chempop wrote:In terms of what YAGAWA SAYS, Garegga is more hardcore.
I love them equally, but batrider only took me 10 months to destroy, while garegga I've been playing for years and barely scratched the surface.
I dunno, the amount of optimization and execution potential in Batrider across all sorts of techniques and tricks is simply unreal, as well as the huge variety of different strategic possibilities. Even the highest western scores are far behind the world record, and the world record is quite a bit behind what a TAS can achieve. It's incredible that after over 15 years there's still so much room for improvement. I would agree that Garegga's more "hardcore" in the sense that it's less friendly and approachable, but in terms of sheer depth and breadth I beg to differ.
I had a hard time deciding between Batrider and Garegga in my vote. I like Garegga's graphics and soundtrack more, as well as its pacing across the game as a whole (that atmosphere in the latter half!), but individual stages and moments within the stages tend to be more interesting to me in Batrider, especially comparing the early stages of the two. Batrider's rank system makes more sense to me but I don't like how unforgiving it is with stocking extends, and I think the long-term effect of raising autofire rate in Garegga is a really interesting idea for the pacing of the game. Bosses in Batrider are more varied and are better in many ways (and there's a whole lot more of them too), but somehow the best bosses in Garegga feel more memorable to me and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's their elegant designs, maybe it's how Black Heart keeps making cameos in other shmups (including Batrider), maybe it's something else, I don't know. I like the feel of most of the characters in Batrider more than the ships in Garegga, though I blame that on me getting too used to Miyamoto in Garegga to play anything else without feeling underpowered (Gain is also powerful but just really hard to use). It's a tough choice and I almost gave them tied scores, but eventually gave Batrider a slight edge.
Bakraid's an entirely different beast, unlike any other Yagawa game. My frustration with some of its quirks kept me from giving it as high a score as Batrider and Garegga, but I think it's the most
interesting out of the three, and probably the most intriguing shmup I've ever come across.
