Past meets present: Truxton Extreme

Toaplan invented the bomb. In the now-defunct company’s first shooter, 1985’s Tiger-Heli, the limited-use bomb was introduced to the genre, with the idea being that it gave players an aggressive and exciting way to attack enemies. Instead, something unexpected happened: as players got better at Tiger-Heli, they intentionally left their bombs alone — there were scoring bonuses for not using them, for one, and second, there were bragging rights to win. If a bomb had to be used, it was purely as a defensive measure: an emergency response to save you from being downed by a bullet you couldn’t otherwise avoid, or an enemy craft you were going to crash right into. From the bomb’s very inception its future possibilities were revealed by those playing Tiger-Heli, and the industry at large took note, with later STG designed around the use or disuse of these screen-clearing wonders.

Toaplan, too, began to build its games around the idea that bombs could save you from enemies and yourself, but also that, with a healthy amount of practice and memorization, you could get away without using them and reap the rewards at the end of the stage. Truxton was different, though. There were no end-level bonuses in the 1988 STG, Truxton — known as Tatsujin in Japan, a word meant to convey “expert” — but instead you defeated a boss and rolled right into the next stage without interruption, the scrolling and music resuming in that moment of active transition. Here, Toaplan wanted you to use the bombs, both because they had designed a game where use of the bombs was very likely to prove necessary, and because they just looked sick: bombs exploded into massive screaming blue skulls on screen. Creating situations where things were chaotic enough that bombs needed to be used, and making things look incredible — that was Truxton, yeah.

It was Toaplan’s return to sci-fi shoot ‘em ups, as the company had been better known for its more realistic — well, for 1980s video games — military shooters, based on helicopters and World War II planes. Truxton was a fully realized sci-fi world with enemy ships patterned after insects, set in the vast reaches of space, and featuring true sci-fi weaponry like the iconic screen-filling blue laser beam, and the fact that enemies could be designed however Naoki Ogiwara imagined them rather than needing to be in line with realistic planes and tanks meant that the very shape of these enemies determined where they might fire from on their bodies, and what — it opened up possibilities and freedom of design for the team, according to composer, designer, and director Masahiro Yuge, who also explained in later interviews that part of the goal of Truxton was a game where specific weapons needed to be used for specific sections in order to truly master it. “I wanted to make a game where the more you remembered, the better you would become. I focused on adding a lot of sections where you needed a specific weapon to deal with certain attacks.”

“Tatsujin” does not just mean expert in a straight translation, but is more of a philosophical concept meant to convey a level of expertise and mastery that you could spend your entire life attempting to attain. That made it the perfect name for the kind of game Yuge wanted to develop, as well as the name for Toaplan’s successor studio founded by Yuge in the modern era. Tatsujin, formed in 2019, eventually collected the rights to all of Toaplan’s scattered properties decades after its demise, and has been re-releasing them across modern platforms while also working on new entries in some classic series. In 2024, Snow Bros. Wonderland arrived as the first 3D entry in that series, and now in 2026 Truxton has returned, in the form of Truxton Extreme. While Wonderland was plenty enjoyable with some caveats, Truxton Extreme is a fitting return to the genre, worthy of both the Truxton and Tatsujin names, without any level of “but” attached.

Truxton Extreme feels very much like a Gradius sequel, in that it's revisiting old Truxton haunts and enemies but from a different angle with new twists — it’s all new, not rehashed, but it’s still going to look and even sound familiar. There are plenty of callbacks and returning enemies and even some similar structures, but it’s all done through the new widescreen lens while also coming across as very different in both setup and pacing. Extreme follows Truxton II — Tatsujin Ou — in having fewer enemies coming from behind than in the original game, but “fewer” is still a good amount: the original Truxton was lousy with foes that snuck up right behind you and collided for a life-ending explosion.

Truxton often felt claustrophobic owing to it packing the screen with dangers, and that's felt here again even with the move to a 16:9 horizontal widescreen display from its traditional vertical orientation. Tatsujin used the extra real estate here, and while enemies still come up from the bottom of the screen, the more significant issue for the player is going to be the waves that enter from the sides, or the massive amount of space that revenge bullets have to chart a path across the screen, testing your own ability to gauge where those shots are actually going to end up relative to your own location.

And oh man, those revenge bullets. Outside of boss fights that's the bulk of the shots you’ll be dodging, even, with the third stage, in particular, designed heavily around this concept to the point that utilizing Extreme’s new homing shot in that stage will actually make your life more instead of less difficult: you have less control over which enemies you are shooting at when with the homing attack, and therefore a more difficult task of dodging or timing revenge bullets and your path around them. Yuge is one of two credited with “Game Design” on Truxton Extreme, and he was intent on making this feel much like the original Truxton, where specific weapons in specific sections mattered.

