Of course, the same properties apply to Shyna – if she’s Mirage and gets hit by a Mirage attack, she’ll only lose spirit instead of health. That means that you need to approach every enemy from a specific angle in order to actually kill them. However, if you attack Silhouette enemies as Silhouette, you’ll only drain their Spirit. Here’s when it gets a little strange – if you attack Silhouette enemies when Shyna is Mirage, you’ll damage them and cause them to lose health. When Shyna’s spirit is low, her magic is pretty weak – however, if the enemy runs low on Spirit, their attacks will also be weakened, and potentially nullified. The Spirit meter determines the strength of attacks. Similarly, each character – both Shyna and enemies – have two meters: the standard life meter, and a Spirit meter. By default, she’s Mirage when facing right and Silhouette when facing left, but you can switch these at any time at the expense of some Spirit power. When facing one direction, she’ll have Silhouette properties, but by facing the other direction, she’ll change to Mirage. The big catch with this game that is almost every enemy is classified as either Silhouette (blue) or Mirage (red).
Shyna is awakened from her hypersleep in the middle of this chaos, and needs to hunt down the Edo system before the two wipe each other from existence. Unfortunately, the world isn’t exactly in the greatest of shape – a psychotic computer system called Edo has attacked the entire planet, leading to a war between two factions, dubbed Silhouette and Mirage.
Despite her cutesy demeanor, Shyna is actually the Messenger of Justice, a being created to set balance to the world. Silhouette Mirage stars a little girl-type thing named Shyna Nera Shyna.
It’s a side scrolling action game that’s part platformer, part shooter, and part beat-em-up, with a number of unique twists that make it completely unlike anything out there. Case in point: Silhouette Mirage, originally released for the Saturn, then ported to the PlayStation, in 1998. When it comes to genre pieces, Treasure almost always seems to take the fundamentals and inject some sort of crazy mechanic that sets it apart from its competitors.