Are you human, or are you dancer?

The modern retfaux scene has been interesting to witness evolve. What began purely as romhacks and fangames has led to a growing niche of reproduction carts, releases that work on original hardware, and potentially lethal amounts of nostalgia poisoning if consumed irresponsibly. My preferred fix as of late has been the Evercade, which has heaps of cartridges chock full of pixelated indie games alongside all of its actual retro releases. Today I specifically want to highlight one of the ten games from Mega Cat Studios Collection 1. I may only like a handful of the games on the cart, but it has Tanzer, and Tanzer is fucking incredible. It’s finally time to answer the greatest philosophical question posed since January of 2009: are you human, or are you dancer?

Tanzer isn’t just a Genesis game that runs on the original hardware, it is the most Genesis game I’ve played in recent memory, and I just replayed most of Gunstar Heroes. The moment you boot it up and the logo splashes slide by, you’re greeted with “ALL I EVER WANTED WAS TO…DANCE” and the thumpinest, trance-iest, flashiest title screen the system could possibly manage without going up in smoke. The game never looks quite as wild as the VISUALSHOCK! peak of Alien Soldier or what have you, but its soundtrack is one of the best on the system and it never lets up. I guess this is what Nintendidn’t all along.

There is a plot, but the game never pauses the action to explain it to you. It’s one of those games that spills its guts on the back of the box, easily skipped or forgotten, which makes the between-world quotes and ending splashes all the more surprising. Here’s what you need to remember: the apocalypse is here, and you may be a time traveling alien hybrid freak now, but you’re still a ballerina. And ballerinas dance.

Despite being openly inspired by Strider and games like it, Tanzer is structured quite a bit differently, almost more like Trio the Punch than any ninja platformer I’ve ever played. Levels start out feeling fairly normal for the genre, but you’ll quickly realize that depending on the route you take they can vary immensely. We’re talking wrapping in well under a minute, or only consisting of a single screen, or some combination of the two. Even when it’s at its most side-scrollinest Tanzer is rarely content to just let you walk forward and shoot guys.

I’ve gone long enough without talking mechanics. Tanzer is a side scrolling actionfest where you shoot waves through the air and triple jump your way to victory. The game is so responsive it’s almost jarring, which isn’t to say you move the quickest horizontally, but you can definitely haul ass if conditions are met. Those conditions largely involve utilizing the aforementioned triple jump’s hitbox to chain kills so that you never have to stop holding right. See, you can adjust your aim while shooting, but you can’t actually run AND gun. Launching energy waves from a distance is a safer option than cartwheeling through the air to careen into a disembodied bleeding head that’s puking pulsating bullets, sure, but it’s not nearly as quick or as rad.

Don’t think the game’s not gonna make you earn your radness. Tanzer doesn’t believe in modern conveniences like “lives” or “continues”. You have 3 HP. Lose it all and you’re returned to the title, back to the wild west zone with you. That said there is a solution: spending your hard earned crystals at the between-level-shop screen to set the level where you’ll restart on death. A save ain’t cheap, and you’d much rather buy the various powerups that cost far less, so you’re incentivized to get as far as you can without blowing your budget. It’s a great way to encourage learning whole sections over individual hazards. Ideally you’d like to save after each world, which you should be able to afford, but you will sacrifice heaps of power to do so.

I would understand criticizing this commitment to not-quite-arcade hard, but I would also fight the hypothetical person who made that criticism. Tanzer demands that you engage with it on its terms, not at a set pace, but at the pace you’ve earned. Levels don’t have timers. You can inch forward, shoot everything, platform carefully, and complete Tanzer without too much strain. But remember, you’re not a soldier. You’re a dancer. Rehearse as much as you need, and eventually you’ll be ready to perform.

Every level, and I mean every single level regardless of route deviations, provides opportunities for you to look incredibly cool. Bouncing off of every enemy in sequence without risk of reprisal, perfectly shooting enemies before you ever have to dodge a bullet, vaulting over hazards rather than engaging with them, popping the right skill at the right time to completely deny a boss their most powerful shot, and so on. You don’t have to do all of them because, again, levels can be taken on at your pace and you have the tools to play like Contra should you choose. That said, each section you master serves to not only provide unprecedented dopamine, but also make your run far easier for when you’re eventually ready to 1CC the whole game.

Yes, easier. If you read the list from the last paragraph again, you’ll note that each of those opportunities actively make you safer. Playing Tanzer with enough knowledge and skill to look badass is playing optimally. You can’t possibly nail it first try – the game doesn’t expect you to! – but the more you master it, the more you find ways to stunt on these hoes, the more the game’s seemingly brutal difficulty falls away. I’m used to optimal play in other games looking ridiculous or exploitive but that is never the case here. Tanzer isn’t Nintendo hard or whatever, it just puts up obstacles and offers you two options: take your time to punch through, or learn to vault over and look good doing it.

Tanzer has two endings. Your first playthrough will almost certainly see you getting the bad one, because the good one demands that you reject almost every advantage afforded to you. No collecting the optional doodads that give you a bullet-blocking robot buddy, no earning the fancy armor that grants you an extra hit, and especially no purchasing saves. At all. It’s not completely unreasonable, you can still buy health refills as needed, but if you allow yourself to slip before the finish line you will be greeted with “you fought bravely but no one was alive to recognize it“, followed by credits. You also miss out on an extra final boss phase, and even though the bosses in this game are generally pretty easy, come on! You gotta!

I’m going to put on my Incredibly Pretentious Games Writer Hat for a moment and add a bunch of extrapolations that Mikael Tillander almost certainly never intended or asked for. For safety purposes please clear the way, it is extremely large on account of needing to fit my grotesquely inflated noggin.

Tanzer‘s endings posit that The Killers, and by extension Hunter S Thompson I guess, were asking the wrong question. You don’t get to just decide whether you’re human or not, because the act of being human is a constant practiced trait. The work itself is not the problem; where we fall is in lack of finesse. Performing without mastery, without thought, allowing yourself to simply operate on the path of least resistance, is a rejection of our nature. It is in mastering every facet of the dance, in overcoming challenges and turning them into opportunities to showcase our strengths, that we find room for expression and by extension, humanity.

Oh god, someone please remove the hat! It’s doing irreparable harm to my mind and body! I can feel it giving me contrarian opinions on David Cage games and I do not want them! Noooooooooooo!

Tanzer is two video games running in parallel. The first time around it’s a rock solid run & gun platformer that’ll make your brain fire off the nostalgia neurons it desperately craves, providing a solid but manageable challenge with enough persistence. It’s when I beat it once and it revealed its full scope, mechanically and thematically, that I felt the scales slip from my eyes and understood all the choices Mikael Tillander made. I did not expect to connect with any game on this cartridge to this degree, much less a throwback Genesis joint, but it has impressed me in every regard and has only gotten better the more I’ve returned to it. Tanzer isn’t just one of the best games on the Genesis or Evercade, it is a legitimate all-timer.

10/10