3D Fantasy Zone: Opa Opa Bros. – SEGA’s LSD-Fuelled ‘Shmup’ of Brutal Proportions

Welcome to the Fantasy Zone; Get Ready!

I promised this wasn’t going to be a SEGA Blog, and yet here we are.

3D Fantasy Zone: Opa Opa Bros. was released on the 3DS last week, almost coinciding with the release of the shiny ‘new 3DS.’ Besides Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Fantasy Zone was my first purchase for my new system, and with good reason. For those unaware, the SEGA 3D Classics range on 3DS is helmed by the studio M2, and the whole range has been pretty damn good. Arcade perfect ports of games such as Space Harrier and After Burner II, as well as some Mega Drive titles like Streets of Rage and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog, all with a staggering set of options and extra features.

Out of all of the 3D Classics available now however, and especially of the ones I own, the one I have the least prior experience with is Fantasy Zone. The most exposure I’ve had to this series is Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa Opa on the SEGA Master System, which was fun, but nothing I played for more than five minutes. Still, for some reason I leaped at this 3D re-release, perhaps because supporting M2’s stellar work is something I have little issue doing.

For those unaware, Fantasy Zone is a System16 Arcade shoot-em-up released by SEGA in 1986. It was partially responsible for the term “cute-em-up,” since this game is basically what happens if you take happiness incarnate and stick it in a blender with LSD and shoot-em-up gameplay. You play as sentient space ship Opa-Opa, and must battle through war in the Fantasy Zone. Despite the colourful graphics, the stories in the Fantasy Zone games actually get surprisingly dark. The first game sees Opa dispatched into the war, and ends with him finding out his dad, Opapa, was leading the dark forces against the Fantasy Zone. The second game goes even further, revealing Opa-Opa’s traumatising childhood during war led to a split personality, and that personality physically manifested itself; in the PS2 remake, Fantasy Zone II DX+, there are separate endings, including one in which Opa-Opa turns fully evil, and none other than Harrier and Uriah from Space Harrier are dispatched to take him out. Surprisingly in-depth for SEGA arcade game lore, especially considering the Space Harrier links.

Sing it with me now… actually, translating instrumentals to words is hard.

As for Fantasy Zone itself, there’s one key detail I immediately discovered once I started playing, besides the fact the music was damn good stuff: and it’s that this game is hard. I’ve played my fair share of SEGA arcade games by now; I can make it through the likes of After Burner and Space Harrier, the latter somewhat consistently on one or two credits. But Fantasy Zone, is a completely different story; this game will beat you down with little mercy. I’ll admit I was at fault initially; I tried avoiding the shop function because I wanted to get to 1 million coins for SEGA’s currently running sweepstakes based around the game. Then I realised I was being stupid, and that spent coins weren’t actually taken from my banked coins, so I started to play it normally. Suffice to say, it didn’t help much. The game can feel like a “bullet hell” shooter at times, due to the sheer amount of stuff that gets flung your way by the enemies. It actually got to a point at which it felt outright unfair, and after 2 hours of straight playing the game, I finally retired to bed, unable to defeat the final boss.

Fantasy Zone demands precision, and in some cases it demands tactics. For example, the final bit of the aforementioned final boss is effectively impossible unless you know in advance to bring a specific weapon to the battle, that being the pricey Heavy Bomb; this particular moment was what ended my two hour play session. I consequently went on a short Twitter rant decrying the game as an unfair load of crap, and telling people to buy Space Harrier instead. Maturity doesn’t apply when you’re angry, apparently.

Your best friend in Fantasy Zone: the shop. That catchy jingle’s appeared in a surprising amount of SEGA games!

I went back to it a day later, and started a fresh playthrough; I decided to change up my tactics, experimenting more with the weapons, engines, and bombs available in the shop, and admittedly also messing with the rapid fire settings. It’s here where Fantasy Zone comes into it’s own, as if you don’t bother messing with these power-ups, then yes, you’re going to have a miserable experience. There’s a surprising amount of ways to tackle this game considering it’s simply an arcade game; you could Fire Bomb the levels to wipe out the bases a bit quicker, or just grab the Seven-Way Shot of justice and take out everything that way. You could go for the ridiculously fast and perhaps slightly hard to control Turbo Engine, or keep things slightly more temperamental and use the Jet Engine. The third boss, Cobabeach, can be destroyed with some tricky standard shooting and perhaps a few bombs, or you can just drop a Heavy Bomb on him and wipe out his entire artillery before he gets chance to do anything; there’s so many ways to play here, and as I tried them all out, I found myself enjoying the game more and more.

This boss is called Ida-2; he’s probably a reference to the boss Ida, from the prior game Space Harrier!

That’s not to let Fantasy Zone off entirely, as it’s “quarter-munching” side does poke through at a few moments; Poppoos, the 5th boss, is an absolute pain in the arse, as the amount of projectiles on screen, the diminutive size of most of them, and the fact they blend in with the background makes the experience less challenging and more brutal. Unless you’re lucky enough to carry a Seven-Way Shot in with you, anyway. On the whole, experimenting with power-ups, as well as practice, is what gets you results here, but don’t get me wrong; regardless of this, it’s still pretty damn difficult. You’ll be seeing Opa-Opa burst into stars quite a lot over the course of playing the game.

Sidescrolling shooters aren’t a genre I’m that accustomed to, even in-spite of my time spent with the likes of R-Type and indeed the second Fantasy Zone game on the Master System. That said, once I bothered to experiment, this title really opened up; and as a portable game, it works incredibly well. I really do recommend the 3DS version as far as ports go, as the extra features packed in here really make it worth it; whilst it may not have the Space Harrier level “Dragon Land” of the Sharp X68000 port, or the bizarre “noir” mode of the Saturn port, it’s got plenty of it’s own interesting new features such as “Upa-Upa Mode,” remastered versions of the bosses previously only found in the Master System version of the game, and a ton of extra settings like “Gold Rush” mode, which multiplies the cash you get in the game. I really do recommend it, as for under a fiver it’s a steal. Just be prepared for a brutal time.

As a quick end note, I just double-checked and realised I have now spent 8 hours playing Fantasy Zone on my 3DS. 8 hours.

3D Fantasy Zone: Opa Opa Bros. is now available on the Nintendo eShop for 3DS.