XDR: X-Dazedly Ray

“The Fate of the Planet Sephiroth is in Your Hands!!”

“The most beautiful and highly advanced planet in the galaxy, ‘Sephiroth.'”
Japanese Mega Drive cover.

Scrolling shooters: The final frontier. This is the voyage of the starship ‘DR.’ Its single mission: To defeat the Guardia Army. To protect the planet Sephiroth in its hour of need. To stink up Sega’s Mega Drive like no shmup has stunk before!

XDR: X-Dazedly Ray’s reputation as a piece of 16-bit kusogē isn’t known to many outside of Japan (its sole territory of release). Hell, it’s almost barely recognized even in its native Nihon, where its claim to “fame” is in the fact that it was so beloathed by the few folk who played it as to earn it something like a permanent spot near the very bottom of Beep! MegaDrive magazine’s “Reader’s Race” charts — in competition with nearly the entirety of the rest of the country’s console library!^[1] Even more obscure than the game itself is its one-time developer and publisher, UNIPACC; who would appear to fold almost immediately following the lukewarm reception to their debut title. Needless to say, the short-lived nature of XDR and its creators means that there isn’t all that much info to go around regarding the pair, especially on the English-speaking end of the web. Needless to say (again), that’s where the Bad Game Hall of Fame steps in.

Today, we’ll be staring straight into those dazedly rays in order to report on the brief history of the team behind the release, to review the contents of the cartridge, and ultimately see if we can’t figure out what UNIPACC’s plans for the future might’ve been. Along the way, we’ll reveal several of the staff responsible for the game’s development, determine if XDR truly deserves its lowly reputation, and – perhaps most importantly – explain what the hell an “X-Dazedly Ray” is even supposed to be. The story of Ray Starbreaker and his ‘Operation X’ will finally be told!

These results as per the final issue of Beep! MegaDrive’s publication run. For reference: XDR would rank as the Mega Drive’s third place lowest-rated title (positioned #477 out of 479 / scoring 3.0269 out of 10); just above Double Dragon II: The Revenge (#478 / 3.0214), and Sword of Sodan (#479 / 2.8954).

“The First Mission of the Final Operation ‘X.’”

“Finally, the super exciting shooting
game of the Summer!”
Japanese magazine advertisement.

Seemingly the only recorded account / description of UNIPACC’s foundation can be found in Beep! MegaDrive’s September 1990 issue, in an interview conducted to promote none other than XDR: X-Dazedly Ray itself. Said issue also includes a rarely-seen print ad for the game, a two-page player’s guide covering the first three stages, as well as the publication’s review score for the game (to be revealed later); but we obviously have the most to learn here from the interview in particular. Between two photographed staff credited as comprising UNIPACC’s “Planning Department” – Hideki Nakajima and Yoshitoshi Tsuda – it’s assumed that one of them served as the point of contact / interviewee in this instance. We’re left assuming in this case, due to Beep! simply attributing their contact as ‘ユ’ (‘U’) — as an abbreviation for the larger company name (‘ユニパック’). In any case, the interview does provide some pointed insight into why the company was founded: To capitalize on the lack of third parties developing for the Mega Drive at that moment, and due to the market momentum of Sega’s console versus the likes of NEC’s PC Engine.^[2]

‘U’ proceeds to discuss the target audience for their software, describing a want to “provide a game that can be used by office workers and users who are not enthusiasts.”^[2b] When asked about the challenges that come with Mega Drive development, they do mention having fewer colors [on the Mega Drive] than on the PC Engine (“16 colors, 4 palettes? That seems to be a bottleneck”). At one point, the UNIPACC rep mentions an interest in developing games on CD-ROMs for the Mega Drive — at a point in time before the Mega-CD add-on was widely known to be in the works. They also field a question about the potential for a modem peripheral coming out the hardware, where their response is something to the effect of “My older brother doesn’t think that’s going to happen, since the telephone line is a bottleneck.” In providing an insight into their planned release schedule / business model: “I want to work at a pace of one release a year, or three over a course of two years. We would like to take a long development period for the next work and provide high quality products.”

For some statements regarding XDR specifically: They mention having had five employees on staff when XDR first started development at “the end of January,” with that number having increased to seven by the time of the interview.^[2c] In further providing a timeline for XDR’s development; they additionally describe programming proper beginning in March, working to have a demo ready for press / exhibitions by June, and targeting an August release. There’s a surprisingly honest admission that the team didn’t have the time to market the game as much as they would’ve liked to; on account of how many different roles each employee was already being made to play (between active development and other duties), and a constant need to fix “parts that weren’t as tight as they should be.” In responding to a statement that “Mega Drive games are often very difficult,” they mention including three different difficulty levels in an effort to provide “levels of difficulty that anyone can enjoy,” as well as a desire [for future titles] to include an AI that “automatically changes the level according to a player’s skill level.” Finally, when asked to provide a closing statement for Beep!’s readers, their sales pitch was as follows:

“XDR is a flashy-looking game when seen on a screen, and it’s designed for everyone from beginners to experts in terms of difficulty. We’ve incorporated all the fundamental features for a shooting game, so please look forward to it.” ~ ‘U’^[2d]

“You can’t ignore the unique users of Sega, who have been around since the Mark III era.”
Beep! MegaDrive, Issue 1990-09 (August, 1990)

Seeing as we’ve pretty much covered all there is regarding UNIPACC’s history prior to releasing XDR, we should at least try and get a handle on who was working for the company at the time. At one point, there was intended to be a credits roll that displayed after XDR’s ending, but this was ultimately disabled / hidden before release. Luckily, it’s still possible to find those credits within the game’s code (as well as re-enabling them in-game by means of hacking), though the proper names are still further obfuscated by aliases. However, at least a few names here can be decoded, and we can discover a couple of other interesting facts based on who’s involved. For starters: I believe we’ve already met Hideki ‘HI-KUN’ Nakajima and Yoshitoshi ‘SYO‑TSUDA’ Tsuda, thanks to their names appearing in the Beep! feature. Others have also figured out that ‘TM AFFECT’ was the nickname for programmer Tsutomu Yoshikawa, and that ‘M.ESAKI’ fits as an abbreviation for designer Minoru Esaki — whose paths had both crossed previously in co-developing the Athena-published arcade title Castle of Dragon. As a matter of fact, they shared in something like a “secret club” / developer clique together, designated as ‘-Take it Easy-’ — appearing in the credits to several previous Taito and Athena-developed games (the likes of Bonze Adventure, Wit’s, and Sword Master).

There’s also the matter of the word ‘AFFECT’ appearing in Tsutomu Yoshikawa’s alias for this game; foreshadowing his role as president of the soon-to-debut development studio ‘Affect Co.,’ roughly a year before their premiere title Super Stadium would release on the SNES. Because of this, some databases online (@Wiki, GameFAQs, and MobyGames; for examples) credit Affect as the true studio / development house behind XDR… based solely on Yoshikawa’s involvement, representing a company that hadn’t even yet been established. Needless to say, I take a bit of issue with this particular accreditation; as I’d compare it to something like giving Ion Storm retroactive credit for Doom, for the mere fact that John Romero was previously involved in it. To further cement my argument here: Affect themselves don’t include XDR in their own catalogue of developed games. So, choke on THAT, hapless games database contributors making honest mistakes!

For what it’s worth: I did try to cross-reference all the other mystery nicknames in XDR’s credits against other possible developers — including the likes of Aspect’s future staffers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any career composers whose names matched the abbreviation ‘S.KANEDA,’ which should’ve been the easiest match to make. Furthermore, the generic “Special Thanks” categorization didn’t help me in narrowing down suspects for the likes of ‘OKAPY,’ ‘TAGA-3,’ ‘GPX-KIKAKU,’ or the elusive ‘MA-FIGTHER’ [sic]. We’ll just have to go on not knowing, for the time being. All that’s left to say for sure is that the XDR team – whoever they might be – managed to meet their slated August 26, 1990 release date, and put their software up for sale with a full ¥6,800 price tag attached. It was time for this newly-formed company to declare their intent to the world — to introduce Sega fans to the UNIPACC “house style.” With XDR: X-Dazedly Ray serving as consumers’ first taste, would it compel them to ask for seconds?

This start date is potentially contradicted by a date given to a debug menu hidden within the game’s code: Where a “25-Nov-1989” code date is shown at the bottom of the screen, alongside a “PROGRAMD BY Tom_boy” credit line. If we’re to take the interviewee at their word though, and attempt to explain away this conflicting starting point for development? It’s just as likely that ‘Tom_boy’ here (referring to programmer Tsutomu Yoshikawa) had programmed the debug menu preemptively — before even beginning development for any title in particular for the Mega Drive. And so, when the opportunity arose to work on XDR for UNIPACC, he likely took his existing debug menu with him in order to get a head start on development.

“Go ‘XDR’!! Defeat the Guardian Army!”

“Powerful boss characters appear with a large capacity of 4 megabytes!”
Back of box.

We travel now to the scenic ‘Sephiroth’ — the seemingly self-professed “most beautiful and highly advanced planet in the galaxy.” It is a happy habitat, which has enjoyed peace and prosperity for a period of many years. Apparently at one point in time though, it was briefly the homeworld to a brutal warlord by the name ‘Guardia,’ whose violent ways earned him a prompt banishment from the planet. Naturally, the time now has come for Guardia and his so-called ‘Guardian Army’ to try and take back what they feel is theirs, and to invade Sephiroth with a surprise attack from subspace. After establishing their base of operations on the surface of one of Sephiroth’s stars, they find the planet’s resistance forces ill-equipped to contend against Guardia’s attacks, and quickly begin to gain ground. Years of pacifism have clearly left Sephiroth susceptible to attack, and so their fate must surely be sealed…

There is one last hope for the peaceful planet, however: A small fighter ship, developed in secret by the best and brightest minds on Sephiroth. Designated as ‘DR,’ the combat spacecraft is rushed to completion, to the point where its power and potential are apparently “unknown” even by its own designers! The pilot tasked with bringing the battle to the Guardian forces is decided as ‘Ray Starbreaker’; who carries the hopes and dreams of his “parents, friends, and loved ones at the bottom of his heart,” and who “battles for all human beings of Sephiroth!” Surely, if anyone is capable of taking revenge on Guardia, it is none other than this emotionally charged young man. And so, he is assigned to the combat operation codenamed ‘X’ — representing the final offensive strategy the Sephiroth forces will be able to conduct. Put that X in front of DR, and you’ve got ‘XDR’ — representing the final (as well as first) mission for the spacecraft DR, where the ‘R’ might also stand for its pilot ‘Ray?’ Honestly, I’m betting that even the Sephiroth generals wound up regretting the whole convoluted naming convention here. Just know that “the fate of the planet Sephiroth lies in your hands,” and be on your merry way, okay?

