Sylphia (Turbografx-CD) review "Those Greek soldiers were not expecting a fairy to start blasting them with all that ammo!"

Sylphia has a bit of a mystery behind it, depending on how loosely you tend to use that word. Namely, is it a Compile shooter or not? On one hand, it was published by Tonkin House and the name of Compile is not to be seen anywhere on its title screen or in its credits. Before you bluntly say, “Case closed, fool!”, a decent number of Compile staff members are listed in those credits and the game does have the general vibe of something that company would create, leading one to believe this is essentially a Compile game without that name attached.

Regardless of what the real story behind all of this is — something I couldn’t find while admittedly not digging too deep in search of answers — Sylphia is a good game assuming you’re not the sort of gamer who only seeks out challenges and turns your nose up in disgust at stuff that’s more novice-friendly. In a genre that’s seen untold numbers of outer space and military themes in its games, this one takes the far less trod route of Greek mythology and, unlike Phelios, was something I enjoyed throughout its eight levels.

Appearing on the PC Engine’s CD-ROM system in 1993, this game really doesn’t bother to take advantage of the CD technology. You have some strong music, as should be expected, but there’s very little in the way of cutscenes and those are standard images with no cinema or voice-acting. What little story there is tells the tale of a woman who falls in battle against creatures of the underworld, but is resurrected by Zeus as a fairy-like being capable to truly taking the battle to all sorts of monsters, including the god Hades.

Your girl has a tiny life meter, allowing her to take more than one hit before perishing, and also gains the ability to use and power-up four different weapons represented by various colors. By snagging all sorts of little items that get released into the air regularly, you’ll slowly fill a meter that, when full, gives you this game’s version of the screen-clearing bomb attack. Pretty much anything I can talk about gameplay-wise definitely reminded me of stuff I’d played by Compile, as well as a number of other shooters utilizing similar power-up systems.

More interesting to talk about is the game’s setting and the stuff you’ll be fighting in its levels. You’ll open up by flying over ruins and blasting all sorts of fantasy monsters before scaling a cliff to enter a temple. The bosses of this opening level are a Minotaur and Medusa, with both of those classic mythological monsters tinkered with a bit to not seem out-of-place in the sort of game where you fly around and spray the air with bullets and lasers. The former throws axes and occasionally charges to the bottom of the screen, while the latter constantly moves towards you while firing bullets and eye lasers.

In fact, the main thing you’ll have to be proficient at in order to topple many of this game’s bosses is the ability to move around the screen. While some of them either are immobile or prefer to use their weaponry as opposed to their bodies, there are a respectable number which are regularly on the move, forcing you to constantly adjust your location in order to both avoid them and be in position to regularly cause damage. Whether it be the Chimera that hops from ledge to ledge as you ascend a tower, the Cerberus that regularly pounces at you when not shooting fire from its heads or the Scylla or Harpy and how they start moving around the screen aggressively after you’ve shot off part of their bodies, you won’t be able to find a good spot to camp out and blast away with impunity too often in Sylphia.



Unfortunately, many of those bosses aren’t too tough if you’re moving all over the screen, with many of the worst offenders coming later in the game when you’d be expecting things to pick up. I found as I played through this game, my notes got more and more brief as I progressed through this one because most of them had only a few attacks that tended to be predictable and easy to avoid. To its credit, the second and final form of Hades delivered, as it took up a lot of the screen and could attack from every angle, making it tough to navigate around it repeatedly while also being effective enough with my attacks to take out its many heads in order to decrease the amount of weaponry it was capable of spewing.

But for me, the journey was the thing with Sylphia, not the general lack of difficulty. This was a fun and breezy game that gave me a good amount of enjoyment. I enjoyed the fortresses, towers and other locations present through its levels and noticed those little touches that made flying through those locations a treat to view. Such as how the giant Colossus serving as the second level’s boss is inert until a soldier enters a tiny door and activates it. Or how enemies regularly swarm out of doors in the tower stage to confront you. While this might not be one of those super-essential shooters that any fan of the genre needs to seek out, it is a fun diversion that might not truly test one’s skills, but will likely provide its share of entertainment.

Community review by overdrive (June 14, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.