On that point, there are once again special containers you can only break with specific weapons that contain an extra life here, which encourages you to absorb the risk of a different weapon sometimes even if you’re comfortable with utilizing the one you already have equipped. This is especially necessary in the arcade where you have to play all six stages in a row and don't get your bombs auto-refilled between stages.

Yes, there are multiple modes: arcade, of course, where you play the game’s levels one after the other, but also a Caravan-style “Arena” mode that’s meant specifically for scoring as many points as possible in two minutes, a “Heart Starter” mode for beginners where you can get hit but it stuns your ship instead of outright killing you, and a story mode with three playable characters, each with their own digital comic telling the tale of their joining the ranks of the elite fighters, and the battle against the Geranium forces in space. More on all of these elements in a bit.

Another thing that’s different in Extreme compared to the original Truxton — which Yuge himself explained this game built off of rather than its sequel, since he was less involved in the production of that game — is that the stages no longer bleed right into another. When a boss is dead, the level is over, there aren’t new waves of enemies or leftover ones from the fight to deal with as you move toward the next level. This is true even in the game’s arcade mode, which has post-level scoring screens with bonuses that didn’t exist in Truxton or II. A little disappointing in one sense, in that this shift from one to the next was often a Toaplan staple, but also as Truxton Extreme moves things more towards a score-chasing setup than its predecessors, it’s one that fits the game that’s here.

Toaplan was never overly concerned with scoring, at least not in the games designed primarily by Yuge or Tatsuya Uemura — emphasis on scoring over memorization and survival were more of a late-Toaplan design that came out of games like V-V/Grind Stormer and Batsugun, with Tsuneki Ikeda, later of score-obsessed Cave, involved. In Truxton Extreme, though, Yuge does that naming convention justice by combining the kind of memorization-based design that led to the original Truxton with the kind of scoring mechanics that were present in some post-Toaplan games he was involved with during his time with Takumi, one of the many studios that, like Cave, rose from Toaplan’s ashes. Takumi was responsible for some quality STG like Mars Matrix and a trio of Giga Wing games, and with Giga Wing, especially, “medals” were a key part of the scoring system.

Yuge seemingly never became a bullet hell guy like some of his fellow Toaplan alum — he was a composer on those Takumi games, not a programmer nor designer — but he brought some influence from his time with Takumi to Tatsujin all the same. There are medals to collect in Truxton Extreme, which significantly boost your score, but they aren’t all-encompassing like they were in the Giga Wing games, where, frankly, the scoring is so high and ridiculous that it’s difficult to tell if you even actually did well or not. In Extreme, you can only make these medals — known as “Amber Jewels” here — appear by use of a special attack that is available to you as you charge up a meter through defeating enemies. Use of this special weapon gives you a supercharged version of whichever one is equipped, hyper-focused and firing at a higher rate until the meter empties or you let go of the trigger, but enemies defeated with it drop these jewels, which are worth an additional 100 points each. Unless you have managed to build up an extra stock of Speed and weapon Power-up pickups, in which case you could make it so that you earn 1,000 points per jewel — since you can basically fill the screen with jewels when deploying this charged-up weapon at the right time, that’s a whole lot of extra points sitting there waiting for you, hundreds of thousands of them at a time when done right.

Like with the bombs of Toaplan days gone by, though, it’s not just for that — since this is a more powerful weapon than your standard ones, it can also be worth saving its use for the toughest sections, rather than just the ones where you can score the most points from its deployment. The scoring vs. survival argument rages on, maybe even more than usual, since this edition of Truxton actually does care about scoring for reasons beyond earning extends.

Truxton Extreme was made by a relatively small team, but its full of heavy hitters. Yuge, despite being CEO of Tatsujin, stepped back into active development to serve as both the composer and a game designer — and the soundtrack is excellent, finally sounding like the full band experience Toaplan wanted their games to feature decades ago on hardware that can let it happen — as well as being credited with “General Direction”. In addition to Yuge, though, was game and level designer Takayuki Saito, who has a résumé that certainly fits with Yuge’s own. Saito was a designer, programmer, and/or director on a number of Raiden and Raiden Fighters games, was a programmer, director, and level designer on the G.Rev cult classic, Mamorukun Curse, and was a software designer on the Xbox 360 version of Space Invaders Extreme. His work on modern shooters — especially G.Rev’s, which focus heavily on vertical shooters played on horizontal monitors — is keenly felt here, and a perfect fit alongside Yuge’s general design philosophy for Truxton.

