Razion

Razion is a science fiction-themed horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up game in which the player take control of a space fighter craft through six increasingly difficult stages in order to defeat an assortment of enemy forces and bosses.^[1][2][3] At the start, there are three difficulty modes to choose from: Novice, Original and Maniac.^[1][2][3][4] The player has only two weapons at their disposal: the main gun that travels a max distance of the screen's height and a powerful beam capable of dealing high-damage to any enemy caught within its blast radius.^[3]

The player can slowdown the ship's movement to avoid incoming bullets more precisely by pressing the A button in the Neo Geo version, which also produces a focused horizontal autofire shot.^[3] Tapping the A button enables the ship to fire bursts shots as well.^[3] The scoring system revolves around collecting gold cubes from destroyed enemies to charge up the beam.^[1] By shooting a charged up beam, gold cubes are turned green and grants higher score bonuses when picked up in this state.^[3] Getting hit by enemy fire will result in losing a life and once all lives are lost, the game is over unless the player inserts more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing.

Razion was first announced by NG:Dev.Team in mid-2014 for the Neo Geo and slated for an Autumn 2014 launch.^[2][4][5] NG:Dev.Team was responsible for the game's design, which bears resemblance to Fast Striker (2010) due to its bullet hell-style approach in contrast to Last Hope (2006) and DUX (2009), though the graphics were outsourced.^[6][7] Timm Hellwig served as both programmer and designer, while René Hellwig acted as art director and graphist.^[8] The soundtrack was composed by Andre Neumann, who previously scored music for DUX.^[9][10] According to Neumann, René told him that his brother Timm was looking for a composer who could make a psytrance soundtrack when working on the project, and he was very interested to score the music after finishing his work on Redux: Dark Matters.^[10] Neumann stated that he used FL Studio, a Korg M50 and the Virus TI2 analog synthesizer when producing music for the game by observing its visuals.^[10]

Razion was released for the Neo Geo MVS on December 1, 2014, as two editions; a collector's edition limited to 100 units and a limited edition of 50 copies.^{[1][5][11][12][13]} At 1560 megabits of data, it is one of the largest games developed for the Neo Geo platform.^[4][5] The MVS release supports software updates via a USB port.^[4][5][11] In July 2015, a Neo Geo AES version was also released by NG:Dev.Team.^[13] Around the same time period, a music album was released by NG:Dev.Team and a digital album was distributed by Neumann through Bandcamp on September 12, 2015.^[10][14] A version for the Nintendo Switch titled Razion EX was announced and originally slated to be released in May 2021 but was instead launched on June 17, 2021, while a digital release via Nintendo eShop is slated for a September 16 launch in North America and Europe.^{[13][15][16][17]} The Switch version features several changes compared to the original Neo Geo releases such as reworked gameplay, redesigned stages and improved visuals, among other features.^[16] Like the Neo Geo versions, the Switch version is available in both standard and limited editions, with the latter having 1500 copies manufactured and NGDEV announced a second batch of 700 physical copies for the Switch version in May 2021.^[18][19]

Prior to launch, Razion was compared by gaming outlets such as RetroManiac and Retro Gamer with both Pulstar, Blazing Star and DUX due to its pre-rendered graphical style and bright color palette.^{[4][6][7][21]} Reviewing Razion EX, TouchArcade's Shaun Musgrave regarded it as a "high-quality shoot-em-up" on Nintendo Switch in vein of Blazing Star, commending the balanced difficulty modes, scoring system, vintage-style visuals and soundtrack.^[20]

• Official website