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> RANK SYSTEM - A HACKER'S GUIDE <Icarus wrote: The benefit of having Garegga available in an emulator is that you are able to use waypoints to observe changes in the game's programming at specific points. The advantage of this for us Garegga players is that we can now figure out just what causes rank to increase, by how much, and how much of a decrease a strategic suicide really gives us, among other things.
I have to give a huge EXTEND to AWJ and Twiddle, for without their scarily detailed knowledge of programming and the time they both took to experiment with the waypoints in MAME, compiling numbers and their tireless efforts to make sense of it all, we wouldn't have some concrete numerical information regarding the rank system.
Be warned though, this stuff isn't for the faint hearted. BulletMagnet continues on his "Rank for Dummies" guide with the hard facts and excellent number-crunching. Are you ready? ^_- - How Exactly Does Garegga’s Rank Work?:
Battle Garegga uses an invisible numerical counter (henceforth referred to as the Rank Counter) to keep track of how difficult the game gets as it progresses. Since, as was said, the counter is invisible and thus impossible to keep track of directly while playing (unless you hack and modify the arcade ROM to make it display the counter onscreen, as will be detailed in the “Hacker’s Guide” section of this ST), it’s not absolutely vital to memorize every single number related to it, but some basic knowledge of how it works is helpful in the larger picture, so you might want to take note of a few things about it.
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For the sake of simplicity, from this point forward in this guide, despite the fact that the rank counter decreases as difficulty increases, I will refer to increases in the game’s difficulty via the rank counter as “rank increases,” as is most commonly done in discussion of this topic.
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- What Increases the Rank?:
This is the section of this guide that you’ll probably want to pay closest attention to: here are the facts and figures surrounding the various things that increase the rank and cause the game to gradually become more difficult.
There are two different ways in which the game’s rank will increase: “Per-Frame” and “One-Time.” Each type of increase is caused and influenced by different things, which will be covered in the sections for each below.
Phew, I think that about does it…there you have pretty much everything in the game which will increase your rank (in retrospect, a list of what doesn’t raise it might have been shorter, eh?). Obviously, unless you’re part calculator you’re not going to be able to keep track of exactly what’s going on numerically as you play, but you’ll still want to be very aware of your actions as the game goes on, and make an effort to avoid raising the rank any more than you absolutely need to, especially when it comes to the things which have the most drastic effect on it. It’s a lot to keep track of, but it’s definitely not impossible, so hang in there, it becomes easier over time, as some actions (or non-actions) will become almost instinctive the more you practice. Now, on to the next section, which details…
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- What Decreases the Rank?:
Well, now that you’ve heard about all the various ways to increase the game’s rank setting and make things more difficult, I’m sure you’re eager to hear about how to decrease the game’s rank and make the going a bit easier. Don’t get too giddy with anticipation, though, as there’s only one way to do it, and it’s not easy (or pleasant) to pull off.
To get right to the point, there is only one way to outright decrease the rank counter, and that is dying, whether by accident or on purpose. While dying either way will lower rank, ideally you’ll want to increase your skill to the point where you ONLY die on purpose, because depending on when you die, doing so can have a greater effect on the rank. In short, the fewer lives you have remaining in reserve when you die, the greater the decrease in rank will be. Observe the table below for exact figures:
Code: | Remaining lives | Change quantity |
|----------------------------------------------|
| 5 | 261,120 |
| 4 | 391,680 |
| 3 | 522,240 |
| 2 | 655,360 |
| 1 | 785,920 |
| 0 (Game Over) |(The same as remain 1)|
As such, to best control rank you’ll want to purposely keep your remaining lives in reserve to a minimum, to ensure that every death has maximum rank-lowering power. Since you’ll want to die regularly to keep the rank down, this means that scoring well enough to keep the extra lives regularly coming is a MUST. Ideally, you’ll want to “suicide” just before gaining your next extend, so as to get the most out of the death and still have another life in reserve waiting in the wings. Also, in certain spots you might want to take advantage of the invincibility window after dying to get into certain scoring situations, but this has nothing to do with rank control.
