It’s Time for This Cult Classic Shoot ‘Em Up to Get a Rerelease

2025's unlikely revival of the developer G.rev means a Border Down rerelease could finally be on the horizon

By Marc Normandin | October 29, 2025 | 1:00pm

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It’s Time for This Cult Classic Shoot ‘Em Up to Get a Rerelease

Sure, 2025 has featured the launch of the Switch 2, of games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Blue Prince and Baby Steps and Hades II and Ryukyu that were labeled “game of the year!” by the masses after they were released (okay, fine, that last one was just me), of mass layoffs and boycotts and large-scale corporate buyouts and more generative AI boosters than you can shake a stick at. Which is a shame, because you could hit a lot of them with that stick while they input prompts to get advice on how to defend themselves.

The point is, it’s been a huge year for stories, so it’s easy to lose track of the smaller ripples among these larger waves. One such ripple is the revival of G.rev—the small Japanese developer never actually left, but still managed to return in a huge way this year despite this.

This began right away, as in January, G.rev rereleased Strania: The Stella Machina as The Stella Machina — EX for the Switch, which included not just the 2011 original version already available through backwards-compatability on Xbox systems, but also its 2020 revamped arcade rerelease, on consoles for the first time. In February, their 2005 arcade title, Under Defeat, received an updated and expanded release across Switch, Playstations 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X, and Windows. It’s an excellent take on what was already a great game, and clearly its definitive edition in its third go at things. Then, in October, G.rev came out with another updated version of an older title of theirs, this time Mamorukun Curse!, released this time as Mamorukun ReCurse! Like with Under Defeat’s latest iteration, the idea here was to bring ReCurse! to as many platforms as possible, with as many game modes as possible, and, also like with Under Defeat, featuring the twin-stick gameplay option that always would have made sense for how the game wants to be played.

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This has been quite the bounty for shoot ‘em up fans, as Under Defeat was an arcade title that was ported to the Dreamcast in Japan in 2006—years after the system was done as far as non-importing Americans were concerned—and then released on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in HD: the digital storefront for the former is shutdown, and the latter’s digital marketplace saw it delisted in 2020. This rerelease of Under Defeat not only added all kinds of new stuff to do and ways to experience (or hear) it, but that it was available at all was a positive. Mamorukun Curse, similarly, was and is on the Playstation 3’s store, but that’s not exactly a thriving market in 2025. And Strania was still available through backwards-compatibility, but on the modern console that no one owns, and in a form that was, at this point, 14 years old, without the EX addition released in arcades just a few years ago.

If you’ve never heard of any of these games, or of G.rev, well, don’t worry about that. They are niche even as far as studios dedicated to making shoot ‘em ups go: G.rev listed on their own website that they had 10 employees as of 2011, and they haven’t bothered to update that page or number since. Their games are never huge, commercially speaking, when they come out, and the lack of general access to them certainly hasn’t helped. It’s likely that you know of or have played a G.rev game even if you weren’t aware of it, however. Yurukill, released in 2022, is a multiplatform, hybrid visual novel/STG, with G.rev handling those action portions. Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours, one of the various enhanced ports from that particular family of Taito’s Darius games, was developed by G.rev. Recall when Ubisoft published Wartech: Senko no Ronde on the Xbox 360? Probably not, since it was an arcade fighter and shoot ‘em up hybrid, but either way, that was a G.rev joint, too.

Whether you’re a sicko nodding along or a little lost right now, what will likely stick out the most from their library is from further back. Before they struck out entirely on their own at the turn of the century, they had bills to pay and money to raise. And they did that by partnering with Treasure on Ikaruga. Treasure was and is also a small studio, but in comparison to G.rev, they seemed huge—constantly working with the likes of Sega and Nintendo, with games that actually sold and were noticed. Treasure was a big deal from that point of view! And G.rev was there to co-develop Ikaruga—and later Gradius V—alongside them, as the assist studio whose name doesn’t even show up in the credits displayed on the game’s Wikipedia page. One good turn deserves another and all, so the director of Ikaruga, Hiroshi Iuichi, would later direct a G.rev game on the 3DS, Kokuga, following his (second) departure from Treasure. Like most of G.rev’s catalog before they started rereleasing it in 2025, Kokuga is also on a dead digital storefront, which is terrible news for the kind of person reading this who might have just gone, “Wait, Iuchi directed a game I didn’t know about???” (Don’t worry, he also surprise-directed this month’s Night Striker Gear, too, so apply that as a soothing balm.)