Your journey begins in the mountain regions surrounding an occupied Sephiroth city, moves to a “secret factory behind a waterfall” also claimed by the Guardian Army, and sees you liberating “beautiful ancient ruins” where further enemy forces have set up shop; all before you can escape the planet’s surface, and into a populated atmosphere. After cutting a path through the airborne forces, you enter into ‘Time Transcendental Space Navigation’ – an abstract, hazardous plane of hi-speed travel – before emerging out the other end to face the Guardian Army on their own mother planet. It’s here where the game’s instruction manual describes a bleak scenario where “the pilot Ray Starbreaker is ready to die” — effectively painting this attack run as a potential suicide mission. Of course, your skills as a pilot / player can see Ray safely through; where Guardia himself should presumably serve as the final boss (the manual doesn’t actually specify), and the final obstacle standing between the planet Sephiroth and continued peace.

Like so many classic video game stories, the details there are all gleaned from [my sloppy attempts at translating] the game’s instruction booklet, and appear nowhere else within the game itself. Oh, and as far as the naming of the home planet as ‘Sephiroth’ is concerned? You can possibly attribute it to the Hebrew word ‘Sefirot’ and its associated meanings, and claim that Square just so happened to coincidentally land on the same name years later in naming the antagonist of their seventh Final Fantasy title. But I think we all know the truth here; that Hironobu Sakaguchi had clearly played XDR for himself, and stole the name knowing that UNIPACC were no longer around to do anything about it! It’s unoriginality like that which makes me sick to my stomach, quite frankly. In any case, all this premise serves to set up is six stages of standard scrolling shooter gameplay: Across the surfaces of planets and stars, and briefly within the expanses of space.

For what it’s worth – and despite a contention I’ve seen repeated across a fair share of criticisms of the game – the visual presentation of all these locales (and across the rest of the game) honestly aren’t all that bad. Unspectacular, sure, but not outright hideous. I’ve read folk asserting that the graphics are more suited for the NES than the Mega Drive, which is obviously a bit of performative exaggeration: At worst, you could maybe claim that it’d fit better visually on the PC Engine, given some of its brighter colors and less depthful palette choices. But I still don’t claim that as any real condemnation, as I generally tend to believe that XDR’s graphics suite the Mega Drive just fine. It all moves at a [mostly] smooth 60 frames per second to boot, contrary to the likes of some better-appreciated contemporaries (the likes of CURSE, Super Thunder Blade, and Xenon 2: Megablast all come to mind). If you’re really looking to nitpick the artistic merits here, I guess you can point to some unoriginal ship designs and simplistic scrolling backgrounds as criticisms?

Of decidedly more dubious quality is XDR’s sound design, which is perhaps more appropriately rated by its detractors. Here, the background music ranges from “sparse” to “shrill” — where S.KANEDA’s compositions fail to take full advantage of the Mega Drive sound chip, or otherwise hang with some of the great shoot ‘em up soundtracks of the greater 16-bit era. There’s also the issue of repeated tracks; with the back half of the game (‘Rounds’ 4, 5, and 6) recycling the stage themes from the first half (1, 2, and 3) in the same order, and where five of the six boss battles share the same tune. For as much as UNIPACC seemed to play up their 4MBs of cartridge capacity in advertising, they certainly didn’t bother to fill that space out with a more extensive soundtrack. Similarly, the sound effects serve to dull the senses as well: Generally flat tones and unending repetition do little to convey the weight of the on-screen action and destruction. Certainly room for improvement all-around, in this department.

Peeling away the surface layers of presentation brings us, of course, to the core of the gameplay. And it is here where XDR finally reveals itself as… pretty standard STG fare, all things considered? For better or for worse, UNIPACC’s claim to understand and incorporate all the “fundamental features” of the genre is fully demonstrated here, with little in the way of other iteration or original concepts. Eight-way movement across the screen, one-hit deaths (sans shield) when colliding with projectiles or obstacles, and standard ranges of enemies and power-ups are all at play here; providing nothing in the way of surprise, unpleasant or otherwise. Before you go writing that off as a condemnation in itself, you’d take care to remember that some of the all-time “classics” of the genre are also slaves to the formula as well. What separates the wheat from the chaff are how precisely these functions are executed, how action-packed the gameplay is paced, and how satisfying your weapon / power-up progression is made to feel. We should probably begin to examine all that.

