izigame.me

Legendary Wings is a more advanced attempt at the shmup genre from Capcom. The game is certainly more interesting aesthetically than what came before, being a mythology-themed vertical shooter, but it stills suffer from exhausting repetition and unbalanced difficulty.
The presentation is very appealing, with its signature flavour and mostly interesting backgrounds. Unfortunately, there's no enemy variety and those that are present are recycled constantly (down to the bosses! Talk about disappointing). Levels are split between "shmup phases" and "sidescrolling phases"; while the shmup portions are all distinct, at least visually, the sidescrolling phases (two per level) are utterly identical, and I could almost swear that they have an incredibly similar layout as well. Even the hidden bonus levels are absolutely copy-pasted between levels, down to the last pixel. It kind of squanders the interesting potential Legendary Wings had, at least visually.
Gameplay-wise, you get a standard shot which can be upgraded and a mortar to defeat ground-based enemies. The feedback of hitting enemies is sometimes unclear, making it difficult to understand if you're actually damaging your foes or not. The difficulty is nasty because of your giant hitbox and is entirely dependant on powerups. With enough powerups, you can trivialize most late-level sections and oneshot the boss of the stage (???), but without powerups you barely have a fighting chance. Powerups also reset each level, so the early part of any given stage is always potentially very difficult and not so enjoyable.
It's a shame for the disastrous difficulty and general repetitiveness, because aesthetically, Legendary Wings marks some very interesting steps forward. They were not there yet!