Macross -Shooting Insight- (NS) - Review
by Evan Norris , posted on 07 February 2025 / 2,987 Views
Video games based on the Macross anime have been around since the 1980s but, believe it or not, none have seen an official release on consoles outside of Japan. Until now. Thanks to publisher Red Art Games and developer Kaminari Games, we now have our first international Macross game: Macross -Shooting Insight-. As a title that's expected to simultaneously satisfy fans of the anime and introduce the franchise's mythology and mechanics to a completely agnostic audience, Shooting Insight is under a lot of pressure to perform. Is it up to the task?
The premise of Shooting Insight is a good one. An unknown person with nefarious motives has used a space-time fold to abduct songstresses from multiple Macross eras and brought them into the Macross 7 timeline. Perhaps unintentionally, Valkyrie pilots and other personalities from those eras have also arrived, and they soon pool their resources to rescue their abducted friends. Fans of the anime will be pleased to see characters spanning several television series, including Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta.
As a result of this space-time-bending plot device, Shooting Insight seems a bit like a Macross greatest hits album. It's a treat to see pilots from the year 2040 mingle with their counterparts from 2067, for example. Furthermore, the integration of five different anime series means five distinct stories, each with different protagonists, antagonists, and cameos. You can experience the adventure as Shin Kudo, Isamu Dyson, Gamlin Kizaki, Alto Saotome, or Hayate Immelmann.
To be clear, you'll still play through the same 10 stages, just in a different order. Would it be nice to get bespoke missions for each pilot? Absolutely. But what's here is already very generous for the genre: five different ways to experience the campaign, each with unique cut-scenes and a Valkyrie (transforming fighter jet) that handles differently from the rest.
Indeed, each Valkyrie is very much its own thing, with specific stats for HP, attack, speed, lock range, missile damage, and evasion — not to mention a unique shot type and spread. Just like the pilots that occupy them, they have plenty of idiosyncrasies. The VF-DA, Shin's ship, benefits from lots of hit points and high attack values, but struggles to achieve missile lock on. The VF-25F, Alto's ship, is just the opposite; it achieves lock on almost immediately, although missile damage is relatively weak. Meanwhile, the VF-31J, Hayate's ship, is a speedster with shots that angle to the side based on which direction he's banking. Because of all this variety, Shooting Insight feels at times like five games in one, even if in reality you're playing reshuffled stages.
Speaking of stages, there's news both good and not-so-good. The good news is that every stage features multiple scenes, each one with a different Valkyrie form or viewpoint. You might pilot the mecha form of your Valkyrie in a top-down 360-degree arena, or the fighter plane form in a vertically-scrolling section, or the GERWALK "chicken walker" form in a horizontally-scrolling area. There's incredible diversity at play here in terms of modes and perspective. It bestows upon the campaign a great deal of energy and dynamism.
The not-so-good news comes in the form of the fourth perspective: a behind-the-back, rail-shooter-esque viewpoint that regrettably doesn't work as intended. The camera is too close to the Valkyrie and it's difficult to dodge a projectile before it's right on top of you. Luckily, this perspective appears only three times throughout the entire campaign. Kaminari would have been better off scrapping these sections and replacing them with more of the top-down variety, which are underused.
Kaminari also could have experimented with the ability to transform at will, instead of only when the game moves from scene to scene. That would have helped push the game into the next tier of greatness.
Another thing that would help achieve that goal: more layout variety. While Shooting Insight gets super creative in terms of perspective and mode, it's less inventive when it comes to level flow. Most of the stages, whether vertically- or horizontally-scrolling, are wide open affairs with no obstacles or set-pieces to speak of. Squeezing through a few tight spaces or weaving through fixed turrets now and again would work wonders.
Even if the majority of stages are straightforward, the shooting and movement mechanics more than make up for it. Shooting Insight doesn't have a ton of commands, but it deploys the few it does have to maximum effect. You'll move with the left stick, fire basic shots with the right bumper, use the right stick to bring up a lock-on radar cone, evade with the A button, and call in a support strike with Y. There's a great rhythm to the game's battle sequences, thanks to these moves. You'll fire off potshots at incoming enemies, tag far-off ships with a flick of your thumb and send a volley of guided-missiles their way, dodge incoming projectiles at the last minute, and, when your back is against the wall and you're surrounded by enemy fire, summon a screen-clearing wave of missiles from your command ship. It's thrilling at times.