Starting with your suite of armaments: Your primary projectiles come in the three standard flavors of wide-spread bullet fire, pulsating waves, and concentrated lasers. Each weapon system can be upgraded twice-over, where higher tiers will either occupy that much more screen space (in the case of bullets and waves) or deal that much more damage (in the case of the straight line laser). While you can’t switch between firing modes on the fly, you won’t lose your upgrade progress if you should pick up a power-up and change up your weapon — where picking one of your previous weapons back up will carry over its progression as well. You can also upgrade your secondary missile fire to the point where it fires shots in all four diagonal directions / glides across the top and bottom of the screen, pick up two forward-firing ‘Option’ helpers that trail your movement, and gain shields to protect you from some amount of enemy projectile damage (where crashes and ship collisions are still instantly fatal). Your fully upgraded ship certainly feels appropriately powerful enough, and allows you to clean up the screen of regular enemies with relative ease. So far, so shmup.

The one “novel” functionality seen in XDR is your ability to control the speed / sensitivity of your directional movements, by cycling through a range of four options with the controller’s ‘C’ button. Expectedly enough, ‘Speed 1’ is your slowest setting, whereas ‘Speed 4’ is your swiftest. None of these settings affect the speed at which the stage scrolls though, so don’t expect to be on speedrun pace just by cranking it up to the maximum. As a matter of fact, the highest speed setting has something of a nasty habit of making fine adjustments / movement near objects a super risky proposition, where tapping the directional pad can still send you a ship’s length in any given direction. Naturally, you’re probably expected to adjust speeds on the fly depending on your present situation and surroundings. But at a certain point – between all the other on-screen happenings you’re meant to keep on top of – you’re more likely to settle permanently on ‘2’ or ‘3’ and get gradually used to how they operate. You’ll likely still encounter your share of “deaths by head-on collision,” but you’re better off than having to keep a constant tab on shifting velocity.

About that tendency to crash into stuff: I’d rate the stages themselves [and their various bits of deadly scenery] as the leading cause of player death. Even as I dodged and weaved between enemy bullets and other incoming hazards; I found that my fatal mistakes in those scenarios most frequently involved me getting trapped in a corner of the screen, and forced to eat the floor or a foreground element. Admittedly, I am not a particularly great player of scrolling shooters, and I struggle with plotting courses through / envisioning a destination on the other side of waves of projectiles. But in my defense in the case of this particular game: Pathways can sometimes feel precariously narrow and prohibitively dense, to where making the wrong snap-second directional adjustment can set you up for an inescapable dead end. And unfortunately, that’s just the tip of the unfair iceberg.

The other thing to consider about the various obstacles / foreground elements is that enemies are unaffected by them. Which is to say, when presented with something like a pillar or mountain that will kill you on collision, enemies will have no issue flying behind them — completely obscured from view [and your firepower], and able to emerge from the other side to quickly get up in your personal space. This is by far one of the most frustrating and unfair design choices (or possible oversights) on the part of the development team, and an issue I can’t seem to recall too many other scrolling shooters having to deal with? In most other games I can visualize in my head, you might see enemies flying in front of the foreground elements that are fatal to you — where whether or not your bullets are still able to reach them might be up in the air. Still, I’m fairly confident that most other respectable shmups don’t use the foreground to outright hide enemies from view. But here in XDR, you’ll find enemies liable to fly out from behind cover, and reappear in your periphery without sufficient time to dodge or destroy.

About those enemies: Don’t expect much outside of the standard variety of simple attack patterns and movement routines here. Generic ship and turret designs complement their generic roles quite nicely. Of the assortment here, perhaps the two most annoying enemy types are the smaller homing baddies – who often manage to obscure themselves behind foreground elements – and bogeys who quickly fly in from screen right in order to swoop behind and collide with you on their return trip. If you don’t have firepower capable of hitting enemies at angles or firing behind you, these two particular varieties can prove that much more tricky. All in all though – and assuming you can stock up a fully-powered ship – these sentient and/or mechanical foes may well be the least of your concerns. After all: They’re small potatoes when the very stages themselves are out to get you.

Between rapid on-set asteroid showers, great big balls of fire, and unpredictable drills made to vertically emerge from hidden alcoves; it sure seems like the world itself is opposed to your operation. In particular, tricks with rising pillars can feel especially cruel, as your focus is often on incoming projectiles rather than the floors and ceilings. One stage in particular (the fifth) goes so far as to build itself entirely around avoiding rising flame columns, which further explode into flying rocks. All said, it seems that XDR has something of a penchant for stage damage. Of course, some will argue this comes with the territory in the scrolling shooter genre, and I reckon that’s rightly fair. I just suppose there’s a certain way about how XDR handles it all; to where you can’t be sure if the level layouts are all the result of deliberate design, or if the team were more haphazardly assembling them and sprinkling in their death traps with a reckless disregard? At least none of the levels are particularly over-long, and each of them do bring a unique aesthetic / tileset to the table.

Naturally, the end of each stage does present you with a boss battle. And aside from the uninspired designs and stock boss gimmicks – the likes of grabbing claws, circling turrets, and narrow openings – what you’ll likely be left to think about is just how quickly dispatched they all are. I’m talking battles that are over in the course of 10 seconds, before your ship is even fully kitted out. Effectively, offense is the best defense here: Staying on target and keeping up rapid fire [regardless of weapon choice] will slay the beasts before you really have to learn much about their “patterns” or whatever else have you. If you can go into fights with a shield power-up intact, all the better! But if it comes to it, you’ll also find there are usually spots on the screen which allow you to easily dodge most of any given boss’ incoming attacks, as needed. Even in a worst case scenario – where you do get swatted out of the sky unceremoniously before or during your big fight, and can’t stock back up a decent selection of power-ups between the checkpoint and the showdown – your starting ship / default weapon still isn’t all that insufficient for tackling the big bads.

