4.5/5 ★ – Cypher_Zero's review of Fantastic Journey.

When Konami was one of the greatest exponents of the golden age and deconstruction of shoot 'em up with works like Gradius. TwinBee, Salamander and of course Parodius, known in Japan as Gokujou Parodius, Fantastic Journey feels like a psychedelic descent into the creativity of its developers, a fresh and unique attempt that offered little more than other types of shoot 'em up that only focused on following the same parameters of "your typical game of killing aliens and having saved the earth in an ending with credits giving you to understand about the sacrifice of the pilot" well, it does not, rarely do you feel when a game is made to squeeze hype out of the genre and other times you feel the love behind it and what was perhaps the fun that had to be had in the development of it and by the group of people who were involved in it, Gokujō Parodius can be assimilated with the second, not only for that great list of characters that you have at your disposal that are parody of gradius and several characters of the already mentioned Shoot 'em up franchises of konami, but for the majority of ingenuity that denotes not only the splendid design of its levels that are already unusual and bizarre, but for the detail of being unique and offering a carefree experience that can be enjoyed many times, there are many classic symphonic themes remixed in 16 bits of many composers such as Mozart, Johann Strauss, etc... ... detail that in itself is already based on what you want to listen to, which in itself, I personally consider it by far the pinnacle of this line of games and even of what Konami has come to do in the way that the genre had before bullet hell became the fad hunter at the end of the 20th century and early 21th century. Konami before: "We Love Shooting Games!" Konami today: "We Love Pachinko Games!"