Backlog Bingo 2025: ZeroRanger

(This will contain spoilers for ZeroRanger, obviously. It will not contain spoilers for Void Stranger. That would be mean.)

This is...mostly just me writing about what happens in ZeroRanger. It's a hard game to talk about for me for some reason. :p

ZeroRanger is a 2018 vertically-scrolling shmup from System Erasure, and it was their debut. They would later go on to make one of my favorite games of the last few years, in Void Stranger (2023); that game's an absolute mindfuck, so I was expecting a bit of that here, even though it's also a debut and thus, idk, my mental model is that those are less ambitious?

Upon booting the game, you're given an intro cutscene, asked for a name, and then dumped into a mode select menu which has one selectable option: Green Orange.

Ah, I see, System Erasure has always been like this, then.

From there, honestly, shmup things happen? But the Void Stranger meta-weirdness keeps peeking through. You do stage one, then stage two, three, four. At the end of stages one and two, you get a choice of two powerups; I took "shoot behind you" and "kill things in the background before they reach the foreground". At the end of stage three, you get...the ability to transform into a mech with a sword. At the end of stage four, you get kicked back to stage...one-prime.

Huh. Okay.

Shmup things continue to happen (ZeroRanger is an extremely competent shmup, and is also not nearly as hard as one might expect, never really going full danmaku, though it is still difficult enough for someone like me who doesn't have very much shmup blood), except now you have your powerups from part one. There's an extra boss at the end of stage 1' and stage 2'. That's fine. There's some fun interface fuckery. Then things go full System Erasure. The boss that you had to kill in stage 3 for the robot transformation powerup shows up again at the end of stage 3'. If you're in robot form already when the fight starts, he cuts a spaceship in half and you fight him; if you aren't, you fight the spaceship and...your run ends. This is something a lot of people will figure out accidentally. :)

Stage 4' opens with being offered a powerup. If you take it...your run ends. You can shoot it to destroy it. You're then offered a second one. If you take it, yeah, your run ends. If you don't, you end up with a stage that's a short corridor and then two bosses, the second of which is the hardest thing in the game by a wide margin. This boss is, as is common in shmups, a load-bearing boss, and you have to escape while slowly losing all of the powerups you've gained throughout the game. It's a really cool sequence.

Oh, also, if you die in the escape sequence, you're offered the opportunity to "sacrifice everything to travel to the beginning", and if you say yes, you're transported to a boss fight that deletes your save if you lose.

This game is...completely insane, honestly, and I'm all-in on whatever System Erasure makes from here on out. I cannot express how genuinely unmooring it is to not only assume that I haven't seen everything in ZeroRanger and Void Stranger, but to not know if it is possible to know this. Both soundtracks has songs I didn't hear. Are they not in the game just to fuck with me? Did I miss some side content or plot beat or?? Is this a Song That Plays When You Fight Sans situation? Is there another game behind that boss fight that I deleted my save against after a second run? Help???

System Erasure is apparently just going to continue to make things that make me say "what", even when they're playing their genre tropes fairly straight otherwise. So, yeah, the second 5/5 of the year, with the small asterisk that I'm only going to recommend this to people who feel like they want to grind their way through some reasonably difficult execution; the opportunity cost of practicing whatever that time travel boss is was too high for me to want to continue to do it, for example. But if this is the kind of thing that appeals to you, yeah, full-throated rec, I loved this.