Also a major part of the game is ex-Toaplan developer and manga artist Junya Inoue — he’s the one responsible for the comics in the three different story campaigns, and it’s not just a few pages, either, with lead programmer for Truxton Extreme, Hiroshi Adachi, telling Famitsu in that pre-release interview that it was basically the equivalent of two manga volumes. To get through story mode, you will at least see the comic, though, the game lets you skip to the end or autoplay rather than have to read it all — you might not want to read it all again on a replay, considering how much of it there is. The story is different depending on which character’s campaign you’re playing through: while the levels themselves repeat, and the ships are the same, there is still reason to go through each for the purposes of the differing stories as well as for logging scores on the leaderboards.

As previously mentioned, the game does feature an arcade mode in addition to story, and here you play through the game’s stages uninterrupted. These stages are long, roughly 10 minutes each, with a clear break in the middle where the music shifts and a new track plays, which also comes with a change in locale and level design, too. The stages feel long, yes, but mostly in a tension way — they are designed with two goals in mind, basically, for two different styles. First, in story mode, each level is self-contained: you complete one at a time, then can start at any time from the next in line, with all the weapons and power levels of the previous stage remaining, which means you can restart from whatever level of power that was again and again until you complete this new level, too. This makes completing story mode a challenge you can pick up and put down when you want, without losing progress. In arcade mode, though, these 10-minute stages make completion a gauntlet — that’s not a negative, so much as it’s clearly Tatsujin going, “hey, this one is the mode for sickos.” An example: last I checked in, I had the highest arcade score in campaign mode of all the pre-release players on Nintendo Switch 2 — I was only halfway through the arcade edition of the game, meaning, no one had even completed the arcade mode in full yet.

At least, not in a way that logs on the online leaderboards. You have plenty of options here for making the game easier or more difficult, but switching from default settings makes you ineligible for logging your score to the online rankings. The more you play, the higher your player level gets — you can track your progress in a variety of stats, including your level, within Truxton Extreme. And the higher your level gets, the more game modes and options you open up. Want to have bombs automatically go off if you have them in your inventory, to avoid dying so long as there is a bomb to save you? You can turn that on. Want some modified weaponry that will make your life easier, or to ratchet up the lives you start with to 10 instead of three? You can do that, too! But again, you just won’t be able to load that score into the online leaderboards. Still, it creates a situation where people can complete the arcade mode from start to finish even if they aren’t going to be going up against the true sickos focusing solely on memorization and about an hour of Truxton Extreme to try to one-credit clear this thing for online bragging rights.

The Arena mode is a two-minute caravan with a level that doesn’t exist in the story or arcade mode of the game, with the idea being that the faster you are able to defeat enemies, the more enemies and bonus points you’ll end up with, further increasing your score. It feels very different from the rest of Truxton, but in the end, you still need to memorize enemy locations and focus on what weapons would work best, so at the same time it’s still extremely Truxton — it’s kind of incredible how easily Yuge and Co. fit a non-scoring-focused Toaplan-era game into score-chasing and 2026. It all feels so seamless on every level.

There is also a Team Mode version of Truxton Extreme, for playing with a friend — you share bombs, lives, and your score, and while the first two of those can be a challenge depending on their trigger finger and attention to detail, twice the firepower is going to be a boon. There’s a little something for everyone here in Truxton Extreme — people who want more story out of games, even their shoot ‘em ups, arcade sickos looking for a challenge, and those in need of couch co-op in the year 2026. If you are all three of those kinds of people, well you’re going to be obsessed with this one.

This all fits within the spirit of Toaplan’s design, decades later. As fellow Toaplan composer and game designer Uemura, who is also working at Tatsujin these days, explained in a 2012 interview:

Truxton Extreme seems to be capable of fitting every potential audience for Truxton, between the above and the “Heart Starter” mode that allows for multiple hits instead of instant death. The balance can be just right, because you can tweak it for yourself — this isn’t an arcade game that needs to be appealing to the arcade itself for the purposes of making the most money possible, but one made for platforms at home, for them to master in the way they want to and are capable of — maybe pushing through Heart Starter mode convinces someone to give Story a try, and making it through Story gets someone into Arcade, and eventually that same person decides hey, you know what, let’s turn those special bonus features off and play this the way Tatsujin intended.

And Truxton Extreme is good enough to warrant that level of playing again and again, of building mastery and thriving despite the many lost lives and exploded ships it will take to get there. Truxton Extreme is not just worthy of carrying the Tatsujin name in the present, but its meaning, too, and that’s as much worth celebrating as it is playing.

Truxton Extreme releases on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S, Steam, and GOG on July 30, with physical copies available for the three consoles. A review copy for Nintendo Switch was provided by publisher Clear River Games, and played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

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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