I was looking for the Mahou code, and was slightly angry, because the code was pretty much the same as the Batrider one, except for a C press after the B, because of the whole "Batrider is 2 buttons" thing, right? So I poked around the reviews out of curiousity and found this:
"Tougher than dodging an 8-way spray of 20mm bullets."
I like the World War II themed shmups. For me, they represent some alternate reality where one of the most epic wars in history was won by a small allied ship squaring off against the evil armada of much larger, much quicker firing, and often-transforming mechanical behemoths, eschewing all infantry combat and strategic planning along with historical accuracy. Videogames in general are full of David vs. Goliath fights, but none really capture this feeling as well as being in the middle of a vertical shooter, firing desperately as your tiny ship struggles not to get clipped by the massive amount of firepower the lumbering bomber in front of you is dumping at and everywhere around you. Despite being made of 8-inch thick titanium, while you’re ostensibly made of balsa wood, your foe eventually explodes in a shower of fire while you blow past him at full speed, your engine roaring as the debris continues to fall from the sky. These moments are usually unparalleled in terms of my gaming enjoyment.
Battle Garegga is another title in the lineage of overhead WWII shooters, granting you massive scores of firepower and maneuverability with the tradeoff of a one-hit-wonder aircraft. The legions of enemies and bosses that reside in each stage will come one after another, shooting all they have at you until they’re destroyed by your concentrations of gunfire. Additionally, the player has access to a death-dealing and extremely finite smart bomb, as well as backup gunfire from small satellites and an upgradable main weapon. Still, this is nothing new, though it is implemented here without any problems.
BG adds to this already immensely playable genre with a few innovations of its own: your aircraft’s obligatory options can be shifted into several formations with the push of a button, score medals increase in point value successively, smart bombs can be replenished by picking up plentiful bomb fragment icons, and half-formed bombs can be fired prematurely if desperate measures need to be taken; though they’re noticeably pitiful when only a few fragments have been collected, they can eat through incoming gunfire and save your ass.
A different kind of beauty
This is no pedestrian shooter. The 4 different aircraft are amazingly worthy fighting machines, each with a different bullet spread and special weapon. The Silver Sword fires out an impressive fog of flaming napalm, usually eating through everything on the screen. The Wild Snail, my personal favorite, dispenses two homing flamethrowers from its wings, disintegrating projectiles and eating up enemies with a beastly surge of fire. Even the standard volleys of projectiles are unexpectedly cool: the normally bland, often lemon-shaped, gunfire one would expect to see from tapping the shot button is replaced by artillery shells as large as your ship. This is some really cool stuff.
Battle Garegga almost effortlessly delivers the best sensory experience I’ve had playing a WWII-type shooter. Unlike 1942, Strikers 1945, and other similar titles, the battlefields of Battle Garegga are mired in darkness. The clouds below are always an overcast haze, the military installations are drab and gloomy, and your opponents are very industrial looking monstrosities that attack without any hint of grace. Battle Garegga is beautiful in how terribly un-pretty everything’s been made to look; clearly, the game has an extremely bleak and depressing appearance that’s both beautifully fitting and oddly uncharacteristic of the genre. The design of this game is impeccable.
The bosses are some major highlights of Battle Garegga: the bosses don’t act the way they do in most other shooters; in other games, end-level guardians are content to put some pretty looking patterns of gunfire onto the screen almost for the sake of doing so rather than to kill you, Garegga’s bosses want you dead; the bullet patterns give off an air of desperation as they flood your immediate area with bullets of all shapes and sizes. One of the coolest bosses, a stealth bomber named Black Heart, dumps gunshots and shells all over the screen. It isn’t enough when the ship opens his wings and shreds the sky with gunfire, encasing your ship in multidirectional bullet streams, but then it shakes your bullet prison around. You must move with the gyrations of Black Heart’s artillery shells if you want to make it out alive. It’s agonizing, but it’s also the best kind of agonizing when you finally pull it off.
Garegga music is a perfect compliment to the rest of the game; it’s also the best I’ve heard from a shooter—its tunes are devoid of excess flourish and dramatic superfluity. What you’ll find are some amazingly crafted pieces that prod along with the scenery, each bringing a typically dark sound without coming off as boring. Even the more upbeat pieces are rather morose compared to the typical rah-rah themes of most other titles. Oddly enough, the music is something I actually want to listen to, and it fits the action onscreen like a glove as it adds another hint of despondency.
If you’re looking at or listening to Battle Garegga, there’s absolutely no doubt that you’ll like what you experience. The cloud stage concreted what I think a WWII shooter should look and sound like: your fighter flies over a blanket of gray skies crackling with electricity as a fleet of massive aircraft carriers fire volleys of scattered gunfire at you from their cores before they explode under your thick artillery shells, intense music playing the whole time.
Battle Garegga is full of great moments like this. It’s a game of amazing boss fights and bullet mazes, and very conquerable odds.
That is, most of the time.
Unfortunately, Garrega adds in an increasing difficulty. While a spike in difficulty is certainly understandable for a game from start to finish, the difference is that Garegga actually gets harder the better you perform. It sounds nice on paper, but quickly the odds stack up: certain encounters become impossible if you’ve done too well; the screen will fill with gunfire that criss-crosses and spits all over the place, bullet mazes overlapping bullet mazes. What might have been once-conquerable bullet patterns will now include three more bursts of claustrophobic gunfire that overlap each other; the patterned and unpatterned gunfire has a tendency to blur together into a dense, impenetrable mass.
Those that have beaten the game on one credit stressed the importance of not doing well: intentionally missing power-ups, dying on purpose, and not shooting down aircraft was the secret of their success. This strikes me as bad game design; it’s completely against the entire dogma of the shooter genre. Careful play and high scores should be rewarded, not punished. The challenge itself would have been more than sufficient if held constant throughout the game: what few unvarying moments that aren’t affected by the curve that exist in the later levels are a joy to play, much like the beginning stages, hinting at the greatness that Battle Garegga could have risen to with a stable difficulty level. It’s one thing when the odds look unconquerable, but things get sour when they actually are.
There are few other grudges I hold with Battle Garegga beyond its unmasked sadism and unmerited increases in difficulty. Bombs have some lag time, leading to an unexpected death from the activation time, and the bullets are occasionally hard to see, as gunmetal-colored shells overlap across the gray haze of a background. These drab colors occasionally lead to a hard-to-see death, though after some time with the game, they can be seen if one knows what to watch for. These two qualms represent the entirety of my complaints beyond the difficulty.
Because of this, it pains me to give Battle Garegga a score lower than what it could have undoubtedly earned. Had it been less ambitious with the difficulty, it would have been a 10 game, easily. Regardless, the bottom line is that I keep coming back to it. The sights, sounds, enemies, and weapons are all staples of the genre, and Battle Garegga nails them all. When the game plays fair, it’s a joy, and even when it’s nasty, it’s hard not to tear yourself away from it. Battle Garegga is perhaps one of the best looking and sounding shooters I’ve ever played. It’s also depressing to think that with a few minor changes to the gameplay, it could have been one of the best shooters I’ve ever played, period.
8 / 10
Almost close to “close to perfection.”