There is one oft-proclaimed hiccup to these otherwise easy combat encounters — one which I, personally, couldn’t replicate within the emulation setting: At a certain point – if you should fire rapidly enoughly – you may begin to render enemy projectiles as invisible. Blame it on a system sprite limit I suppose (which, for the record, I always keep enabled in emulation), where having too many of your own shots on-screen might prevent your enemies’ from properly displaying. Maybe my missing out on this has to do with how up close and personal I tend to get with the bosses — where the shorter distance means less of my bullets on the screen at any given moment? I guess I can’t say for sure. In either case, I just don’t see this proving too much of an issue in the boss battles, when they can all be ended in such short order so as to make it a non-issue. Of course, if enemy shots were to start disappearing during the scrolling portions of the stage, I can obviously see that being a much bigger problem.

That being said (and again confessing to my less-than-accurate setup), I never felt like I got hit by hazards or projectiles I couldn’t see coming during the standard stage play. Sure enough, I did trigger some system slowdown a few times — particularly with a fully upgraded ship, in traversing some heavier-populated screens. But these instances were few, far between, and short-lived. When I can point to more beloved “classics” of the genre that suffer worse in these similar sorts of technical regards, I feel like I shouldn’t hold XDR too highly to task for this occasional shortcoming? Players able to endure the game on real hardware may well appear and disagree with my findings; but I’m gonna contend that standard play with the game’s setting for ‘Auto’ fire enabled – or even with the use of a per-frame turbo button, in conjunction the seemingly unlimited amount of your on-screen bullets allowed – shouldn’t actually cause you too many slowdown / invisible shot woes. If you happen to own the game on cartridge, go right ahead and prove me wrong.

All said and done, XDR just isn’t a particularly difficult shmup. Of all the “unfair” factors I mentioned earlier, most can be avoided or thwarted outright after you’re first made aware of them. The fact that I – a rank amateur of the genre – was able to 1CC (“1 Credit Clear”) XDR within just two playthroughs should tell you all you need to know here. Truthfully, I found its ease a bit refreshing: In a genre which seems to seek to push the limits of on-screen bullets and human reaction time, it was nice to have an easy time of it for once! Of course, I’m sure that does little for the die-hard STG fans, who come to the genre looking to have their skills tested. If that applies to you, XDR will likely do little for you, even at its highest of three included difficulty levels. As it turns out, the only factor which the difficulty settings actually impact are how many hits your enemies can take; where most baddies will die in one hit to your weakest weapon on ‘Easy,’ or manage to endure up to four hits on ‘Hard.’ Boss health seems to scale by some other factor, but you’ll still find that you can take out most in under 20 seconds even at their toughest.

To be clear: This single changing variable is a fairly lazy, generally poor way of attuning / adjusting difficulty. The fact that even on the easiest setting, there seems to be nothing done to reduce the number of on-screen enemies and bullets coming your way? That doesn’t really do much to make the game any more accessible to first-timers, who may still be struggling to get a handle on the basic function and controls. Consequently, not increasing the quantity and danger level of hazards on the higher end of difficulty doesn’t do much to make the game all that more challenging, either. At a certain point, having to fire an extra shot at every enemy is nearly a non-factor; when auto-fire can save you the thought of an additional button press, and where certain weapons (the laser in particular, which is more powerful than the others) negate the need for follow-up shots to begin with. Perhaps more than any other design decision, this botched difficulty implementation demonstrates UNIPACC’s lack of understanding of the genre.

What all this ultimately contributes to will likely be a fairly breezy playthrough for most players: Something in the 15 to 20 minute range, more likely than not. This would only go and earn XDR the dubious distinction as one of the shorter shmups to complete (if not the outright shortest) in the console’s entire library — where the average / median length for full playthroughs seems to be something closer to the 40 minute mark. Simply put, the six short stages and simplistic boss bouts don’t amount to much length-wise (or in terms of available content, for that matter). Of course, another difference to consider between XDR and its contemporaries is that most other shmups typically take some time and several failed playthroughs to master — to where the time you’d likely invest in order to perfect that 40-minute run might amount to hours of practiced playthroughs. The very real chance that you might beat XDR on your first-ever attempt at it really doesn’t do much for the ol’ “value proposition,” for those who abide by it.

And for your efforts, do you at least get a satisfactory conclusion as reward? Well, after putting away Guardia in the game’s most challenging boss fight (still not saying much), you’re whisked off to a small-frame cinematic of your Dazedly Ray flying back to Sephiroth, before promptly being rewarded with a notification reading “Congratulation., now, you’re Hero.” After skipping over where the UNIPACC credits were at one point intended to roll, you’ll find yourself right back at the beginning of the game, where I suppose you can continue building that high score of yours. From what I can observe, the game doesn’t get harder from here, and there are no better endings to unlock: You’ve experienced the grand sum of content in the game by this point, you Hero you. Obviously, we’re still talking pretty standard “lacklustre ending” fare given the era here, and it’s your own fault (as well as mine) for expecting anything more substantive here. I guess after reading the manual, I had found myself hoping to at least see Ray Starbreaker’s stupid face or something in the post-game? But obviously, that dream was never meant to be.

