In Retrospect: Journey to Silius

Journey to Silius is one of those hidden gems from some of the later days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I don't mean a shitty gem that's good because of how bad it is...I mean like the purest, sparkling ruby you could possibly ever find in a...stack of rubies I suppose. It's one of those games I always go back to when I want to play a solid, classic action game, and I never regret my purchase.

When I first encountered Journey to Silius, I was a kid and was in the video store looking for a game to rent. After looking at all the titles and trying to find one that I hadn't played or rented before, this one happened to catch my eye. The cover of it was pretty standard...just a simple shot of the game with a neat background, which showed me that it was the kind of game I wanted: a side-scroller. Little did I know how GOOD of a side-scroller it'd be. I paid up and took the game home.

Well, I sat in front of that fucking TV for hours on end. This wasn't because the game was terribly long...in fact, it's only got 5 (relatively long at the time) levels to work through. The reason I played it for so long? Well, the first run through took a good while, because the game's so damn tough that it gives you quite a run for your money if you're not paying much attention...so I played it over and over and over again until I had the whole game nailed down...and after that I STILL played through it a shitload more times!

So let me get to the actual game. Journey to Silius is a side-scrolling action game designed by Sunsoft...the same company that created Blaster Master (which I have talked about previously), along with numerous other amazing titles for the NES such as Batman and Fester's Quest. These guys knew what they were doing when it came to game creation back in the day, and it definitely shows in Journey to Silius. It was originally supposed to be a game based on the Terminator franchise, but for some reason they lost the rights to the material and created a whole new game based on some of the features they had created. You play as a character named Jay, whose father designed a space station. A group of terrorists killed Jay's father by blowing up the space colony he lived on and so naturally, Jay decides to load up on guns and wipe them all out to avenge his dad. Thus begins his JOURNEY TO SILIUS...which I believe is supposed to be the star Sirius, but it didn't come out that way.

Lasers and turrets and beams, oh my!

So you control Jay like in any other side-scroller...left and right move him left and right, down causes Jay to go prone, A makes him jump, and B fires his weapon. You progress through stages while destroying aliens and robots in an effort to get to the end boss of each stage. It's totally a simple concept...blow things away and get to the next area where you get to blow more things away, but it's the fact that the game does it so well that makes it so damn enjoyable.

I've always explained the game to people as sort of a mix between Megaman and Contra. The action feels much more like Contra as you make your way through the level, but the Megaman element comes into play with your weapons. You start off with a handgun (which looks a lot like the Nintendo Zapper...) and a shotgun, which fires three shots at once in a spreadfire pattern. You can bring up a menu at any point by pressing Select, which allows you to switch between guns. You have unlimited handgun rounds, but every other weapon shares an ammo meter...so when you fire the shotgun, you lose ammo for ALL your special weapons. This means you have to really think about what to use in what situations to waste enemies as efficiently as you can, because if you miss too often, you'll be stuck with only your handgun. That's not really as bad as you'd think though, as once you get a hang of the game, it's definitely beatable with only the pistol. In addition to an ammo meter, you also have a health bar, and these can both be replenished with ammo and health pickups, respectively. There's something weird about the health pickups in that they either show up terribly rarely in a playthrough, or way too often...I'm not sure what the hell the deal is with that, but whatever.

Each level is relatively large, and they're all laid out very well. Rather than simply left-to-right level design, most levels are not completely linear. Well, that meaning there's still one path through the level, but it's not just in one direction the whole time. My only complaint is that there are some locations where you need to descend down to a lower level, but you can't see where the enemies are below you and sometimes you land right on them. This pretty much boils down to memorizing where to jump (something that's not too hard to do), or just getting lucky with where you land...but it's not too bad because you at least can take multiple hits before getting killed. Locales vary from level to level, and you can find yourself in a sewer one moment and an alien base the next. There're only 5 of them, but the levels are very well done and will test your mettle with their tricky jumps as well as some smart enemy placement. Give it a few runthroughs though, and you'll be able to traverse each level while only taking one or two hits.

The enemies all have their purposes, and are used well in the levels. For example, in Area 4, you'll find small pods in the floor. These are indestructible...until you get too close and they start rapidly firing shots that will just barely miss you if you're careful, at which point you can take them out. This is pretty smart design on it's own, because you have to be cautious around these enemies rather than just run and gun through them...but then they start appearing near tricky jumps, which changes their function completely. There are also traps, such as lasers or pistons that require you to time your movements through them, and mechanical arms that attack you from the ceiling. There really is no shortage of enemies for you to blow up, with half of them being there to provide you with simple cannon fodder, but the other half being well-designed and well-placed in a good attempt to make things rough for you.

Your six degrees of SEPARATING ALIEN LIMBS!

So when you reach the end of a level, you fight a sub-boss. When you kill the sub-boss, they drop a shiny new weapon for you to pick up and use. You can have six weapons in total: the aforementioned handgun and shotgun, a fast-firing machine gun, homing missiles, a powerful straight-shooting laser rifle, and a slow but even more powerful grenade launcher. They all have their uses, too...the shotgun can help you waste enemies up close and also attack hard-to-reach targets, while the laser is good for delivering high damage in a pinpoint location or blowing away multiple enemies standing in a line with its piercing ability. Using your guns effectively isn't absolutely necessary to complete the game, but finding the right tool for the right job really is a satisfying part of Journey to Silius.

After you fight the sub-boss of a level, you're taken to a separate screen to fight the actual boss. These guys are very cool, often pretty damn big, and very well-designed...some with patterns and others with pseudo-random behaviour. These are good opportunities to put your new weapon to good use, too. You'll fight everything from death helicopters to humanoid tanks, and although the bosses inflict some heavy damage, they're all definitely beatable with a few tries.

I'mma firin' mah laser!

The soundtrack for Journey to Silius is probably one of the best soundtracks for an NES game, ever. Every single tune is memorable and incredibly rock-oriented, charging the game with music that drives you forward, turning you into an efficient bringer of death!!! It's pretty hilarious that dying doesn't even become irritating because it just means you get to hear the music even more. My personal favourite is probably the theme for the sewer level...man...now I just wanna play it again. Seriously, check out these following links and listen to the tunes, and you'll know what I mean. No sound effect seems out of place, with gunshots from each weapon sounding perfect and satisfying explosions whenever you destroy an enemy.

Journey to Silius - Stage 1 Music

Journey to Silius - Stage 2 Music

The graphics are also really friggin' amazing for an NES game. Sprites are incredibly detailed, and the animation of the characters and enemies is particularly well done. Jay himself is animated extremely fluidly, and the screen-filling bosses are also animated pretty damn well (even though they don't move all that much, when they do it looks good). Everything is just extremely well-detailed and I would even go as far as to say that Journey to Silius looks better than some early Super Nintendo games...maybe a little unsurprising since JtS came out in 1990, and the Super Nintendo was released in North America only a year later.

-----------------------------------

The Bottom Line

Journey to Silius is a damn fine game that can still satisfy those who love sidescrolling action in the vein of Contra. At the same time, it's still able to establish its own unique identity among the library of run and gun games in the NES library with its superb level design, soundtrack, sound effects and graphics. My only wish is that it were a little bit longer...but the length of a game really doesn't matter if it compels you to play it repeatedly, over and over until your eyes bleed. This is one of the best NES games you can find, so if you see it, pick it up. Sunsoft really knew what they were doing back in the day, and this game is a perfect example of their grasp on action games.

9.5/10!