Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Playthrough with Edie Burret. Another week, another trashy Taito ga… wait. What’s going on? I’m having fun playing a Taito game? This is a new experience to me! Known as Elevator Action II in America, this sequel was originally released in 1995 and is held in high regard by Taito fans.
And for good reason -this game is great, and this is coming from someone who isn’t proficient in shooting games. You have to find and enter red doors throughout each stage, all whilst taking out enemies, finding items and using elevators to progress or dodge enemy attacks. The graphics feature small sprites, but they are nicely animated and the backgrounds look good. The soundtrack is also fantastic, I highly recommend listening to it:
youtube.com/watch?v=MIZr9G8VkEs&list=OLAK5uy_mmUbMWrCzlsb1PFsVI9P0oBp7eZGaibK4&ab_channel=ZUNTATA-Topic
There are three playable characters, but why would you pick Kart? He has his hair covering up one of his eyes, so he’s useless. Jad the Taff goes into battle with a “dessert” eagle… we’re here to shoot terrorists, not eat ice cream*! So naturally you should always pick Edie. Her fire bombs are very useful, since the fire stays onscreen for several seconds. They are particularly good against those flying enemies in stages 4 and 6. She can also fire her gun really fast. The only downside is she’s the weakest of the three characters.
The first two stages are easy, stage 3 is where the difficulty increases a bit, stage 4 is where it starts to increase a lot. Stage 5 is really where you have to know what you’re doing. The section at 20:20 is really tough, but try and not enter the blue doors -if you don’t go into them, enemies won’t spawn out of them. You can take your time as well, there is a timer for each stage but you can’t even see it until you have a minute left. I’ve never seen this timer so as far as I can tell you have got plenty of time to finish each stage.
Stage 6 is where you’ll want to make sure you’ve got either some bombs or the rocket launcher at the ready, mainly to deal with the flying enemies you’ll come across towards the end. When you get to the nuke, you’ve got a limited amount of time to make your way to the boss and kill him, otherwise the nuke will take off and you’ll get a bad ending. Although the “good” ending in this isn’t much better -nuke takes off with the hangar doors still closed, screen goes white, cut to credits. Guess our heroes all died? I kind of want to say the “bad” ending is the good one -sure, some country got nuked, but it means Edie survived, and I think that’s the important thing around here.
One thing I noticed is that the default lives stock settings for this version are wrong. The default is two here (meaning you get three lives) but in all the other videos I’ve seen for this game, the default stock is one (meaning you get two lives). Not that it matters to me since I beat the game without dying once (that's called a no miss clear apparently!). One setting I did change from the default is the violence setting. It’s off by default, turning it on will cause enemy blood to splatter on the walls sometimes. If they get crushed by an elevator a lot of blood will be seen too.
To conclude, I really like this game, its quickly become one of my all-time favorites and you should play it asap. It’s currently available on Switch, PS4, Xbox One and PC as well as part of the S-Tribute series, so go buy it!
*To his credit, he does appear to be the smartest of the group. Look at him during the mission completed cutscene art -he’s the only one who knows how to stay inside moving vehicles, something Kart and particularly Edie seem to have great trouble with.
Playthrough with Edie Burret. Another week, another trashy Taito ga… wait. What’s going on? I’m having fun playing a Taito game? This is a new experience to me! Known as Elevator Action II in America, this sequel was originally released in 1995 and is held in high regard by Taito fans.
And for good reason -this game is great, and this is coming from someone who isn’t proficient in shooting games. You have to find and enter red doors throughout each stage, all whilst taking out enemies, finding items and using elevators to progress or dodge enemy attacks. The graphics feature small sprites, but they are nicely animated and the backgrounds look good. The soundtrack is also fantastic, I highly recommend listening to it:
youtube.com/watch?v=MIZr9G8VkEs&list=OLAK5uy_mmUbMWrCzlsb1PFsVI9P0oBp7eZGaibK4&ab_channel=ZUNTATA-Topic
There are three playable characters, but why would you pick Kart? He has his hair covering up one of his eyes, so he’s useless. Jad the Taff goes into battle with a “dessert” eagle… we’re here to shoot terrorists, not eat ice cream*! So naturally you should always pick Edie. Her fire bombs are very useful, since the fire stays onscreen for several seconds. They are particularly good against those flying enemies in stages 4 and 6. She can also fire her gun really fast. The only downside is she’s the weakest of the three characters.
The first two stages are easy, stage 3 is where the difficulty increases a bit, stage 4 is where it starts to increase a lot. Stage 5 is really where you have to know what you’re doing. The section at 20:20 is really tough, but try and not enter the blue doors -if you don’t go into them, enemies won’t spawn out of them. You can take your time as well, there is a timer for each stage but you can’t even see it until you have a minute left. I’ve never seen this timer so as far as I can tell you have got plenty of time to finish each stage.
Stage 6 is where you’ll want to make sure you’ve got either some bombs or the rocket launcher at the ready, mainly to deal with the flying enemies you’ll come across towards the end. When you get to the nuke, you’ve got a limited amount of time to make your way to the boss and kill him, otherwise the nuke will take off and you’ll get a bad ending. Although the “good” ending in this isn’t much better -nuke takes off with the hangar doors still closed, screen goes white, cut to credits. Guess our heroes all died? I kind of want to say the “bad” ending is the good one -sure, some country got nuked, but it means Edie survived, and I think that’s the important thing around here.
One thing I noticed is that the default lives stock settings for this version are wrong. The default is two here (meaning you get three lives) but in all the other videos I’ve seen for this game, the default stock is one (meaning you get two lives). Not that it matters to me since I beat the game without dying once (that's called a no miss clear apparently!). One setting I did change from the default is the violence setting. It’s off by default, turning it on will cause enemy blood to splatter on the walls sometimes. If they get crushed by an elevator a lot of blood will be seen too.
To conclude, I really like this game, its quickly become one of my all-time favorites and you should play it asap. It’s currently available on Switch, PS4, Xbox One and PC as well as part of the S-Tribute series, so go buy it!
*To his credit, he does appear to be the smartest of the group. Look at him during the mission completed cutscene art -he’s the only one who knows how to stay inside moving vehicles, something Kart and particularly Edie seem to have great trouble with.
