Shooting Through a World Engulfed in Flesh: A Boss-Fight Playthrough of Iron Meat to the Ending

The game opens with a distress call reaching Earth after a failed experiment at a lunar base. The protagonist, gun in hand, pushes forward while exterminating monsters.

After heading right for a while, the first boss, "Gut Tank 2" (as written in the subtitles), appears. It is a tank that fires meatballs, and the commentator praises the weight of dodging while firing nonstop as feeling "very Contra." The top of the tank has no hatch; instead, it's packed with a giant brain. According to the commentator, the game's bosses keep up this kind of over-the-top design from start to finish.

After leaving the military base, the protagonist reaches a communications tower. The plan was to contact allies here, but the tower itself had been infested by the flesh.

Here, the commentator explains the backstory. The flesh was originally a life form from deep space. A researcher pursued interstellar teleportation technology on his own initiative, and because the device acted as a massive signal, the flesh discovered Earth. Later, a small amount of flesh cells was found at the lunar base, and the researcher once again began studying them without authorization. That research revealed their parasitic nature, which led to the outbreak at the start of the game. The opponent in this stage is the researcher who started it all, Yuri Markov.

After receiving a distress signal from another military base, the protagonist fights the "Meat Express" along the way, a monster formed from a train fused with flesh. It's a train with a giant face, and the commentator calls its entrance one of the coolest in the game.

In the first phase, you clear out its minions and shoot the fleshy parts while dodging its huge jaw so you don't get crushed. Next comes a fight against the passenger cars, where you take out the eyeballs peering through the windows one by one. Since destroyed eyeballs start dripping tears straight down, it's effective to take them out from the outside in. In the final phase, you keep firing while evading an attack in which it spits out the soldiers it has swallowed.

The weapon used in this fight was the Plasma Arc Blaster, which has low firepower but makes it easy to land hits. In this game you can't freely choose your favorite weapon; you fight with whatever you randomly pick up, so the combat experience is different every time. The commentator cites this as one of the game's interesting points. They also love the blaster's "myon-myon" firing sound, and say that the fun of mindlessly hitting a boss over and over with the BGM cranked up is one of the things you can only get from this game.

When the protagonist arrives at the military base, the next opponent is a giant killing machine fused with a car. It has many ranged attacks, such as breath attacks, blood beams, and attacks from underground, so the fight becomes a matter of fleeing the approaching boss and shooting when you see an opening.

What the commentator focuses on is the control system. Because your shooting direction depends on your movement direction, in situations where you want to shoot while dodging, you have to choose whether to prioritize evasion or attack. The commentator calls this trade-off one of the interesting aspects. Early in development there was apparently a separate control for aiming, but it seems to have been removed partway through because it hurt the game experience, and the commentator remarks, "I think that was a tough decision." This time they had the high-firepower Energy Machine Gun, so the fight was settled quickly.

After the protagonist boards a military airship, the next opponent is a helicopter. The commentator looks back on the boss lineup: a tank, a researcher, a train, a car, and now a helicopter. An antidote had been produced at the previous military base, and the plan is to spray it from the air.

The Heavy Capsule Launcher used here is a weapon that explodes on impact. Its shots are sparse and it struggles to hit small targets, but the large explosion on impact is powerful, blowing away everything in the vicinity at once and letting you ignore troublesome gimmicks. In the final phase too, the explosions wiped out the bullets fired from the eyeballs while chunking down the boss's health in one go. The boss "Mi-24" is defeated.

On the way to the teleporter to the Moon, the protagonist is attacked by a building that has turned into a monster. In the first form, you destroy the mouths scattered around the building one after another while watching out for flames and falling rocks. The weapon was the Energy Machine Gun, and its firepower carried the fight.

In the second form, you chase the moving mouths while constantly running from the flames at your feet. The commentator describes the game's controls as "pretty quirky," but says it's fun to bounce around while lining up your aim. In the final form, you keep shooting the exposed eyeball while dealing with the enemies it spits out one after another. Since the small fry wander into your line of fire on their own, they say you can just keep firing at the eyeball.

Upon reaching the teleporter, the protagonist fights Markov again. He has gained even greater power than before and unleashes every kind of attack: beams, fire, meatballs, lightning, and more. According to the commentator's explanation, Markov is actually being parasitized by the flesh. The setting seems to be that his inherently wicked nature combined with the flesh's abilities to produce this state.

This leads the commentator to touch on how the game tells its story. The game explains almost none of its story, but there is an official video explaining the backstory that serves as a kind of companion guidebook. Old game cartridges came with lavish instruction manuals, and there was a culture of conveying the story and character settings there. The commentator says that these days there's no such venue for storytelling, giving the impression that games struggle with it. The fight progresses by hopping across floating corpses as footholds while dodging lightning attacks that repurpose the teleporter's power, and Markov is defeated.

After crossing to the Moon via the teleporter, the protagonist infiltrates the lunar base in pursuit of Markov. Since the base itself has begun absorbing him, the plan is to crush it along with the lunar surface. The stage is cramped and full of small enemies, so the Heavy Capsule Launcher's wide blast radius came in handy.

This boss has many forms. In the second form, you deal simultaneously with caterpillars coming from the left and right and the boss's homing shots. In the third form, you target a brain-like thing on the ceiling. This brain apparently controls the flesh on the Moon, so defeating it should bring things under control. In the fourth form, you keep shooting Markov while watching out for the flesh sprouting from the left and right. Normally this is a part where you're kept busy dealing with the flesh, but perhaps thanks to a good match with the weapon, this form ended quickly. In the final form, you simply keep shooting the brain until it's defeated.

Just when it seems things have settled down after destroying the flesh's brain, the protagonist senses the presence of flesh still groaning in the research facility, and the final boss fight begins. To BGM that the commentator describes as "Terminator no matter how you look at it," a giant monster clad in iron appears. Its name is "The Iron Meat," and it is the biggest boss fight, the one that pays off the game's title.

In the first form, its attacks are balls spat from its mouth and a fast punch that comes just when you've forgotten about it. In the second form, eyeballs run around the outer edge of its mask, but if you aim carefully, it ends surprisingly quickly. The third form uses attacks with both hands: after dodging the left and right hand attacks, you deal with flames coming from the right side of the screen. You destroy the left arm, the right arm, and the remaining eye in order. Even when you think you've destroyed both eyes, they revive through some mysterious gimmick, so you attack the eyes again. When the skull cracks open, a fleshy core finally appears. With the protagonist's lower body being controlled by the flesh, you watch out for the raining bubbles and shoot through the core to defeat it.

Right after the boss is defeated, a countdown begins. With the core destroyed and the flesh's power weakened, the lunar base regained control. However, the lunar surface is still covered in flesh, so the base is to be blown up entirely. The one carrying out this demolition operation was a female soldier who had briefly appeared at the beginning, and the protagonist hurriedly escapes from the Moon together with her. The head of the flesh is defeated, and the game closes with a beautiful burst of fireworks.

In closing, the commentator reflects that before playing, the game gave the impression of being outrageously loud, but it somehow felt nostalgic.