I think what gets me about XDR is how often I feel compelled to pair my criticisms with reminders of how its contemporaries feel lacking in many of the same ways. The thing about XDR though is that it consistently proves to be slightly worse in all those comparisons — that much less polished, so as to be considered that much more egregious. It’s not that XDR is an unmitigated disaster as far as shmups are concerned: It’s just that it manages to slightly underwhelm in every conceivable facet, to where it’s hard to mount particularly passionate defenses for it. And without any particular efforts made by UNIPACC to deviate from the generic sci-fi theming, or attempts to innovate any sort of new mechanics; you can’t even point to anything especially charming or ambitious about it. The sum of its parts just makes for a mildly frustrating, quickly consumed, easily forgettable whole.

I hesitate to write it all off as the dreaded “boring bad” (arguably the worst kind of bad), as it’s not particularly drawn out or exhaustingly mediocre. Rather than boredom, the predominant emotion I feel while playing XDR is something more akin to disappointment — some form of ennui where I’m simply left wishing the game would steer even just slightly in the direction of either “better” or “worse.” If it was slightly more competent, I could just write it off as disposable and get on with my day. If it were slightly worse, I’d likely have something more to latch onto here, where I could maybe discuss just how far off the mark it is. Like, it’d be so much better if UNIPACC had tried to incorporate some new sort of ill-advised / poorly-executed gameplay concept, like – I don’t know – boomerang bullets that can blow up your own ship if you catch them. Clearly, a stupid idea that I just pulled out of my ass. But imagining XDR making that effort, there’d at least be something to justify how beloathed this game came to be! I guess that’s the real issue here for me: For as deeply loathed as XDR apparently is by some, it’s just hard to understand how someone could hate this game with any real degree of passion?

Sure, I can pretty easily list all the ways the game could’ve been improved and likely saved from the bottom of the reader’s race rankings. It certainly could’ve done with a few more stages, for one thing. Populating the game’s stages with more enemies [on higher difficulties] probably wouldn’t hurt either — so long as they’re no longer liable to fly behind the foreground and sneak attack you. While you’re at it, you could likely make the bosses more of a threat, with just some relatively simple tweaks to them. Simple tweaks across the board are all the game really needs: Just a bit of tightening up mechanically, several more minutes worth of content, and some sort of real attempt at a gimmick to set it apart from the rest of the pack (I’m not counting the speed adjustment as anything of substance). If UNIPACC had really been looking to overachieve, they could’ve developed a more interesting setting / aesthetic for the game to inhabit, and then gone and paired it with some more memorable / motivating music. But “ambition” just wasn’t part of the mission statement, I reckon.

What ultimately does in XDR is its strict adherence to the shoot ‘em up template, paired with its consistently coming up just shy of meeting the set standards. It’s hard not to simply dismiss the game as a quick and dirty cash grab, and I totally get why most folk would. But beneath it all – against all outward indication and better judgment – I can’t help but believe that UNIPACC were genuinely passionate about developing this lacklustre game of theirs! They knew that their company’s futures rode on its success, and they were clearly looking toward the future of the console, so you have to trust that they did the best they could do here? Perhaps an aversion to risk may have stifled their creativity some, but that should’ve theoretically left them more time to focus on the fundamentals. In any case, I prefer to assume the best in people rather than the worst: I choose to believe that UNIPACC set about trying to make the best game they could, within this basic-most scope. Obviously, they fell short of that mark. So what happens next?

I calculated this by creating a spreadsheet; with a sample size consisting of longplays for 40 Mega Drive shmups, taking count of each of their respective lengths. XDR represents the shortest end of the range with a 14 minute playthrough, while Wings of Wor stands as the longest at roughly an hour and a half. Obviously, these associated times don’t account for how much prep and practice goes into perfecting these optimal playthroughs, but that falls outside the scope of what I was looking to determine anyhow.

“If You Score Higher Than 5th Place, Register Your Name.”

“It’s a shame that there are no elements made to attract girl players.”
Beep! MegaDrive, Issue 1990-09
(August, 1990)

For as much as UNIPACC may owe to Beep! for bringing XDR’s to the world’s attention, the publication didn’t go so far as to heap any undue praise on the debut cartridge in their review of it. Across four of their critic’s scores, the game ultimately rated as a 25 out of 40 — 60%, effectively.’^[3] While things could’ve certainly gone worse score-wise, there are some pretty telling snippets in some of the accompanying blurbs: One ‘OL-X Koji’ took the game to task for “monotonous graphics” and “too few backgrounds,” as well as the simplistic enemy patterns which “only move along determined paths without considering the player.” A reviewer by the alias of ‘Cyborg-NO’ would hone in on the lack of difficulty; noting that while the game might “make good practice for super beginners,” the so-called “maniac” players would likely finish the game on their first try — thereby leaving him to regretfully weigh in that he “can’t recommend it.”

