To Garegga fans, why do you (not) like Ibara more GAMEPLAY-wise?

[1000Eyes]

TL;DR: Title

Hi, I'm normally a lurker, but I'm really curious about this question for some reason. Ibara doesn't have as much ink spilled on it as Garegga, but what little scattered posting I find here and elsewhere suggest a dedicated following. If they are similar, why do you prefer one over the other? Ignoring aesthetics for now, as I'm more curious about the gameplay.

[Steven]

Because I have never played Ibara.

[Lord British]

Because I have never played Ibara.

Same. That and MMP/PS are practically the only ones I haven't touched.

[stellar_light]

The main distinction for me is that rank control doesn't feel quite as fluid in Ibara when playing for survival--Garegga's stage design was flexible enough that you could handle it in several different ways and feel how the results of that effort would have significant rippling effects later in the game, whereas with Ibara I feel like I'm approaching stages with a more standard playstyle in mind and the gameplay consequences come as a permutation of how well I stick to that route rather than how much I'm influencing my rank. As an example, my main strategy in Garegga is to barely shoot at all during the first three stages and not pick up any options, which usually lets me get to stage 4 with 1-2% rank and multiple extends in stock, and the stages are constructed so that you don't really need all that extra firepower during the earlygame anyway.

Ibara is something you can't really approach that way, enemy waves are high density even early on and you should have all your options online and be using the Search formation by the end of stage 2. If you go into stage 4 of Garegga with 20% rank then something has gone very wrong, but if you go into stage 3 of Ibara with 30% rank (sometimes it's 18% if you're on your last life), then that's just a standard run of Ibara. Obviously you still can do some rank optimizations in Ibara, like there's not much reason you need to be stocking up on three rocket options during stage 1, but it's not something that's actively at the forefront of my mind while playing the way it is in Garegga, beyond making sure that I lose a life before my next extend and not to pick up every option in sight.

That's just speaking for my own playstyle and my experience with those games--I've never played them for score so I imagine it's a whole different beast when that's added to the equation. I like both games, but despite the similarities they don't scratch quite the same itch as each other.

[Steven]

Because I have never played Ibara.

Same. That and MMP/PS are practically the only ones I haven't touched.

Yeah, those three + Akai Katana, which I always forget exists, and Deathsmiles 1 and 2. Taito Hey has Ibara... Kuro, I believe, or at least they did the last time I was there, but I'm not in a rush to play anything that isn't 80s Toaplan or Out Zone, so I'll get to those other things eventually. Maybe. Maybe not.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

With the Cave CV-1000 Ibara pcb kit, at one time, it was the cheapest pcb kit you could buy for a mere $300.00 usd back in 2005-2007. Heck, someone sold a brand new Ibara pcb kit here on the Shmup's Trading Section many moons ago that hadn't even been "initialized" yet and it uses the CR2450 based battery for RTC functionality -- how cool is that (for an entirely brand new CV-1000 based arcade hardware platform built from the ground up)?

Of course, it's well-known that a Cave CV-1000 pcb can be "re-initialized" by the arcade operator/owner at a whim's notice if it needed be (as it is, it's mostly a "one time affair & be done with it" type of deal).

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On the "Rose Garden" demo stage run, the correct time is shown on the huge clock timepiece (which was a cool, whimsical and novel way to "showcase" the CV-1000's RTC (Real Time Clock) prowess hard at work.

Protip: If the time isn't being displayed correctly, then it's time to replace the dead CR2450 coin-type battery with a fresh brand new one and you're good to go for another four to five years (or so) down the road. The new CR2450 battery will vary in longevity based on how old it is and when it was manufactured.
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PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Jeneki]

Garegga brown bullets are easier to track than Ibara transparent spinny bullets.

Ibara has the best medal drop sound though.

[KAI]

Its a huge shame most people never got the chance to play it properly until the cv1000 emulation was a thing. I can understand why shmup fans never cared a lot about it.


