For us born in the 80s, the best moments of our social nerd life were those spent in the arcade. How many afternoons spent in those mystical places, full of cabinets where games were graphically much more beautiful than the versions for home consoles. A meeting place for us fomented kids, ready to challenge each other in fighting games or collaborate in scrolling titles, but which also aroused a little fear because of those older boys, with their cigarettes. When one thinks of those times, there is no doubt that shoot'em'ups with space shuttles were very popular, including Ikaruga, R-type, Gradius and the like.
Among these there was also Darius, a title that was seen extremely rarely. The reason was the very particular structure with which his cabinet was built: more screens were in fact attached one after the other, horizontally, so as to create a mega giant fencing in which we could see the enemies coming from very far away, also offering a huge room to maneuver for our ship. In addition to this incredible structure, which attracted players like flies, its non-linearity in the progression of the levels was also particular: a bit like OutRun, in fact, at the end of each stage there was a crossroads through which we could choose our route to finally arrive, crossroads after crossroads, to one of the many final stages available.
To tell the truth, in addition to the difficulty in seeing these cabinets in our country, outside Japan the saga received a very confused treatment, including changed titles, added suffixes and porting to the threshold of decent. Fortunately, two o'clock Darius Cozmic Collection they come to our rescue to clarify everything there is to know. Divided into two different collections (Arcade edition and Console edition), within them there are all the games of the saga with a lot of explanation about their origin and the treatment reserved outside Japan.
The development of this Collection has no flaws, if it were not perhaps for the lack of additions and extras that would have made all buyers happy. The games of the Darius series are all present without exception, even the slightest updates of the cabinet have been included. All titles maintain a rock-solid 60FPS, and this is also true for games that originally suffered from framerate drops (such as the Gradius III port for Super Nintendo). At the end, input lag is better than all ports of similar titles released so far: they had 5 frames of lag while the titles in the Collection allow us to play with only 4 frames of delay. There are 6 Save States for those who do not have patience, and you can map the buttons at will, except for the backbones which are mysteriously linked to the Pause.
Technical side aside, anyone who has ever played Darius knows all too well the hell that comes with it. Today's gamers who tie the concept of difficulty to Dark Souls will never be able to imagine the frustration associated with this diabolical series. In the arcade, thousands of banknotes have come to an end, and will always be remembered.
Seriously, Darius is an extremely difficult series to deal with, where enemies mercilessly punish any oversight and where we will frequently find ourselves having to dodge a hail of bullets never seen before: a real Bullet Hell. Fortunately, in the Darius Cozmic Collection we will have the possibility to insert as many fictitious tokens as we want and complete the game regardless of our defeats, but while playing, try to think for a moment what would have happened if you had played in the arcade, with consequent use of tokens at each continue. That's right, the thought is terrifying: especially in the final stages of the title it is not uncommon to have to use a continue after not even 10 seconds of play. The games of the Darius series require a lot of patience, dexterity and memory, yet they return an incredible sense of satisfaction to those who are able to master them.
As previously mentioned, within the Darius Cozmic Collection there are multiple versions of the same games. To give an example, the first Darius has the Old Version, the New Versionn and the Extra Version, which differ from each other for the positions of the enemies, the power ups and the HP of the Bosses. The Extra Version is considered by all to be the most balanced. Darius II is instead present in only one version, although outside Japan it arrived with the name of Sagaia, remaining in any case basically the same game. What most differentiated Darius I from Darius II, at the time, was the elimination of one of the screens of the cabinet: from 3 spectacular screens to 2, which still maintained the feeling of the series even if for many it was a low blow.
As far as our collection is concerned, a title like Darius II is much more playable than the first, as having only one screen, the game takes place in a narrow horizontal bar in the center of the monitor, which makes the first Darius a shooter with very small and almost unplayable sprites in the Nintendo Switch Portable mode.
Assuming that we do not much appreciate the fact that the collection is divided into two and that the two parts are sold at exaggeratedly high prices to be porting of very old shooters, our review evaluates the set of Console and Arcade versions also because, for those who want , there is a physical International Edition for both PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch which contains both combined versions, and it is the one that we strongly recommend you buy if you are interested in the title. Undoubtedly the price of the Darius Cozmic Collection is quite high, but the developers have dangerously balancing between a collection of titles so old that they are not worth this price and a sea of love and nostalgia towards a series that absolutely deserves to be owned. There are no extras, however the collection is solid thanks to the presence of all the games (except Sagaia for Game Boy), the Save State, the replays, the mapping of the buttons and an excellent technical sector. For those who lived the series many years ago it is a must buy, for everyone else it is a purchase that we highly recommend, perhaps when the Christmas discounts arrive.