From here, sales data and reader survey results provided by Beep! over the next months and years tells the rest of XDR’s story. Their November issue provided a ‘Shop Data’ update indicating that the game rated as seventh in the top ten sellers [on the Mega Drive] for that given month.^[4] Naturally, come December, it had already vanished from the charts completely, indicating a complete lack of staying power. From here, it would be several months until Beep! debuted their regular ‘Reader’s Race’ rankings — tracking how surveyed subscribers rated releases across the Mega Drive catalogue, and sorting them by descending order of “reader’s average points.” And so it came to pass that in its first appearance on the list, XDR would rate as 83rd out of 85; with an average rating of 3.175 (out of 10), and just barely beating out the likes of Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijō (84th) and Rastan Saga II (85th).^[5] As it would turn out, this third-worst spot would more or less stick — to where XDR would still be there come time for Beep!’s final reader race results four years later.

Though XDR may have never made its way outside of Japan, that didn’t stop a small handful of English-language (primarily UK based) magazines reviewing it. The Complete Guide to Consoles would score the shmup as a 47% in their fourth [and final] volume, noting that “there are absolutely no original features at all, and the weapons are all as lame as a horse with leg irons.”^[6] One Sega Power would briefly describe it as having “gaudy backdrops and insipid blasting,” before grading it 2 out of 5 stars.^[7] What’s most curious in this lot though though is a brief review in Raze magazine; which in addition to rating the game at 60% (citing “dodgy collision detection, podgy graphics, etc.”), would provide a whole new plot synopsis for the game — either the result of some possibly abandoned attempt to localize the game for the international market, or as a cheeky bit of bullshit on the part of the magazine’s editor.^[8] In their take on the story, players would take on the role of ‘Jake McChink’ (?!), and take to the skies of ‘Mega-Tech City’ in order to combat “alien forces which are threatening to take over the city’s food plants and hold its inhabitants to ransom.” Yeahhh, I’m calling a lark on that one.

“Note that touching the terminals of the cartridge or wetting it with water may cause malfunction.”
Instruction manual.

Now, before we get to the part where UNIPACC reacted to their debut game’s poor reception, there’s still another interesting aspect left to cover here. See, if you check under your chair, you’ll find a copy of XDR’s instruction booklet! And if you’ll go ahead and open that up to the section detailing the precautions for use and handling of the cartridge, you may notice some peculiar artwork within — detailing a fantasy warrior flanked by a fairy and cutesy dragon. To be clear, this isn’t some generic Sega-issued art template that publishers were handed for use in their manuals: This is original art commissioned / designed by UNIPACC, not appearing in any other game’s manual. Which begs the question of what the hell it’s doing here in the instruction booklet for a sci-fi shoot ‘em up — where all the preceding pages have a drastically different art direction going for them? Fortunately, I reckon we might actually have the answer.

As XDR entered the market, UNIPACC already had their next planned Mega Drive game well into development: An action RPG to be tentatively titled ‘Phildias ~Requiem of the Wind~’ (‘フィルディアス~風の鎮魂歌~’). The title would appear in Beep!’s list of upcoming Mega Drive releases in as early as their October 1990 issue, albeit only providing an “undetermined” release date.^[9] That same issue would also provide a brief one-page feature on the planned game; providing a brief gameplay and plot synopsis, showcasing the three planned playable characters, and running a banner ad for XDR at the bottom in order to remind folk just who was attached to develop it. From the portions I was able to roughly translate; the game’s premise would’ve had something to do with a war between four gods (with one mentioned being no less than ‘Hades’ himself), the goddess ‘Feria’ becoming the imprisoned / evil-cursed “Lady of the Wind,” and your choice of one of three characters (the royal knight ‘Feed Tilloak,’ an aquatic elf [?] ‘Sophia ul Reem,’ or dwarf ‘Bucks G. Dijk’) tasked with “restoring peace to the continent of the wind.”

So, in looking back on the fantasy-style art featured in XDR’s manual? I reckon the warrior character does bear a slight resemblance to Phildias’ own swordsman protagonist (as best as you can measure from chibified take). And so, I’d rate it as likely that the cartridge-handling guide here would’ve originally been intended for that upcoming game’s manual — present here in XDR’s manual as a labor-saving measure, or to plant the idea of the upcoming game in a reader’s mind. Of course, we’re already aware by this point how things turned out for UNIPACC: How Phildias would never have the chance to come to fruition, as the company behind it would ultimately be made to fold in the wake of XDR’s failure. Alas, the games industry is a cruel mistress, and some studios simply never get a chance after a bad first impression. And so the work that had gone into Phildias would all be summarily scrapped, and the concept abandoned where it stood… unless, of course, you take a certain rumor to be true.

Sorcerer’s Kingdom for Genesis (Masaya / Technical Wave, 1992)

Beginning as a rumor on Japanese message boards and later parroted across blogs and games databases, there’s this idea that Phildias’ assets and designs were picked up by the publisher Masaya / developer NCS, and rolled into a new game by the name of Sorcer Kingdom (or ‘Sorcerer’s Kingdom’ internationally). This rumor is apparently founded on absolutely nothing of concrete value — based on little more than some possible passing resemblance of the protagonist’s blue armor to Phildias’ planned knight character, maybe? About the closest thing to an actual theory that I found posits that employees involved in XDR’s development migrated to NCS, and took their old game idea with them. Of course, in comparing the game’s staff against the names attached to XDR, you’ll find a grand total of no potential matches there; so I’m calling bunk on that too. At the end of the day, there simply aren’t any discernible similarities or connections between Phildias and Sorcer Kingdom, and it’d be nice if that myth got nipped in the bud.

