In Air Twister, there is a lot going on. A weird fantasy world full of armored birds, flying squids, skeletal dragons, floating towns, and malevolent clocks is explored by players in the arcade-style shooter from renowned designer Yu Suzuki, which is now available on Apple Arcade.
It was an opportunity for Suzuki, who is best known for his work at Sega on games like Space Harrier, Shenmue, and Virtua Fighter, to create a fantastical world filled with his favorite things. According to him, “It’s a combination of all the various things that I would like to see in a fantasy world.”
Players take on the role of a sci-fi princess battling to preserve her home world in the classic rail shooter Air Twister, which is similar to Panzer Dragoon or Space Harrier.
It contains 12 rather brief but densely populated stages, each of which is followed by a huge boss battle. With the inclusion of touch controls, it has the feel of a long-lost Dreamcast game. You may use your fingertips to highlight groups of foes to launch a barrage of strikes. It’s quite gratifying.
Although Air Twister has good gameplay, its absurdly strange setting is what really stands out. Before moving on to stages like a desolate moon, a stark mechanical lair, a big garden full of impossibly huge roses and topiary animals, and a desert full of lethal flying manta rays, you start out flying across a wide ocean with massive mushrooms growing out of it.
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They just seem to fit naturally for me. He claims that concentrating on “the texture and the density and the colour” of the environments and foes when creating the images was a key factor in making this work. He explains, “I wanted everything to feel as though it had aged 100 years.”
Similar methods were used to approach the music. Suzuki claims to have been a longtime admirer of the musician and even “wanted to have the world fit his music.” Air Twister’s prog rock soundtrack was created by Dutch composer Valensia. Suzuki lacked the connections to make contact, though. He then turned to a chance Facebook message, which was successful. Valensia, in Suzuki’s words, “was entirely on board once he had a feel for the universe we were aiming to build.”