Gameplay: Great
Controls: Great
Graphics: Good for its time
Length: Great. 7 Missions.

Note: Played on RG35XX Retro handheld console.

Deeply punishing due to camouflaged bullets and limited combat options, but balanced with a beautiful soundtrack and aggressive play requirements. Garegga stomps on your throat and dares you to wrestle free.

Practicing at this one is deeply satisfying, even among other bullet hell titles, if only because the skill ceiling is SO high. 1CCing this one is a true act of valiance, and the charming design innovations within the extremely tired military shooter aesthetics that normally plague the genre ensure you won't mind trying again and again...provided you can take it.

i'll fight you to the death, and win, if you don't like ketsui. if you don't like greg, well, you're wrong, but i guess i can respect it

personally, because i'm a dickhead, i admire that this game absolutely bombs away most strict ideas of "good design". the bullets are grey and brown on brown and grey. bombs are flawed, imperfect solutions for both offense and defense that are hard to rely on. the rank system is invisible -- yet must be constantly observed. getting anywhere with greg requires external study and theory which is enacted with guesswork and risk. (though the "all in" feeling of cranking your autofire and finally fully powering yourself up to try to burn the end of the game down before the rank catches up with you -- this is a rare thrill in games). the best player ships are crossovers from mahou daisakusen, unlockable via cheat code. and yet i still love this game!

a particularly interesting and undersung thing about garegga is how scoring works. we generally think of scoring as an extra rule or two to follow, a covenant, a loop. medal chaining serves this purpose to a degree, but it's not the heart of the game's scoring -- which is about oddly-balanced score values, tick points and how you get the damn medals to appear in the first place. medal chaining is simply there to link all these little stunts together

each stage in greg has a massive amount of inscrutable scoring rules which, again, are never said to the player. bomb the pipes for extra points, destroy the tanks while they're on the houses, bomb the flamingoes, self-destruct into the blimps. bosses even moreso -- a scoring run of garegga is tasked with a very systemic dismantling of the various intricate mechanical bosses not unlike reading a technical manual in reverse. no, you fucking idiot, you were supposed to destroy that part with a non-piercing shot!

if you can surmount the tragedy of having to look up scoring information on the internet, this does a lot for the game -- each stage feels and plays so differently, is always asking different things of you, yet always does nothing more than use the basic tools of shooting, moving, managing your options, and bombing.

as with the rank system, it's up to the aspiring player to put it all together and succeed -- which means constantly juggling resource against resource, constantly asking if you should burn a life to appease the rank demon or hold onto it for a safety with no future, constantly wondering how low your power should be for a given section, micro-managing bomb fragments. greg makes you sweat the small stuff.

this level of absolute detail, this level of nurnied out machine-like inelegant intricacy, is frankly incompatible with having to explain everything twice every five seconds. something has to give way, and this game is of an older era where it was friendliness who'd generally give way. i love you greg

First, I'll give Garegga the credit it deserves: it's an obsessively-designed shooter, with a focus on tearing enemies apart piece-by-piece that's both unique and intensely gratifying. The look of it is a bit mundane, superficially--but the more you play, the more all kinds of striking little details become apparent... some of which act as keys to the game's myriad, tantalizing destructible layers and secrets. (Flamingos, am I right folks?)

I could go on at length, singing the game's praises (cool music! neato bosses! nice explosions!), but I'll just leave it at this: it's great. You could play it for a while and have a fun time, blissfully unaware of the complexity and rigidity of the structure upon which it's built.

It's when considering its structure that the game gets equal parts more interesting and more problematic. Honestly, knowing about how Battle Garegga actually works in detail it makes me hesitant to say I love, or even LIKE it.

To sum it up: the game has a hidden system that increases difficulty ("rank") based on a bunch of different parameters. Many, many shmups have a system like this; however, arguably none are as rigid or multifaceted or downright infamous as Garegga's. Rank in this game increases with time, with collection of power ups and items, with number of shots fired, with lives accrued, with points gained, and with a million other things I probably don't even know about... and the only way it ever DEcreases is with player death.

So the philosophical problem is that: if Garegga is played on the terms it actively presents to the player, it is brutally unfair, and nigh impossible. If you play the game collecting every power-up item that falls your way, hoarding lives for survival, hoarding bomb items--as you do in most other shmups--rank will get so high, so fast, that the game will literally be unfinishable. It's only by carefully avoiding power up items (only small ones--the big ones are OK!), and being careful to die on purpose at set intervals to decrease rank, that an intermediate or even advanced (non-super) player can manage to 1CC the game.

I find this annoying at best, and antithetical to "good" game design at worst. Good design educates the player, and gives them the tools they need to win, right? Things can get punishingly difficult in a well-designed game, of course, but you should never feel lost at sea without a paddle. The worst kind of game-difficulty leaves you completely reliant on external sources of information to gain an advantage. (Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES comes to mind, where you're supposed to somehow know that a specific item should be thrown at a specific tile on the floor to open a passage to continue the game. No one could EVER know this without playing for an unreasonable amount of time, getting crazily lucky, or asking someone who's already beat it for help. That's shitty!)

Garegga's devious rank system mirrors this. No one, without external knowledge, or without an extreme amount of fastidious replaying and testing, would ever play this game and know to avoid the little power up items, or to avoid accruing more than three lives, or to avoid holding the rapid fire button at select sections and let enemies pass by. It just feels completely wrong and backwards to do those things! And, even if a player had a general idea that certain actions increased rank, certain OTHER shooter conventions (i.e. bombs DEcreasing rank) are eschewed entirely here.

All of this is to say that the complete picture of what it takes to achieve an ideal run of Garegga simply cannot be obtained legitimately, on the game's terms... which seems kind of terrible.

Enter M2-- a wonderful developer that made a loving port of Garegga in 2016 for PS4. In this port, a "gadget" can be toggled that makes rank visible as a percentage and as a graph... and it is SO much more fun to play than the Saturn or Arcade versions! Now you can track the consequences of your decisions -- is it worth a 2.5% rank increase to pick up X item? How much rank do you gain from rapid firing through a section versus dodging and holding fire? These kinds of risk/reward choices are what great shmups are built on, and the fact that they're so obfuscated in original release of this otherwise really great game is criminal. (I should also mention that the M2 port fixes a major bullet-visibility problem, too, though that's much less of a big deal than the rank thing).

So, the question is: do I review this game as a person living years after its initial release and heyday—years after all of its secrets and systems have been laid bare? Or do I review it on its own terms -- pretending the M2 port doesn't exist, and without accounting for the pages upon pages that I read about its hidden complexity, prior to ever booting it up?

.... I dunno, man. I'm giving it 3.5 stars. Which accounts for both perspectives, in my mind, sort of? Just play it on PS4, it's cool! I will just never not fucking hate dodging to avoid a power up item in a shmup.