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Playing SPACE HARRIER at about 1/5th the speed with cutesy graphics is one way to describe this game. This is a fun game concept implemented well with occasional brilliant graphics.
In this game you play something that looks like a penguin hanging from 3 balloons. You are floating into the screen as the scenery scrolls beneath you (like SPACE HARRIER or STARFOX, except at a leisurely pace. Enemies approach you to pop your balloons. If they pop all 3, you start over at the beginning of the level. You have a magic wand of some sort you can use to attack the enemies as they approach. You recharge your wand with power ups you collect along the way. The wand also has a power-up feature, like R-TYPE, in that the longer you hold it down the broader the charge you send against your foes. When you run out of "wand ammo" you can use it like a club, but it's a little less effective (although I like the fact that you can swing all you want without worrying about conserving ammo). You also have the ability to zoom forward about an extra 10 virtual yards into the landscape at the press of a button, but this also costs you some "wand ammo."
When you strike an enemy, he goes flying backwards (away from the screen, growing smaller as he drops deep into the Z-axis on your screen). A smitten enemy often strikes the other enemies, even making combinations of 2 or more hits. After you've drifted about a mile into the virtual landscape a boss or subboss appears. Defeating the first boss is done by smacking the objects he throws at you with your club to send them flying back at him, very much like the CRASH BANDICOOT underground mine boss. The regular enemies are sprites. The bosses are very large and detailed; the one that I have gotten to swings a giant ball and chain at you which scales nicely into the screen when he lets it fly your way.
A large part of the play action is learning how to control your balloon-hanging penguin. He sways back and forth as you move him around, and the best strategy is to make lots of quick taps to move his balloons in the right direction. He of course follows his balloons, but sometimes as he sways from the short cords he may strike an enemy or a scenery element that the balloons have missed. In addition, you can judge the impact of the objects by comparing the shadows they cast on the ground as they approach your shadow. All this combines to produce a play mechanism I haven't encountered with any other game. Thankfully it is completely "fair" (although you may first think that it is unfair until you learn the trick of looking at your enemy's shadow).
The background scenery is embarassingly good, meaning that it's certainly nothing anyone here in the U.S.A. would have done. In the first level you drift above the clouds with towering mountains in the distance as a landscape of sprite drawn towers approaches. It is through this field of towers (imagine about 30 towers of Pisa piercing a bed of clouds) that you have to navigate your penguin. At the start, for no other reason than that it is beautiful to watch, a flock of sprite drawn birds flies from behind you off into the sunset. As the scenery unfolds, the towers begin to shear off at the middle and some topple--very cool and well animated. It is during this stage that you should use some "wand ammo" to zoom into the landscape to avoid the collapsing towers.
The second level is a pastoral scene with lush green rolling hills in the foreground and the mountains from the first scene now closer and stretching high into the sky. A new set of enemies approach, and new power-ups appear (including replacement balloons). The enemies do some new patterns, there's a stiff left to right crosswind you have to deal with, and the cows moo (I even saw one fly by; haven't figured out what that means yet). Now, we've been playing games since SPACE INVADERS came out for the Atari 2600 and when this screen first appeared my wife and I exchanged glances that spoke volumes: why is it that U.S. developers don't do games like this? I suppose it's because there's no greasy gunmetal or dark techno-future scenery; there's no hard-bitten hero who's going to kick some serious alien butt; there's no whining guitars droning in the background. And what market approach would work for a penguin hanging from balloons?
To summarize, this gameplay is new and fair, the graphics are very appealing, and the music is well orchestrated and happy (god forbid that a non-Japanese developer ever creates a happy, bouncy little tune). On a scale of 100 this rates an 85. Oh, and I'd personally like to take bets with anyone who thinks that a U.S. publisher would ever touch this excellent title with a 10 foot pole.