R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos hands-on: two PSP classics arrive on Switch with caveats

R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos bundles two turn-based strategy games originally released on Sony's PSP — 2007's R-Type Tactics and its 2009 sequel Operation Bitter Chocolate — alongside a brand-new epilogue campaign called Cosmos, all now landing on Nintendo Switch.

The package includes three distinct campaigns. The original R-Type Tactics covers both the Human and Bydo story paths and runs anywhere from 20 to 40 hours, with individual missions clocking in at roughly 30 minutes each before accounting for failures and retries. R-Type Tactics II — making its Western debut here — adds character assistants, Visual Novel-style interactions, and branching mission paths, making it the most polished of the three. The new Cosmos epilogue is the shortest, wrapping up the story across just 12 missions. A notable frustration: both Tactics II and Cosmos are locked behind progression, meaning you have to work through the clunkiest entry first before reaching the better ones. For players who already know the original, that's a real barrier.

Granzella — founded by former Irem staff after the studio's video game division was dissolved following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake — picked up the R-Type licence specifically to revisit this work. The remaster brings updated sci-fi backdrops that fit the series' aesthetic, configurable English or Japanese voice acting, adjustable text sizes, and basic Commander Profile customisation. The original game's presentation is fairly bare-bones, built around logbook-style narrative entries, though Tactics II steps things up considerably. The overarching story covers both sides of the human-versus-Bydo conflict, and verbose cutscenes can be skipped if the plot isn't holding your attention.

As a genre, tactical strategy demands patience and time investment, and R-Type Tactics leans into that fully — the R-Type skin adds flavour and series fan-service, but the core loop follows familiar genre conventions. Whether the progression lock and the slow opening campaign are dealbreakers will depend heavily on how much goodwill players bring to the package going in.