Thank goodness I got a copy of Ibara as soon as i got my first ps2 (around 2007), and learned about cave and yagawa from it and was basically the reason why I went full shmup back then.
Playing it on a rotated crt was a hell of an experience, and is the reason why i never complained about how shitty that port looks if you play it on a hori setup. That's why its still on my shmups top 3 list.
IMO Ibara is far superior than Greg, It has better music (Hosoe>>>>>Namiki), scoring is more fun, the attack mechanics are better (aura damage my beloved), and has more variety overall (trains and thongs>>>>gritty artstyle).

Got into Garegga 15 years ago and my first impression was that the game played like a bad prototype of Ibara. learned to love it eventually, but I still think is not as good.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Patching the PS2 Ibara disc to get 240p does wonders for the rotated display (particularly in RGB), otherwise it's still 480i, I'm afraid. And the patch is a recentish thing. Best of that version is the unique arrange mode, I hear?

[Steven]

How expensive is Ibara? Tops has an Ibara Kuro that is approaching Saidaioujou levels of expensive, but I don't know about the regular version. Tops overprices everything, unfortunately, and you can get the same stuff for way better prices at any other PCB store in most cases, assuming they have it, but I've never seen Ibara for sale anywhere.

[1000Eyes]

Ibara has the best medal drop sound though.

Heh, I concede

Yeah, I think stellar_light articulated my current stance on the game survival-wise. It's like that with the other non-Garegga Yagawa games for me too, like Batrider. Technically scoring is optional with a lot of Cave games as well, but I keep finding myself naturally scoring despite it hurting my survival chances in Doj or Ketsui for example. Dunno what's the difference here, that's why I'm asking you vets.

Weirdly enough though, I agree with a lot of KAI's points as well (besides the Namiki heresy , but I love Hosoe's work on Ibara). Blowing up those oil tanks on Stage 2 or timing the popcorn destruction over the arches feels amazing, the Hadou cannon and aura flashes are super fun, and so on. Is it a case of the game not leading me there naturally enough, or just me making excuses for being a scrub? I definitely will be revisiting this game a lot when I start to get better. There aren't that many Garegga-likes out there anyway, so I can't be picky

[jepjepjep]

I love Garegga and I love Ibara too. I think Ibara is very underrated.

[Lethe]

Garegga is a simple, approachable, nondemanding game that combines a variety of fundamentally attractive little scoring elements with lots of attention to detail, which ended up complicated mostly by accident because its system turned out to be very exploitable.

Ibara is an inelegant, impenetrable, tryhard game that is overcomplicated by design because Yagawa was under pressure to exceed Garegga. Typical Yagawa nonintentionality combined with doujin-level kitchen sink nonsense sounds great on paper but it's executed in a way that is more obstructive than it is fun. It's not helped by having the worst art direction of any even remotely well-regarded shmup that I know of. I think it represents most of the faults of both of its parents with few of either's strengths.

[Bassa-Bassa]

So gross indeed. I always say, why does not every game look like Space Invaders, damn.

[Steven]

That's what this game looks like? Yuck, more hideous pre-rendered graphics. Space Invaders is significantly more aesthetically pleasing than this game is.

[CStarFlare]

It's not helped by having the worst art direction of any even remotely well-regarded shmup that I know of.

Nonsense, Akai Katana exists. (seriously - Ibara's art direction is fine and Teresa is a top-tier Cave final boss.)

I don't think Ibara qualifies as kitchen sink nonsense (it's significantly simpler than Batrider, which is the real "trying really hard to surpass Garegga" game), but it's unapproachable in a way Garegga isn't. You can just throw yourself at Garegga and not run into an unreasonable wall until stage 5 (?). For Ibara that wall is the stage 2 boss and even that can't be easily solved just by starting to engage with rank management - you need to go into that fight with a plan. It doesn't really get easier from there.

I tend to like it, but I don't think I'll ever manage a clear.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

It's not helped by having the worst art direction of any even remotely well-regarded shmup that I know of.

Nonsense, Akai Katana exists. (seriously - Ibara's art direction is fine and Teresa is a top-tier Cave final boss.)

