Fantasy Zone

Fantasy Zone (ファンタジーゾーン) is a surreal arcade game released by Sega in 1986. It was later ported to a wide variety of consoles, including the Sega Master System. The player controls a sentient spaceship named Opa-Opa who fights nonsensical invader enemies in the titular group of planets, full of settings atypical of the traditional scrolling shooter and pastel colors; for that reason, it is occasionally dubbed a "cute 'em up".

In the game, the player's ship is placed in a level with a number of bases to destroy. When all the bases are gone, the stage boss appears, who must be defeated in order to move on to the next level. There are eight stages, and in all of them, except the final one, the scroll is not fixed; the player can move either left or right and the scroll follows him, though the stage loops. The final level consists of fighting again all previous bosses in succession and then facing the final one.

Fantasy Zone was ported to the Sega Master System, MSX, NES, X68000 and TurboGrafx-16 systems. There are actually two different versions for the NES. The Famicom version is ported by Sunsoft, while the NES one is an unlicensed version by Tengen. While all of these ports play similarly to the original version, some of them have several omissions and changes. For instance, the Master System version lacks some features such as the radar that indicates the location of the bases or a gauge that indicates how much energy left they have, and two of the bosses were replaced by original ones. Other versions have several changes as well. A remake of the game was later release for the Sega Saturn under the Sega Ages label. A couple of enhanced remakes have been made for the PlayStation 2 under the Sega Ages 2500 label. In early 2008, the Master System version saw a re-release for the Virtual Console. It was released in all territories at a price of 500 Wii Points.

In the space year 6216 (1422 in the original Arcade version), the Fantasy Zone was cast in panic at the collapse of the interplanetary monetary system. The Space Guild brings to light the plans of the planet Menon, whose forces are stealing the other planets' currencies to fund a huge fortress in the Fantasy Zone. Opa-Opa is sent to stop the invading army and discover who is behind it. In the end, it turns out that the leader was none other than Opa-Opa's long lost father, a revelation that leaves Opa-Opa with mixed emotions.