GAME CLEAR No. 243 -- Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX

Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX (2011, Arcade)

EX Version Of: Dariusburst: Another Chronicle (2010, Arcade)
Original/EX Developer: Pyramid
Original/EX Publisher: Taito
Clear Version: Arcade
Clear Platform: Arcade
Clear Date: 7/16/25

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Why should I care?
You like to blow up fish?

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Holy mackerel

Last week I made a trip up to North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, three states I’d never visited. It’s part of my effort to see them all. In Fargo, North Dakota, I found a nice little arcade/brewery called Pixeled Brewing Company. It’s lovely. As if to give me one last bit of the Japanese arcade experience, Pixeled was home to a big ol’ four-player Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX cabinet. It rocked.

If you’re not familiar with Darius, it’s a series of shoot ’em ups in which you blow away giant robot fish. The original game used a combination of mirrors and a whopping three CRT monitors to render an ultra-wide screen experience. Another Chronicle continues this tradition albeit with modern display technology. The cabinet is simply massive and comfortably sits three (although my experience was limited to a two-player playthrough with just me and my partner). It’s nicely enclosed, and the sound fucking rules. It’s a super bassy cabinet, and when that iconic “WARNING! A huge battleship is approaching fast!” banner appears, it really rumbles you and your crew.

Dariusburst differentiates itself inasmuch as it separates the experience into a number of shorter routes to completion than the original games. This probably is related to the “burst” subseries having started on PSP, where more bite-sized playthroughs would’ve been appreciated.

It’s also nice because this enabled a neat feature: infinite lives mode. If you pay a full dollar, you and your comrades get all the lives you want to blow away the fishy threat. Ordinarily, such an arrangement would not behoove an arcade operator, but with playthroughs lasting only 10-15 minutes, it’s not an outrageous proposal. It’s a nice way to flip the typical arcade “difficulty = money” scheme on its head.

Anyway, we played through one “original” mode path and one “EX” path, whatever that means. The “Chronicle” mode was not available to us because the machine was not online. It was clearly an import, since most of the text was in Japanese, so who knows if it’s even possible to get that stuff running stateside. Nevertheless, it’s a great time and was a thrill to encounter in Fargo of all places.

This game got a release on most platforms, so I may grab it on Switch or something for play when traveling. Great way to burn through a quarter of an hour, even without the immersive cockpit experience.