Released in Japan as “Raiden Densetsu” (“Legend of Raiden“), but with a title screen that calls it “Raiden Trad“, this is an authentic port of the Seibu Kaihatsu arcade game Raiden, but with a few extra options.

In this you can choose between three different play modes (Arcade, Competition A and Competition B), at three difficulty levels (easy, normal and hard). You can also turn autofire on or off (all this does is change whether you can hold down the fire button to fire repeatedly, or not), and choose between single-player and two-player cooperative mode.

Raiden Densetsu is a super-challenging, vertically-scrolling ‘bullet hell’ shoot ’em up with progressive weapons and secondary smart bombs. It has gorgeous background graphics and bombastic music, and tons of sprites flying around the screen, with not a hint of sprite tearing.

Extra points can be earned by revealing hidden medals (by shooting certain parts of the landscape, then collecting the resulting medals), which are tallied-up when a stage is completed.

Each stage has a boss battle at the end, but the sheer number of bullets and the tenacity of the enemies makes getting there difficult.

If you can handle the high level of difficulty then there’s a lot to like about Raiden on the FM Towns. And if you can’t handle the high level of difficulty then you can at least drop the game down into ‘easy’ mode, but even then Raiden Densetsu is no pushover. Hard mode is for nutjobs and masochists only!

The FM Towns version of Raiden was ported by Success Corporation and published by KID (Kindle Imagine Develop) in 1991.

More: Raiden on Wikipedia