Except for the seventh stage which is the final stage and boss battle.Įach of the stages has a different theme to them to keep things fresh. Each of the six stages will have two main levels then a boss battle on the third stage. Ristar plays extremely well as you would expect from a Sega developed game. The lack of buttons keeps the controls simple and precise. You can press A or C to jump or hold the B button to grab. You really want to take things slow if want any chance of progressing. Running in guns a blazing will usually end up in a death from some enemy just appearing on screen.

Ristar rewards you for taking a slower, thought out pacing. I wish more games used this type of gameplay so that was great to see. Watch these sections where you have to rush forward and avoid getting pulled back by the current. I had a blast with the areas that Ristar had to swim around in. Later stages of the game you’ll see even more clever uses like holding onto a pole while pulling yourself around.

For such a simple mechanic, you have a ton of different uses outside of smashing an enemy against your like climbing up a ladder or signing from a bar. Instead of simply jumping on enemy heads, Ristar uses it’s hands to grab onto enemies. Ristar takes on a much different approach to the platformer genre. Of course it didn’t turn out that way for Sonic being the incredibly fast hedgehog that he is, fast forward four years later Ristar was born. When the team at Sega was developing Sonic, they originally thought the character would have the ability to reach out and grab things as part of it’s core gameplay.

What you might not know about Ristar is that Sonic and Ristar were originally intended to be the same game. Ristar was a late Sega Genesis release back in Feb of 1995 published by Sega.

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