I should also note that I’m not the first to cast dispersion on this rumor: An enthusiast blog by the name of ‘Mega Drive Recipe’ (‘メガドラレシピ’) actually began attempts to disprove the tenuous theory in 2016, as part of a series of diary posts. In March, they penned their first post airing suspicions about the supposed connection between the two games, mentioning recollections of the rumor circulating online in as early as the late 90s. Their immediate contention is that there are no similarities at all between the plots, characters, or gameplay features in comparing Sorcer Kingdom to what’s presented in the Phildias feature. A follow-up post in April provides additional scans of Beep! magazine features on both games, further highlighting just how different the two titles appear when stacked side-by-side. And so, on the off chance that blog’s author should ever happen to read this article: I just wanna say that you were totally right about all this, my dude. As you say, “there is no similarity anywhere” [between the two games], and anyone still trying to pass this baseless old myth off as fact is a fool.

So, with all that finally squared away, we can get back to what really happened to UNIPACC’s disbanded staff. As mentioned earlier, programmer Tsutomu Yoshikawa would go on to form his own development house in Affect Co., and score some minor come-ups in developing games around the ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh’ licenses. Beyond that, they largely seem to deal in interchangeable mahjong and shogi titles, with the rare original piece of software here or there. I’m curious to dig a bit deeper into a particularly odd-looking duck of theirs titled Rung Rung: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Another World, to try and figure out what the hell that’s all about. Though they persist in some capacity to this day, it doesn’t appear that Yoshikawa’s past collaborator in Minoru Esaki would join him at any point for this business endeavor; as the one-time ‘Designer’ for XDR has continued down his own path in the games industry — continuing as a graphic artist and animator. Apparently, he contributed some “inbetween” frames to the likes of Guilty Gear Isuka, if that fighting franchise means anything to you.

Grand Master for Famicom (Varie / Soft Machine, 1991)

As it would turn out, both members of UNIPACC’s “Planning Department” (Hideki Nakajima and Yoshitoshi Tsuda, if you’ve since forgotten) would stick together for a time, and join up with a new publisher / developer known as ‘Varie Corporation.’ Here, Nakajima would contribute in direct development roles (as a graphic designer, programmer, and ‘Test Driver’), where would Tsuda operate in planning / supervisor capacity; across a catalogue consisting largely of F1 racing games, several Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling entries, and what appear to be a couple of virtual casino / card games. Varie would’ve also contributed a 1991 Famicom RPG by the name of Grand Master: Featuring a cast of characters including a royal swordsman ‘Rody,’ a princess ‘Serena,’ no less than the hellish ‘Dante’ as an antagonist… uhh, there’s some stuff about elemental magics and a fallen priestess named ‘Freya,’ apparently? It’s also got branching paths and multiple endings, just like they said Phildias was going to?

… Oh, goddamn it all: Don’t go and tell me now that this Grand Master game is where some of the Phildias ideas actually wound up getting recycled?! I swear, I let out an audible groan when the realization here hit me. You know what? Go ahead and put a pin in all this for now, as I am not prepared to fall any further down this rabbit hole at the moment.

The sad fact of UNIPACC is the same as other one-time developers: They never got their chance to improve on their first impression, and to show the world what they might’ve been truly capable of as creators. When your one and only release is a dud, that’s all you get as far as the mental picture players and enthusiasts will paint of you. Of course it’s not fair, but neither is having to shut your doors after a single middling game release. It’s easy enough to criticize XDR: X-Dazedly Ray, and to point out where the team behind it went wrong. What’s not quite so easy is envisioning what they could’ve done with more time, more money, or a different project altogether. Where their strengths clearly didn’t lie in creating scrolling shooters, perhaps that RPG of theirs might’ve actually made a splash? What could have been had they decided to go with Phildias as their introduction, and maybe leave the shmup for a mediocre follow-up? All we can do is imagine and hypothesize — for whatever that pointless thought experiment may be worth.

XDR apparently has a pair of less-than-affectionate nicknames among circles who still find occasion to even reference the game: “Kuso-Dearu” (‘くそであーる’) and “Kuzu-Daru” (‘くずであーる’). The sort of onomatopoeia at play here is meant to combine the pronunciation of “kusogē” with the “DR” in Dazedly Ray — something like replacing the “X” with “kuso” (a word for “shit,” if you need reminder). I don’t mention these nicknames on account of finding them particularly clever or anything: Even as someone effectively illiterate in Japanese, I can tell that both those jokes are stretches. I guess what I wanna highlight here is the fact that XDR is even relevant enough to have a nickname in the first place. If UNIPACC’s former staff should happen to have days where they look back and bemoan the fate of their short-lived studio, and possibly wonder what might’ve been; I should hope they’re able to take some sort of solace in the fact that folk at least remember their game — even as a historical dud. Not every one-time game developer can make that claim of their singular output, you know. Here’s seeing off Ray Starbreaker, as he sails his Dazedly-Ray toward that silver lining.