Battle Garegga

"Your thirst for destruction will be thoroughly quenched"

The Saturn is well-known in the hardcore gaming community as having a multitude of import shooters that are above and beyond the offerings of any other system past and present in terms of both quality and quantity. A wealth of compilations from past series (namely the Gradius and Thunderforce series) as well as amazing exclusive arcade translations (the mythic Radiant Silvergun,), the Saturn is also home to a host of lesser-known yet equally entertaining shooters. Battle Garegga, though not possessing the stardom of it's shooter brethren, is an amazingly well crafted old-school shooter.

Raizing/Eighting, makers of Battle Garegga, also produced the fantastic shooter Soukyugurentai, which by chance includes a demo of Battle Garegga in it's reissue, Soukyugurentai Otokuyu. Their ability to masterfully craft shooters is evident in the consistency of their efforts. BG isn't an innovative or revolutionary shooter in any sense of the word - it uses the old-shooter shooter formula that has hardly changed since it's inception, although it manages to incorporate several ideas from many different classic shooters rather well. The gameplay is meant to be more manic than focused and methodical. You start with a limited number of lives and bombs, and acquire power-ups and additional bombs to increase your firepower. The 4 available ships (with another hidden 4) in BG have your typical shooter dichotomy - differentially balanced in terms of speed, firepower, and weapon range. Each ship also has the ability to acquire assistant pods which can be arranged in a variety of formations, similar to Truxton and Shienryu. Bombs can either save you in a pinch or nuke everything on the screen. One hit from enemy fire and you’re dead, and contact with enemies merely downgrades weapon power. Die, and the shrapnel from your fallen vehicle will deliver death to surrounding enemies; you can thank Raiden for that one. There are copious amount of power-ups available at every turn of the game, as if the developers anticipated the repeated deaths of the player, balancing out almost malicious level design with wanton generosity. Although Battle Garegga doesn't make major strides by introducing new gameplay twists, that doesn't detract it from being an incredibly challenging and entertaining shooter.

On that note, i've been rather perturbed by shooters as of late. They seem more and more obsessed with twisting around the shooter formula and inventing new gameplay conventions that they don't stop to consider whether or not such innovations are fun. It distracts from the heart of the shooter - blasting everything in sight and dodging a spread of bullet hell. Furthermore, shooters are the busiest games in the biz – keeping your finger on the trigger as well as properly timing bombs is what most players can handle while dodging a deadly spread of bullets. It's nice to be able to go back to a simpler time, a time less associated with novelty than pure adrenaline pumping gameplay.

Battle Garegga, like all shooters, is a very difficult game. Fast reflexes are the key to success in BG, but those with limited hand-eye coordination can also rely on a time-honored shooter tradition known as memorization. Memorizing enemy patterns is very necessary in many of the later missions, as the constant stream of enemies and bullet patterns must be navigated more or less perfectly in order to survive. Memorization is only part of the equation – the other being survival. As in most shooters, death means a loss of weapon power, which ultimately makes the later levels almost unplayable after dying even once – at which point the game becomes a frustrating effort of the player to survive more by luck than anything else.

Battle Garegga was originally designed for the Saturn ST-V board, essentially an arcade Saturn board. The colors are rather drab and somewhat unvaried. Early on, the game has major undertones of dark green and brown, giving the game an extremely dithered, dreary appearance. The graphics improve later in the game, with more color variety (though not necessarily brighter). The game has a unique WWII-esque motif similar in principal to the Strikers 1945 and 19xx series, but different in execution. While the game doesn't use any actual WWII ship designs, the overall design elements are highly reminiscent of that era. And while Strikers and 1942 take several creative liberties when it comes to their boss characters and overall enemy design, BG tries to maintain some semblance of realism and consistency - at least for the first few levels. Transforming mechs are nowhere to be found, but there are some interesting boss characters, not the least of which is a ship from Soukyugurentai. If there's one unique aspect to the game that many people are divided over, it's the enemy fire. The bullets in Battle Garegga look exactly like that - real bullets. They're easier to dodge as they're slimmer and tend to travel slowly, but they can be lost in the background quite easily. Considering that most everything in the game gets lost beneath the myriad of explosions, the audio is largely unimportant, although the music is entertaining without having to be modern techno.

Many an old-school gamer has waxed philosophical about the changing nature of the videogame industry and the death of the great genres that were once so bountifully occupied in bygone days. What’s necessary to achieve enjoyment then for any fan of a dead genre is to take a leap backwards instead of forwards. Battle Garegga may be old, but it’s heart is in the right place. It retains the spirit of the classics of the genre as well as having a character all it’s own.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/01/03, Updated 07/01/03