi Sakamoto worked on the audio and composed many games for Westone, including a number of Wonder Boy titles, and often under the alias Cheabow. Shinji Hosoe worked at Namco on games like Ridge Racer and many of its sequels, and eventually joined Arika — Changeable Guardian Estique, despite a 2024 release, isn’t even Hoseo’s most recent credit, since he worked on the music and sound for 2025’s Tetris: The Grandmaster 4. He’s also been attached to pretty much every other shoot ‘em up re-release or remaster that had a new arranged soundtrack added to it. Cave, Success, on many M2 projects, oh, and on a ton of Zero Escape titles, too. Hosoe also worked with a familiar face here in Ayako Sasō, as she also got her start at Namco, and has essentially the same career path as he has had, from Koei Tecmo and Ridge Racer to the various shooter remasters to joining Arika in 1996, while also being responsible for some of the fantastic music heard in titles like Rolling Thunder 2 and Xevious 3D/G. Last up is Sakuoki Kudo, who has served as a sound engineer or was credited with the music itself on a few dozen games from 2018 to now, primarily on projects that M2 has worked on, from collections to Sega Ages titles on the Switch, but with some contract work mixed in there with Nintendo and others.

This might feel like a long time to spend on the credits of this game before saying a word about what it actually is or how it plays, but it’s important to get through this for a couple of reasons. One, so you can just go “holy shit” about the assemblage of devs who played important roles in games you probably love: a mini Compile reunion combined with some Arika folks and M2ers, or, three of the most reliable signs that you’re about to have a good time with a video game that you can find, all in one place. And two, because Changeable Guardian Estique is a boutique release that has to be ordered from a cartridge manufacturer and publisher, Broke Studio, located in France. It’s a Famicom and NES game with no digital release, and seemingly no plans for one. Cat Hui Trading put together a team like this to make a throwback horizontal shoot ‘em up that would push the NES to its limits decades after its official end, and unless you’ve still got your hands on one and are willing to spend about the price for a brand new physical video game on modern hardware for Changeable Guardian Estique, then you won’t be able to experience it yourself.

On the one hand, that all admittedly feels like a waste, to intentionally limit the audience for something like this to such a small number from the start. On the other, most of the people excited about ex-Compile developers teaming up with Arika and M2 devs probably have an NES still plugged in somewhere in their house. Or even a Famicom. Or both! Maybe Cat Hui knew what they were doing here after all, says the guy who bought the game to play it on his NES that he didn’t have to dig out from storage, and did so on a couple of different CRTs “just to see”.

Plus, playing Changeable Guardian Estique on an actual NES serves to underscore how phenomenal a job the actual programming and technical work in it is, in the sense that you know for a fact that this is an NES game meant to play on an NES, and not just one drawn to look like that’s the case. Screen flickering was, regularly, a problem in NES games with a lot going on in them. Horizontal shooters were especially prone to suffering from this, which could be detrimental in some cases, or merely a distracting annoyance in others. There’s practically none of that in Changeable Guardian Estique, which, despite never having a shortage of objects on screen, be they enemies or bullets or explosions or power-ups or extremely detailed, layered backgrounds and even some parallax scrolling late, took forever to finally flicker during my time with it.

It was at the penultimate boss of the game, right near the end of the final stage, playing on the game’s Hard Mode. There wasn’t a ton of flicker, but when that enormous mech threw everything it had at me and then some more while I slammed down on the fire button twice to shoot off my special attack, filling the screen with even more rapid-fire bullets, the flickering began. And really, it wouldn’t even have been noticed if not for its total absence before that moment. It occurs more often in the game’s toughest difficulty — nicknamed God of Game — but that’s because it’s designed to kill you sans mercy from stage one.

Flickering or not flickering isn't a reason to buy a game on its own by any means, but it’s representative of the job that Hirono did programming it all. Compile stuck with 8-bit hardware well beyond what many saw as its sell-by date as they continued to support the Game Gear and NES and even the Master System deep into their lifespans, which is part of what made the M2/ex-Compile joint of GG Aleste 3 so fitting. They always shined in this space, and Hirono getting a chance to go back and show what the NES was still capable of all of these decades after Gun-Nac — which Hirono also programmed, and exceptionally so — is a reminder of that. Gun-Nac and the GG Aleste games and Power Strike II, for all that was impressive about them and their performance on aging hardware, did not attempt the same degree of massive, screen-filling bosses that weaved multiple attack waves together while you filled the screen with bullets, while multiple portions of said bosses animated. The backgrounds were not as detailed, the screen never quite as busy. Changeable Guardian Estique’s entire design would still be impressive were it just made to look retro, but it’s hard to deny that there’s something to seeing it on the actual thing it’s meant for, doing what it set out to do on it.

You play as the titular Estique, which is, in fact, changeable. And also a guardian, but that goes without saying. There’s a ship form, and a mech form, and they serve different purposes and have different pilots, one of whom is dressed a lot like a maid, which we can pretend, given the transforming nature of the ship, is a reference to Spaceballs. Given how many times “Aleste” has already been typed in this piece, many of you know without me saying that both of the pilots of the Estique are young women.

These two pilots — Mary, who looks most like your traditional Aleste pilot, and Kanon, the pilot dressed like a maid — are fighting off a group of space pirates, who have come to Earth to assault its major cities. Mary and Kanon are from the planet Petelguese, and have been sent to Earth to save it. You’ll go to five different locations — Hong Kong, Bayern, London, New York, Tokyo — and then a sixth level for a final showdown with the pirates, in order to complete Changeable Guardian Estique. Doing so on normal will not test you at all unless this is your first shoot ‘em up, and we’ve already been over how that’s unlikely. It’s actually simple enough to play that it probably won’t force you to really learn the ins and outs of the game’s systems. Hard will challenge you a bit, but not in an insurmountable way, more in a putting you through the paces one that will force you to engage with the game and its mechanics.