I don't think Ibara qualifies as kitchen sink nonsense (it's significantly simpler than Batrider, which is the real "trying really hard to surpass Garegga" game), but it's unapproachable in a way Garegga isn't. You can just throw yourself at Garegga and not run into an unreasonable wall until stage 5 (?). For Ibara that wall is the stage 2 boss and even that can't be easily solved just by starting to engage with rank management - you need to go into that fight with a plan. It doesn't really get easier from there.

I tend to like it, but I don't think I'll ever manage a clear.

Yes, I agree with the sentiment of Dr. Teresa Rose being really "easy on the eyes." There's nothing wrong with the notion of showing some skin along with "if you've got it, flaunt it" with the golden ratio of ideal body portion as with Teresa's figure being depicted -- could she have a side job posing as a model in addition to her primary job?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Lethe]

Nonsense, Akai Katana exists.

Right, yeah... I'll just go back to pretending that nobody likes that game.

Maybe overcomplicated isn't descriptive of what I'm getting at; I don't mean it's too complicated to play. Over-wrought maybe? It's fundamentally another (fourth) game with Nose Laughin in it, a boss that flies around chaotically doing random attack combinations which sometimes lets out milkable drones, Mad Ball patterns to point at and scream excitedly, etc, and now for this iteration we have more shit on the screen, fast pacing, sort-of-new mechanics, everything is exploding constantly. It's got an enthusiastic appearance yet is somehow more one-note and less intense than before. To escape the cursed lethargy of the latter-day-Caveman, it needed to become kitchen sink nonsense, and it missed it.

Batrider, which is the real "trying really hard to surpass Garegga" game

Whatever the intent was, those two don't fill the same niche. If they did, they'd have tried to make a Batrider-like instead of Ibara. Or maybe you're right and they went with Ibara because it wasn't so dependent on huge scale.

[Rastan78]

My advice to people struggling to get into Ibara would be just learn the scoring routes. Its basically get your medals up stage 1, bomb everything relevant and remember when to hadou for medals. You get so many extends and the hadou and aura burst are massively OP so you can steamroll the game and skip the boss fights to a degree.

It's way simpler and easier to score than Raizing games. Like if chaining Bakraid and getting all the items on Dimahoo are like 8 or 9/10 complexity and difficulty then Ibara is like 3/10. Its Raizing Lite more or less.

My issue with Ibara is more how skewed the scoring is towards two bosses only. Makes all the little scoring tricks seem kind of inconsequential when you can double your entire score spamming hadous and suicides on the last boss.

[DarkSlayer]

Mainly because it’s harder to actually play it. Even with the recent cv1000 emulation I struggle with the input lag as I can’t get run ahead to work with it for some reason.

What’s the main way you guys play ibara? I guess the ps2 port

[Sloppy_J]

I ended up forking out a silly amount for the PS2 port of Ibara following recommendations on this forum. It took a while to click with me but once it did I ended up playing it religiously for a few months. While there are similarities with Garegga, bombing is completely different. If you’re playing for score (which is how you should be playing) then you’re going to be bombing a whole lot to get those medals. It’s 480i and a bit laggy but the PS2 port isn’t as bad as people make out, especially if you’re using a rotated CRT. Definitely a top tier shmup.

[1000Eyes]

My advice to people struggling to get into Ibara would be just learn the scoring routes. Its basically get your medals up stage 1, bomb everything relevant and remember when to hadou for medals. You get so many extends and the hadou and aura burst are massively OP so you can steamroll the game and skip the boss fights to a degree.

It's way simpler and easier to score than Raizing games. Like if chaining Bakraid and getting all the items on Dimahoo are like 8 or 9/10 complexity and difficulty then Ibara is like 3/10. Its Raizing Lite more or less.

My issue with Ibara is more how skewed the scoring is towards two bosses only. Makes all the little scoring tricks seem kind of inconsequential when you can double your entire score spamming hadous and suicides on the last boss.