Border Down G.rev

That in the course of 10 months the trio of Strania, Under Defeat, and Mamorukun Curse resurfaced is incredible—if those had been released over the course of three years in these expanded, definitive forms, it would have been worthy of a party in certain circles. All three in less than a year is frankly a little bonkers, and the announcement of a sequel to Mamorukun Curse of all things doesn’t lower the bonkers ratio at all. And yet… and yet. We require more from G.rev.

Yes, getting Kokuga out there somewhere where people can buy it again or even know it exists at all would be wondrous, and a sequel to Mamorukun Curse is sure to be lovely if G.rev’s decades of quality and dedication to doing something a little weird and unexpected are any indication. But there’s one thing that G.rev absolutely has to do: rerelease Border Down. The game that is the reason the studio formed in the first place.

That’s not hyperbole, either. G.rev was formed by ex-Taito employees who had worked on classics like Metal Black and G.Darius, and founder Hiroyuki Maruyama, who had produced the second of those and was enamored by the beam system of the former. Border Down is very much its own thing, but it’s also building upon two ideas those titles had: it has a beam weapon system, where you duel with an enemy’s enormous laser in the hopes of countering it and getting the resulting explosion of energy to blow up in their proverbial face, and it has a branching level system. Except both are different from the source material, with the beam system, for example, slowly charging over time and as you defeat foes, while also being utilized to aim for massively high scores and, in turn, extends. The branching levels are far different in approach than in Darius games, where you simply get to the end of a stage and decide between the potential levels your path to that point has led you to before moving on. Instead, in Border Down, you… border down. There is a green path, a yellow path, and a red path—they are all close to as difficult as each other, but with differing rank to contend with, and you access the other colors by dying. The green path is the easiest, comparatively, but dying will send you to yellow, and dying again gets you to red—if you die three times without earning any extends, that’s game. Each of the paths actually cuts through the same levels, but the enemy layout and behaviors are different, and so too are the paths you take within the stages sometimes. So while there are “just” five stages to get through, each has three variants, and depending on how often you’re dying and earning extends, your specific path through the game could be very different from attempt to attempt.

Border Down—okay, not famously, this whole feature began with a lengthy preamble about how G.rev is not famous, but you get the idea—had its scope cut repeatedly due to budgetary issues, so the completed version of the game isn’t exactly what was originally envisioned in that sense. There’s less of it than there was meant to be, but what’s there is excellent: like with G.rev’s later shooters, there’s a complex system here that you need to figure out before you can understand what makes it special and truly compelling, and what keeps it that way decades later. People haven’t had the chance to figure that out with Border Down for the most part, though: while Under Defeat is on its third release, Border Down just had the one home port, in Japan only, a couple of years after Sega pulled out of the console business. It had multiple printings in Japan, for a grand total of 20,000 copies, per Retro Gamer reporting from a conversation with Maruyama from 2008—Border Down sold the copies made, but not that many were created, is the thing. So, emulation and burned discs played in modded Dreamcasts is how most people have probably experienced Border Down at this point. Those people know what’s up, though.

With G.rev revisiting its past so frequently, and with a seemingly very willing publishing partner in Clear River Games/City Connection, it’s time to go back to Border Down. Give it the same treatment as Strania, Under Defeat, and Mamorukun Curse, in that the original version(s) of the game should be there as well, now with additional options to choose from, as well as some kind of brand new mode in addition to the move to HD graphics. Go back to the original plans for the game and add in what Maruyama lamented in interviews post-release that had to be tossed aside due to budget constraints—make that Border Down Director’s Cut over two decades later.

And even if that’s not the version of Border Down that comes out, that’s fine: any version of Border Down at all would be more than welcome. It’s a true cult classic, one never released outside of Japan, and only barely released there. G.rev has persisted for decades now, and seems to be resurgent, with the busiest release schedule they have had in ages, and now a sequel, even, which is not a thing they normally end up doing. It’s a little late in 2025 for Border Down HD EX or whatever, sure, but there’s always 2026. There’s plenty of room in that year for an expanded, definitive Border Down rerelease.

And yeah, a Kokuga one, too. What? There’s no harm in making a little demand here and there.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin