As the Eighties came to a close, Japanese studio AlfaSystem was beginning to forge an impressive reputation. It was doing considerable work porting or otherwise codeveloping and collaborating on games for NEC’s remarkable PC Engine console line.
That proved to establish invaluable experience. In the years that took the team into the following decade, AlfaSystem’s development staff had taken on worlds and works as varied as Populous, the Ys RPGs, the Wonder Boy licence, and SNK’s Art Of Fighting.
Having asserted an abundance of talent and ideas through its porting work, it was inevitable that crafting its own games would soon become defining of the studio AlfaSystem was. Almost certainly the most impactful of those original AlfaSystem games was its arcade shooting game Shikigami no Shiro.
Back at the time of its arcade release in 2001, it felt rather like it came out of nowhere. After all, AlfaSystem wasn’t a shooter-focussed studio with a string of genre contributions behind it – not a CAVE, Toaplan, Psikyo or Raizing. And yet was a tremendously impressive creation, elegantly balancing purebred genre