Sorry for the bump, but I actually took this advice! The game's way more fun to play now, like Garegga on steroids with the crazy medaling in Stage 1 and risk reward of stage 2's oil drums and popcorn. I do wonder how this is supposed to be Raizing lite though. Scoring like that means I barely get pass stage 2; all the crazy spreads due to the rank increase keep murdering me. Feels more like Garegga hard mode unless im doing something wrong

[Rastan78]

Are you stockpiling lives or making sure to do your suicides? Do the instant suicide at the beginning of stage one to get your first hadou and drop your life count. Having too many in stock is going to boost rank.

I guess by Raizing Lite I mean the scoring routes aren't terribly difficult or unforgiving (relatively). And the mechanics can be abused to make boss fights easier. For example suiciding and collecting the resulting powerups while invicible and overlapping the boss can do massive damage with the aura blast. Combine with the hadou and bosses can be deleted in a way they can't in Garegga. IIRC don't shoot while damaging a boss with the hadou. Let the circular blast do its thing without firing your normal shot for max damage.

[Sumez]

I couldn't get into Garegga back in the day. Ibara was literally the game that eased me into weird rank balancing Yagawa design, opening my eyes to both games

[AGermanArtist]

I didn't have much love for Garegga thanks to the fact I had difficulty seeing the bullets in MAME. It took the Shot Triggers for me to enjoy it. Now I love it and have spent quite a bit of time with it, learning how to actually play it. Also a big fan of Ibara Kuro, and Pink Sweets to a lesser extent.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Building up bombs in either game is a bit of a painful process; I don't like how few resources you respawn with after dying. I do however wonder if most of the rank control is really necessary...

I've (barely) 1cc'd Gun Frontier which is also a game that often gets talked about as a game which requires rank control, and honestly I totally ignored that and just blasted everything aggressively with autofire. It's manageable at max rank, albeit difficult, but the difficulty I find mainly comes from how slow and large your ship is. If your ship moved faster (or had a bit of spreadshot) it wouldn't be nearly as difficult. It makes me wonder if Garegga doesn't really need nearly as much rank control as we're sometimes told it takes to get a clear? I still suck at it though, it's a hard game in part due to bullet visibility.

[R79]

I got it when it came out for JP PS2, but eventually sold it, because I never really played it, and it went from like £40 off PlayAsia to £150 upwards on eBay, and the cash was welcome frankly. I don't particularly miss it, as have managed to pick up loads of other shooters from different eras and movements over the years. Yes, I did really like the art style, but it was soooooo punishing off the bat. Some of the stage tracks were outstanding, no doubt. But I seem to remember reading on here, how the actual arcade version was supposed to have slowdown, and the PS2 didn't (no Wait option like Saturn Garegga AFAIK), and that really just sealed the deal: it felt unfair.

Surprised really it didn't get another port during the giddy 360 days, when so much Cave stuff turned up on the machine in the East. I didn't keep track of the genre much after that for some years, and the PS4 and Switch seem to have become the home of STGs de jour, yet Ibara is still effectively AWOL? Well, I would definitely welcome another stab (and stomp) at it for I guess 40 quid approx again, if some of those issues could be straightened out...

[1000Eyes]

Hope it's ok to bump my own thread Was debating to put this in the shmup ticker thread, but maybe it's better to centralize my Ibara thoughts.

Doing a weird scorevival-ish run, because i felt pure survival just ignores a lot of stage design. Only getting ~2M entering ST3 so still a lot to learn, but there's very nice moment in a recent run with the two ships in the back of Stage 2 that illustrate what i like about the game. They normally fire a nasty aimed line of bullets, and they drop medals when you destroy their wings. This recalls scenarios in previous Yagawa games like the helicopter wave in Batrider Airport stage, where a similar dilemma happens. Normally you could just play defense and ignore medals, or do a risky micrododge to get em, or spend a bomb, but I love how Ibara's mechanics open up a fourth way. What i did was plan a suicide when the first ship appeared, then use the aura flash to destroy them while invincible to get the medals safely.

I love that little interlock, the way you can line up all the crazy levers in the game in your favor. I heard that high level scoring is milk-heavy, so maybe my opinion will change, but I think that having to juggle the variables like that is why I enjoy Yagawa games.