The traditional ship and mech play differently. While their standard shots are the same regardless — more on that in a moment — their special weapons are different, with the ship having the more powerful ones that fire more, faster, and a further distance. The mech, though, avoids environmental damage, which has its uses in a horizontal shoot ‘em up. Gradius or R-Type this is not in terms of general claustrophobia, but you’ll find yourself in cramped spaces full of foes and bullets often enough that “walking” on the floor with the mech is going to be appealing in order to avoid as much of all of that as you can. The mech form also recovers health faster; yes, this STG has a health bar. Your health — shield, really — won’t recover fast, mind you, but it does come back faster when you’re in mech form, so long as you can go a bit without taking any damage, anyway. Per the manual, it takes 10 seconds for your shield to begin to replenish in the mech, and 40 seconds in the ship.

What it doesn’t have is lives, however. Once that bar empties, it’s Game Over. You do have infinite continues, but there’s a catch. You either start again at the beginning if you hadn’t made it all the way to the boss before dying, or, you get to restart the boss fight if you had. Your score resets, though, so as far as personal challenges go, you’re going to want to keep trying until you can get through in a single credit. There might not be an online leaderboard, but there’s another reason to want to get that score to keep climbing, and that’s to earn shield refills. After scoring 80,000 points, rather than earning an extend, a cat face power-up — Maruino — will appear, and when you pick it up, you earn a chunk of your shield back, as well as some refills for your special weapons. Managing to secure one of these during a boss fight feels amazing, but there will be plenty of in-level moments where you’ll find you need it just as much while playing on the tougher difficulties.

There are multiple ways to rack up extra points. There’s picking up the weapons, sure, but if you wipe out an entire wave of one enemy type, you’ll score an additional 500 or 1,000 points, depending on the enemy type. Each foe defeated while you’re using your special weapon is another 500 points, too, which means you can really drive that score up in certain situations where the screen is overflowing with enemies, or more just keep on spawning out of a boss. Defeating bosses faster also means more points, but that’s just good practice, anyway, since the longer those fights go on, the lower the chances you’re going to survive, given they ramp up their attacks — in terms of both frequency and type — the more damage they take.

There are just two weapon types for your ship. One is the Wave, which triangularly fires three streams of bullets in a spread shot, and then there’s the B.I.T., named such for the “bits” that orbit around your ship, serving as both an offensive weapon and a defensive measure against enemies, obstructions you can blow up, and the destructible bullets. The “problem” with the B.I.T. is that it only fires one stream of bullets directly in front of you, making it tougher to plow through tougher enemies unless they’re right on top of you, while the con to the Wave is that you’re defenseless when it comes to anything that doesn’t approach you from the front, within range of the three streams. These negatives are positives, though, in terms of design, because you’re forced to want to switch back-and-forth between the two when you see the power-ups. Wait long enough, and they’ll switch to the other one, and make sure you pick it up even if you’re satisfied with the weapon you’ve got. While these attacks won’t change shape or increase in power in any way, you score some points for picking up what you’ve already got, and each collected weapon also gives you stock in your limited-use special weapon. On Normal, you can have up to six in stock, while Hard allows four, and God mode just the three.

These are known as Super Weapons. The mech has a punch that fires off a tall wave of energy, which is great when it hits anything because it obliterates it, but it also moves real slow and lacks the range of your standard weaponry. The ship just fires its weapon real, real fast, whether it’s the B.I.T. or the Wave, which is fantastic for wiping numerous foes off screen or for trying to make short work of both a boss and whatever destructible attacks it’s sending your way, in between all the indestructible ones. The ship’s B.I.T. special also briefly increases the number of orbs flying around your ship, which can do serious damage to anything that gets caught in that chaos. In addition, you’re invincible while your special attack is in use, so don’t be shy about getting right up in an enemy’s face or mechanical equivalent.

You use these special attacks by tapping the fire button twice in rapid succession — remember, this is played on an NES controller. Your options for inputs are pretty limited, and everything else is already accounted for given the D-pad is used for moving around, start is pause, you need a button both to fire and to transform, and the select button is already spoken for, too.

That’s because your ship has three speeds to choose from, and you use the select button to do that while the game is paused. Getting used to controlling your speed isn’t quite as vital as knowing when to switch between the ship and the mech forms or what weapon works best where, but it’s still a piece of the puzzle you need to figure out for success on the higher difficulties. Changing it while paused will take more getting used to, really, but at least it means you can take a second to breathe and think about what you’re doing next.

That you can continue on from a boss to try again despite the rest of the game being designed around a lack of lives or checkpoints speaks to some changes in expectations and design in the genre, changes made in the decades since these games were designed to be rude in a different way. It also helps keep you invested in trying and trying again, since the focus now is only on replaying the whole thing again if your goal is to earn that 1CC and the top score possible. And you will want to go back and play again.

When it all come together, man, this game rocks. It just feels good to play — frustrating, but in the right ways that turn to exhilaration when it all goes like it’s meant to for you, with all of its parts working in unison. It feels like a game designed by masters of the genre, is the thing, and there’s a reason for that which the first half of this review already explained. Changeable Guardian Estique is an exceptional shoot ‘em up, even more so because of the hardware it was designed for, but also just generally.

It’s a shame that it’s not more widely available and that you need an NES to experience it, but so it goes, at least for now and possibly forever. Broke Studio already finished its preorder period for both the Famicom and NES editions of the game, and now they’re carrying a stock of Changeable Guardian Estique carts, so get yours while you’re able to. If you’re seriously considering making this kind of purchase at this point, then it’s a game meant for you, anyway.

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