The game pits the protagonist and his spacecraft, configured with a variety of weapons and augmentations, against masses of small enemy fighters and large capital warships.

Critical opinions on Project Sylpheed were mixed; reviews varied from considering it an exciting cinematic shooter to calling it a clichéd and complicated simulator.

In Project Sylpheed, players take on the role of a rookie pilot and fly the Delta Saber starfighter in a campaign that comprises 16 missions.

[7] By pressing the maneuver button and pushing the thumbstick in a direction, the player makes his or her fighter perform aileron rolls and 180-degrees turns (half-loops).

[12] Project Sylpheed's setting, exposited through flashback sequences during the game, is a fictional 27th century in which human civilization has expanded beyond Earth for 500 years, colonizing several worlds and forming the Terra Central Government (TCG).

[14] The central government's responded by destroying the terraforming facilities of an alliance planet, Acheron, killing many colonists and turning the world inhospitable.

[24] Project Sylpheed's plot has the style and substance of typical anime,[17] depicting characters as the focal points of events rather than individual pawns in the grand scheme of things.

[25] Told through an hour's worth of animated cutscenes,[26] the story starts in the Lebendorf star system where Faraway's squadron is ambushed by ADAN forces.

[28] Then Egan arrives with her superweapon, the Promethus Driver,[20] and destroys most of the TCAF defenders and several ADAN ships with a single shot that also devastates the planet's surface.

In the final battle, Mason flies alongside Faraway, destroying many of ADAN's ships and sacrificing himself to clear a way for his friend to reach the Promethus Driver's firing mechanism.

[2] The original game, first released in 1986,[33] was a rail shooter rendered with 2D computer graphics; dodging and shooting at incoming enemies, the player's starship moved around a playing field that scrolled vertically.

Project Sylpheed was conceived and developed by SETA's Ikusabune team, which comprised former Game Arts employees who had worked on the Silpheed series.

The new game would allow player characters to move anywhere in a three-dimensional playing arena, instead of restricting them to fixed paths as in standard rail shooters.

Computer graphics studio, Anima, was brought in to develop the game's story and characters, creating the animated cut scenes that are interspersed among the missions.

The popularity of shooters began to wane in the 1990s as gamers turned their attention to video games that featured the latest technology: 3D computer graphics.

[39][40] Project Sylpheed lets players fly starfighters and dogfight many enemies in the vastness of space; however, G4TV's reviewer, David Francis Smith, said that the game's designers had "no idea how to create structured, intelligible action in such a big area".

[5][6][42] Other reviewers had no qualms with these flaws, stating that the intense dogfights more than compensate such shortcomings;[11][17][45][46] Game Informer's Andrew Reiner wrote that the "rewarding quick-trigger combat and thrill of overcoming the worst of odds makes Project Sylpheed a memorable play for gamers who daydream of galaxies far, far away".

[47] In Project Sylpheed, starfighters and missiles leave colorful contrails in their wake as they move through the void of space, and explode into fireballs when destroyed.

The graphics impressed several critics;[7][45] in his article for Play magazine, Dave Halverson called the game "by far the prettiest free-roaming shooter ever created".

[41][18][48][50] Will Freeman of VideoGamer.com in contrast appreciated the contrails for filling the emptiness of space with "tangled webs of gently shimmering blue and red" and found them useful as "a way of tracking [his] enemies".

Club criticized the game for forcing the player to constantly focus on the instruments to locate targets, thus breaking the illusion of dogfighting in a spacefighter.

[5][47] The focus on relationships made it more complex and easier to relate to than those found in other shooters,[17][46] and Halverson praised the game for lacing a "mission-based space opera" with "real emotion".

[39] Again, differing opinions are not uncommon; Hardcore Gamer's Thomas Wilde was disappointed to find the game akin to an exaggerated science-fiction soap opera.

[17][47][39][48][51] Despite receiving such reactions, Project Sylpheed sold enough copies (as judged by Microsoft) in Japan within the first nine months of its release to become part of Xbox 360's Platinum Collection on November 1, 2007.