Talk about out-of-nowhere here. Earthion was an extremely exciting surprise at gamescom latam 2025! Coming in from Ancient Corporation, the indie game development house made up by legendary videogame soundtrack composer Yuzo Koshiro, of Streets of Rage and ActRaiser fame. The game will be released in conjunction with Limited Run Games, which is known to put out extremely hard to get physical releases of retro games. Koshiro is set to release Earthion on everything modern as well as, and why the hell not, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in cartridge form!
The demo session took place behind closed doors and had me pilot Earthion’s powerful starship while wearing the boots of Azusa Takahashi, a fearless starfighter tasked with protecting Earth against all manner of invaders as I played the initial stages of the modern platform version of the game. It featured four different difficulty options, as as lowly shoot ‘em up scrub that I am, I picked ‘easy’, which proved to be the expected smooth ride that the title suggests. Even so, it wasn’t particularly a cake walk and gave a slight hint at what to expect when playing under the usual settings.
I was able to reach and beat both boss fights while enjoying the ever-living crap of what I was playing, a brand-new game in the style of 16-bit classics such as Gradius and Raiden, but with contemporary sensibilities such as the aforementioned difficulty setting that allows even the worst players like me to enjoy what is otherwise a very tough – and equal to Koshiro’s fame – legendarily demanding genre. Earthion allows you to equip different subweapons, which can be fired simultaneously, to great effect. Also, as expected, there’s an extremely overpowered special weapon that is fed with crystals that you collect along the way.
At its current stage in development, Earthion looks and sounds amazing. It goes without saying that the music is excellent given Yuzo’s contribution to the game (which in the final version will come in the form of 27 tracks), but man, I’ll say it anyway: it freaking rocks. That also goes for the rest of the sound work in the game, which even features voice samples. Graphically, it’s also ridiculous looking, chock full of amazing backdrops featuring multitude of layers and brain-twisting scaling effects.
Earthion has been developed from the ground up with the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive architecture in mind, in order to push the system to its crying limits and it certainly looks the part and would fit onto your teenager gaming shelf in the 1990s along with other greats. The retail release will include a multitude of options in order to make the game look just like you want on modern displays, such as including scanlines and other types of filters.
It’s worth noting that Yuzo Koshiro isn’t the only big retro gaming name attached to this project. Its director just happens to be Makoto Wada, who helped design the original Punch-Out!! among other classics, and the game is also being drawn in part by Mitsushiro Arita, who had a hand at a number of Marvel comics as well as the Pokémon trading card game.
Earthion will be hitting the scene hard sometime in 2025 and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s shaping up. Be sure to check Entertainium out for full coverage of the game in the near future!
Until then, here’s the game brand new trailer to tide you over:
