Einhänder
1997 video game
Einhänder is a 1997 scrolling shooter video game developed and published by Square for the PlayStation. It was released in Japan on November 20, 1997, and in North America on May 5, 1998, by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was also re-released for the Japanese PlayStation Network on June 25, 2008. The name Einhänder is German and denotes a type of sword that is wielded with one hand, here used to refer to the single manipulator arm possessed by the player's spacecraft.
The game is based on the story of the Greek's mythology of Selene and Endymion and set in a fictional future during a war between the Earth and the Moon. The player is part of the Moon's forces and must invade enemy territories to gather reconnaissance and enemy weapons. The music of the game, mainly in a techno/trance style, was composed by Kenichiro Fukui and was published in Japan as a soundtrack album. The game received positive reviews from critics, who praised its gameplay and graphics, but felt the game's short duration and lack of two-player mode were minor flaws.
Gameplay
Einhänder is a shoot 'em up game of the scrolling shooter subgenre in the tradition of games like Gradius, in which the player controls a fighter spacecraft that must destroy enemy craft in side-scrolling levels. The game's graphics are in 2.5D, that is, in 3D with occasional shifting of camera angles, but with the player's movement restricted to a two-dimensional plane.
“Einhänder” enters the record as 1997 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Einhänder, video and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1307981. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1998 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Einhänder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.