Axelay on SNES is absolute ice cream for your eyes and ears

destructoid.com:

I find scrolling shoot-’em-ups to be one of the most difficult genres to talk about, right up there with puzzle games. It’s a formula that has been utilized many times, and frequently the changes are very small. Most of the time, you maneuver your spaceship, unicorn, or spaceship with boxing gloves around on an automatically scrolling background until a much larger boss shows up.

I can’t say that Axelay is much different. The formula could be described as a close companion to Life Force or Abadox where it alternates between vertical and horizontal scrolling stages. Its weapon system is a little lackluster. Axelay is, by most metrics, a pretty flacid shoot-’em-up.

Except, it’s still worth experiencing if you have eyes and ears.

Continuing the theme of being unremarkable, Axelay’s story is that an evil empire is invading a peaceful planetary system and absolutely kicking its ass. But thankfully, there’s, like, this one spaceship that is really great. It alone can beat back the bad guys.

This is the storyline of approximately 80% of shoot-’em-ups. That’s a completely made-up number, but off the top of my head, I can name a few. Gradius, for example. One of my personal favorites: Raiden. Gun*Nac. They’re narratives that aren’t really worth telling, and many of them just don’t.

Axelay could have skipped this too, but it decided to do it in the same way it approaches everything in the genre: as stylishly as possible. There’s a planet that gets covered in explosions, goes dark, and is left just outlined by a corona. Someone snaps a locket shut for some reason. Who were those people? I don’t know. But that forceful snap means that it’s on.

The soundtrack immediately starts crawling into your ears and laying eggs in your tympanic