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- Conclusion:
So there you have it, more or less: the infamous Battle Garegga rank system, put to paper (well, not literally, unless you print this out, but you know what I mean). Obviously, the above is a lot to digest, and even once you’ve managed to sort it all out, the play style that the game demands of you is highly challenging and rather difficult for many to adjust to, especially after having played other, more “orthodox” shmups for awhile beforehand. Some have accused the game of being a little “too unique,” claiming that the game “punishes players who do too well” or “discourages skill:” I would argue that this isn’t at all the case, although at first glance it might seem like it. Rather, I’d say that Garegga simply uses its own definition of what counts as “doing well” or “playing with skill,” which is much different from the definition other shmups use: instead of asking “How far can you get using all the stuff we offer you?,” Battle Garegga asks “How far can you get without using all the stuff we offer you? How confident are you in your raw survival skills, with or without in-game enhancements? How willing are you to walk the line and cheat death, rather than putting as much distance between it and yourself as you can?”
Anyone who claims that Garegga “discourages skill” obviously hasn’t played it, or at least hasn’t done so while being honest with himself: surviving even while powered-up is no cake walk, and doing so while purposely limiting the amount of lives, weapons, etc. you have available (not to mention scoring well) takes a very high level of skill and practice to pull off. At the same time, anyone who claims that Battle Garegga is “newbie-friendly” or “adjusts itself to a player’s innate skill level” also needs another look at how the game actually works: anyone who hasn’t studied how the rank system functions is doomed to failure, and even those who have done so still need to practice the game extensively to have a shot at completing it without continuing. The game is definitely geared almost exclusively toward dedicated shmuppers, which is both its biggest draw and its biggest off-putting factor…this definitely isn’t a game “for anyone and everyone,” as it were. For most, however, who are willing to drop their assumptions for a bit about what a shmup “is” or “should be,” and to dedicate ample effort to improving their shmupping skills, Battle Garegga is a challenge (and I DO mean a challenge) for the ages.
Hopefully having compiled this info will help you along the way, or at least have enlightened your understanding of the game just a bit.
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- Debunked Rank Theories:
Here, for the sake of completeness, I’ve listed a few well-traveled theories about Battle Garegga’s rank system which were prevalent before the above information was obtained, but have by now been proven false.
- 1) Rollover:
Perhaps the most infamous bogus rank theory, this one stated that once the rank had risen past a certain point, it would “roll over” to the next-highest difficulty level and be impossible to lower down past that point for the rest of the game: as such, it was theorized that dying right after the rank “rolled over” would give the player nearly no benefit at all. Since the rank counter is normally impossible to track directly, the concept of “rollover” turned many potential players off of Garegga, causing rank control to appear largely based on blind luck. Thankfully, this theory has been proven false, and players don’t have to worry about timing their deaths during a brief “window” which they can never actually see.
- 2) Destroying Enemies:
One factor that was theorized to raise your rank was simply how many enemies you destroyed, and players were advised to purposely let some enemies pass without taking them down periodically to help keep the rank down. This has since been proven untrue, although it is true that the shots you use to destroy enemies DO raise the rank, so this theory likely sprang from confusion about per-bullet rank.
- 3) Dropping Medals:
It was previously thought that, aside from dying, another way to lower the rank was to drop a “Max Value” (10,000-point) medal: while it supposedly wouldn’t lower rank as much as dying would, the more you dropped, the more the rank would supposedly lower. In a way, the opposite has since been proved true, since lower-value medals (which will appear after breaking your chain) raise your rank much faster than higher-level ones do, and dropping the high-value medal has no “direct” effect on the rank whatsoever.
- 4) Bullet Eating:
Perhaps a misunderstanding related to the “bullet nullification” aspect of rank, it has been stated previously that every bullet that was cancelled via either bombing or contact during invincibility would raise the rank. In truth, though, only using an enemy’s “dead zone” to nullify bullets, as described in the above section, actually affects the rank.
- 5) Button Pressing:
Another incorrect theory stated that every single button the player presses during a game, even the joystick to move around or the “C” button to change option formations, raises the rank somehow. ROM hacking has proved this untrue.
- 6) Rank Reset by Continuing:
As shown by the chart in the “What Lowers Rank?” section, losing your last life does not in any way “reset” the rank, but simply lowers it by a fixed value (equal to losing one’s second-to-last life, as fate would have it), the same way as a “normal” death does.
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- Stuff We Still Need to Figure Out:
Hopefully to be updated in the future.
1) Whether or not the “chain” formation increases per-frame rank or not.
2) Differences, if any, in how rank works in 2-player games.
Last edited by Icarus on Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:36 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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). Technically, the central turret must also be destroyed, but this is a consequence of shooting the main core when the tank will be at the proper place: if done earlier, it will just trigger the rotating cannon beneath. This will make things a bit more complex, but the ending result is roughly the same.