The second SNES Darius game, and the one with some of the most memorable
boss names if you ask me, Darius Force was released outside Japan as SuperNova (good Lord, WHY?). The game also has a few extra features thrown in (including a different text font which looks suspiciously like Westminster). To start off, we are fed with a philosophical intro on the survival of the fittest, and how Belser is out for blood again. Fine. Some fun...More interestingly, we are offered the choice of three Silver Hawks- the original one (green), the one from Sagaia (blue), and a new one (red). As in Sagaia and Darius Twin, you have those green 2-way/6-way lasers as well as the missiles, but they can be toggled instead of being always on. Interestingly, if you fire both shot and missile at the same time, both come out at a diminished power, which means you have to exercise some judgement regarding when to use what. The powerup system goes up to 8 levels if you believe them, with the old formula of powerups only returning in Darius Gaiden. As in Darius Twin, powering up is faster but is reset to zero when you get killed. And you don't respawn on dying.
The other change in the game is the stage layout; instead of the usual triangle, we have a neat little parallelogram of stages. But you can't
do every stage in it, though. You are constrained as well:in the picture,
I can't go to level C, only the highlighted ones. Another interesting thing about the bosses, apart from the fact that they were drawn with better care than the ones in Darius Twin, is that one appears to move up the evolutionary tree as you progress along the game. For example, take the upper tier path. A's some kind of microorganism, B's a jellyfish, D&G are molluscs, J's a chameleon, M a humpback whale and O a cyborg. Design or cleverness? Who knows? The bosses also have an extra attack when diffculty is bumped up to 'Hard'; a nice touch 
Anyway. On to the bosses. For the first time since Sagaia, we have all-original bosses. Woo hoo!
An 'extra' boss lurks in this game too, called Icthyion. Any information on him is welcome!
Darius Force Box Art:1,2
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