Konami's parody shoot'em up on Famicom. Gradius with octopuses, penguins and insane bosses. Brilliant meta-humor, solid gameplay. Little known outside Japan but absolutely delightful.
Your verdict
Category
Shooter1 player3+
Description
Humorous horizontal shoot-'em-up featuring TwinBee and friends battling enemy armies in a comedic style. Published by Konami, released in Europe in 1992. TwinBee in side-scrolling view with comic shots and bell power-ups, humorous bosses and two-player co-op. European version of Konami's Parodius on NES.
Parodius review
4/5
Art direction
★★★★★
"Striking"
4/5
Music
★★★★★
"Excellent"
1/5
Story
★★★★★
"Anecdotal"
Konami turns its own space shooter into burlesque: the ship is replaced by an octopus, a penguin or a plane with a face, and the enemies become dancers, giant cats, coins. The scenery takes up the structure of the originals but dresses it in candy colours and round shapes.
The accompaniment pushes the hijacking further still: well-known classical airs arranged for the chip, themes from the original series played in a major key, fairground refrains over tense passages. The gap between the learned reference and the context is exactly the one the image produces.
Konami's NES port of Parodius exists in a PAL edition with a limited European run, noticeably harder to source than the Japanese Famicom version. The parody Gradius line carries cult standing among shoot-'em-up devotees, and the late 1992 release on a console already fading in Europe squeezed distributed quantities. This geographic scarcity, more than the game itself, explains the desirability of a complete PAL copy.
Is Parodius still worth playing in 2026?
Parodius brings Konami's parody shoot'em up to NES, mischievously twisting the Gradius universe with TwinBee, octopuses, penguins and absurd settings. The zany visual humor, the snappy power-up-based gameplay inherited from Gradius and the lively soundtrack make it a shmup as funny as it is demanding. The NES conversion inevitably shaves off the arcade abundance, but keeps the essentials. For fans of retro horizontal shooters and Konami's offbeat humor, it is a delightful success with a strong identity.