Things only get more interesting with shot levels and score multipliers. Defeated enemies will leave orange crystals on the battlefield when destroyed. If you collect a certain number within a short period of time without taking damage, you'll increase the power of your attacks, up to level five. While doing this, you can also raise your Rate (up to a maximum of level 10) by shooting down or immobilizing multiple enemies in succession. However — and this is important — you can only increase your Rate by defeating enemies using lock-on missiles.
All these moves and modifiers make the action in Shooting Insight incredibly energetic and intense. But things reach an absolute fever pitch with the introduction of songstresses, which arrive to grant various buffs once you shoot down enough transmission-blocking satellites. The screen sparkles and goes neon around the edges, a powerful song plays, and your Valkyrie gets a boost to evasion, speed, attack, etc. The screen can get a little busy and cluttered during these times, but the thrill and visual stimulation is worth it.
How you take advantage of all these elements will dictate your stage score and your final score, which is then uploaded to online leaderboards. You'll be graded based on how much health you had left at the end of a stage, your enemy kills, your lock-on kills, the time it took to take down the boss, and how many medals you collected from the battlefield. Thanks to this focus on score-chasing, plus the ability to play through story mode as five distinct characters, Shooting Insight is one of the rare shoot-'em-ups that has both base value and replay value. And it only gets better with the introduction of several ancillary modes.
Once you beat Story Mode with any of the five protagonists, you'll unlock the following: Arcade, Ace Battle, Boss Rush, and Area Survey, all of which feed into separate online leaderboards. Arcade is basically the campaign without any narrative interruptions. Area Survey allows you to tackle a particular stage with the pilot of your choice. Boss Rush, which is self-explanatory, is great because it allows you to revisit the game's bosses, which are quite impressive. Almost every one hits hard, transforms into different forms, attacks from different angles, or disappears from the screen and then reappears to ambush the player. It's clear a lot of thought went into these climactic fights.
Ace Battle, however, is probably the best of the lot. In this mode, each of the five pilots faces off against their rivals in a battle simulation. Think of them as special boss battles with the flavor of a specific Macross anime. The enemy pilots will even taunt you in the thick of battle.
That actually points to a small flaw in Shooting Insight. The game throws a lot of dialogue at you during missions, including copilots cheering you on or providing intel, and rivals provoking you. The problem: all of the voiceover work is in Japanese. There are subtitles, yes, but it's next to impossible to read them while you're threading through a veritable bullet hell.
In general, though, the audio side of things in Shooting Insight is great. The music especially is exceptional — unsurprising, given its importance in the anime. The songs are rousing, bouncy, or haunting, depending on the scene and songstress. For music aficionados and Macross super fans, it may be worth forking over €69.99 for the collector's edition just to grab the physical soundtrack.
The graphics, unfortunately, don't live up to the audio side of the equation. When the camera is pulled back and focused on small, darting ships and inky outer space backdrops, things look quite good. When the camera pulls in and gets close to the action, as it does in transition shots, flaws begin to emerge. You can tell some of the models and textures aren't up to snuff.
Despite those graphical inadequacies, Shooting Insight is a remarkably solid space shooter, both for Macross fans and shoot-'em-up players without any allegiance to the anime. Thanks to multiple modes, high replay value, energetic moment-to-moment action, terrific tunes, and, most importantly, five playable characters who arrive with their own stories, ships, and play styles, it's easy to recommend. With a few tweaks here and there — more level variety, the removal of behind-the-back sections, and the ability to transform on command — it could be great. Even without, it's a worthy international debut for the beloved franchise.
VGChartz Verdict
7.5
Good
This review is based on a digital copy of Macross -Shooting Insight- for the NS, provided by the publisher.
More Articles
I imported this on PS5 last year. Found it to be a solid but not great Shmup. Still better than the effort on SEGA Saturn
Macross? Must be one of those fad new gaming franchises that popped up overnight.
If my gut is to be trusted, this game will sell millions of copies and the franchise will then vanish very quickly with no longterm cult following or inspiration toward some of my favourite RPG franchises including designs and concepts.
Essay Pro