Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa is the sequel to the classic 1986 Sega arcade game, Fantasy Zone. Rather unusually, it came out first on the Master System, before later being released as an arcade game. Usually the opposite occurs, but in this case the Master System version was released in 1987 and the arcade version came out in 1988.

Gameplay-wise, Fantasy Zone II is very similar to the first Fantasy Zone. You again control “Opa-Opa“, the cute space ship with legs (when it walks on the ground), and must blast enemy motherships to clear a set of levels. Destroying motherships (the large stationary enemies with eyes) will either drop bonus money or reveal warp gates to other sub-levels, and when the motherships are all gone you can then enter the red warp gate to face a boss battle.

Enemies come out of motherships to harass you, and waves of coordinated attackers also appear regularly. Touching anything hostile will lose you a life, so you have to be careful as you move around a level. Shooting an entire wave of enemies will drop a big coin, which you can pick up for extra cash. This currency can be collected and used in a shop that is found somewhere among the sub-levels. Once you’ve located the shop you simply fly into it to enter. Once inside you can then buy upgrades for your ship. Note, though, that some of these only last for a limited time, and a timer in the top right will count down showing how long you have left before you default back to your standard weapon. In later levels you can also buy extra lives from shops.

The idea with the upgrades is to build up your cash and to buy them before facing a boss, rather than using them in a regular level, because the boss battles are difficult and become harder as time passes. The first boss, for example, is a tree-themed enemy that is fought within a maze of horizontally-scrolling logs. If you touch any of these logs you’ll explode and be sent back to the regular levels, and over time the movement of the logs speeds up. So to beat this boss you have to pile on the damage as quickly as possible. If you go in with just your regular weapons you’ll undoubtedly fail.

Like its predecessor, Fantasy Zone II is a cute-looking game that is very challenging to play. The cartoony, brightly-coloured visuals hide a wolf in sheep’s clothing that is something of a cross between Defender and Parodius to play. Opa-Opa can fly both left and right over the landscape and has two sets of weapons: a front-firing gun, and bombs that it can drop downwards.

While Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa is not drastically different to the first game, it is arguably more refined. The main difference is that you have to clear a series of sub-levels in this, to complete a stage, whereas in the first Fantasy Zone you only had to clear one level at a time.

As a Master System shooter, Fantasy Zone II is probably one of the best on the system. It’s nicely-presented, playable, and very challenging. It might look like a kid’s game, but it’s certainly not a trifle of a shooter…

Fantasy Zone II was also released for the Nintendo Famicom and the MSX, and has also been re-released on a variety of other home systems, including the Wii and Nintendo 3DS.

More: Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa on Wikipedia