At first glance Battle Garegga doesn't look like anything special. It has nice pixel art but the theme from a far appears common for the genre. It's not until you sit down and play that you learn how special it really is.

Battle Garegga has a thesis which flows through every facet of the game’s design:

Short Version:

• It teaches you lots but not didactically: It never forces your hand but expects you to think.

• There’s risk/reward ****ing everywhere: Like in every setpiece.

• You can play it however you want: Usually you can make any plan work.

• You can use all your resources: Bombs, lives, it’s all fair game and you’ll get more.

• You can think your way out of trouble: Suck at dodging? Prep and you won’t have to!

Long Version:

You can do anything, but everything has consequences.

As you play, this thesis is continually reinforced. The weapon system gives you precise control over both where you want to fire and how much firepower you want to use. The scoring system is discrete enough to let players choose the opportunities they wish to take. Even the story, wherein a pair of engineers unwittingly empower a vicious regime through their own creations and now must stop it by their own hands, has a strong individualistic streak running through it.

You can do anything, but everything has consequences. Which leads to the second rule of Garegga: take what you need and make the most of what you have. While Garegga is rather famous for having a dynamic difficulty system integrated into every element of the game, this inclusion is necessary for giving the gameplay meaning. Allow the player to greedily collect powerups without consequence and there would be no downside; much like in CAVE games, the powerup would become a mandate instead of a free choice. Likewise, start the game at full power and the game would need to be rebalanced around that expectation. You could no longer choose to power up for specific situations in order to get the upper hand before dying and slinking back under the radar. You could no longer dictate the rules of engagement; you’d be forced to fight every situation straight-up.

But this also reveals one of the beauties of Garegga: your wits can make up for where your reflexes fail. Troublesome bosses can be crippled, and annoying enemies can be bombed or sealed or fought from behind—often with no direct penalty. Yes, at some point a compromise will need to be made, but you can plan around when and how that compromise will occur. Garegga is a game that rewards thoughtful play, and a bit of reflection and planning can dramatically swing the odds in your favor.

All of this means nothing without good level design so if you're still reading, here's a brief but still long-ish breakdown of stage 1...

Games live or die by their first stages. As stage 1 is where the rules of the game are established, perceptive players should, by its end, have a handle on what is possible within the game’s scope. And because everyone is already familiar with the basic rules of this genre (shoot, dodge, etc), good developers can use stage 1 to highlight what makes their game different from the rest.

Just a few seconds after the game begins proper, you are confronted with what you see in front of you.



Yep. Garegga don’t **** around.

But this prompts the player to shoot, and upon doing so they find that ground enemies drop trinkets. Since there are so many, the player is bound to collect a few and notice that the meter at the lower left is going up. If they collect enough (and there are plenty of opportunities to do so), the meter is replaced with a bomb icon. The player learns how the bomb system works, is rewarded with one, and realizes that, if they want bombs, they’re gonna have to work for ’em.

Following that, air enemies start flying in and, as they’re shot down, items appear. Here, the developer took care to make sure that items cycle in a specific order:

• The player collects a medal and they get 100 points. These must be important for scoring.
  
• The player collects a yellow powerup and it powers up their shot. Cool.
  
• The player now sees another medal, notices it looks different, and collects it for 200 points. They now assume that collecting more of these will lead to greater values. They might even be curious if there’s an endpoint to how big they get, and will keep playing to try to reach that end.
  
• The player collects a green powerup, making the ship spawn a new little helper. These are called “options” and, like the medals, it does make the player wonder how many of these you can collect.
  
• Finally, the player collects another yellow powerup and hears a click. So, as you get stronger, you must need more powerups to level up.

But the player doesn’t have much time to think about these, since the first large enemy appears from the top-left. Its spread is denser than anything you’ve faced as of yet, and is just threatening enough to perhaps make the player try out the two other buttons on the machine. Button 2 deploys your hard-earned bomb, likely obliterating anything it touches. However button 3, unusable up until your recent option pickup, changes the position of said option. The fact that this operation gets its own special button makes it clear that effective option positioning is key to successful play.

To hammer it in, a fleet of active tanks now appears from the right side. As the player’s option is placed on their left side, you can see that this formation is just built for destroying with your option. Your main shot takes out the big row and your option picks off the flanks.

Finally, the stage concludes with a cart traveling along a railing. If the player doesn’t notice it right away, they’ll likely only be able to pick off the rear parts to get bomb fragments. However, a clever and powered-up player might choose to pick off the head, stopping the cart dead on its tracks and being rewarded with multiple option items. This is important because it shows that the game is fairly liberal with its powerups. It’s pretty easy to max out your options right there—and it’s only stage 1!

Likewise, if you happen to die soon, you’ll notice that you’re not that screwed. Though you’ll lose a shot power level and all your options, they’ll just fly to the top of the screen and are usually easy to re-collect.

Now remember when I said that Battle Garegga is a game that rewards thoughtful play? At this point, if you really think about it, you might realize how absurd this power-up system is. Why offer the player a lot of powerups when it’s easy to max out and there’s little risk of losing them? Unless, perhaps, there are situations where you might want to pass them up?

When people learn about Garegga for the first time, its dynamic difficulty system is usually one of the first things brought up. Usually it is portrayed as an opaque, counterintuitive, and brutal system. Yet situations like this only serve to telegraph that there might be repercussions for how you play. The game's difficulty is ultimately in your hands.

Finally, we reach the boss. Unlike a lot of other games, where a singular boss throws out a series of patterns, Garegga’s bosses operate more like a collection of turrets connected to a central power source. This gives the player a lot of freedom in how they want to take the boss out. You can choose to focus all your firepower toward the core, withstanding the full force of its attacks but only for a few seconds. You can choose to cripple the boss, taking out its most dangerous armaments before unloading into the now-helpless fuselage—its power tied up in useless weaponry. Or you can choose to pick off each and every part, leaving behind just a clean carcass.

THE SECOND TIME

Of course, if you start taking a liking to Garegga, you’re gonna be playing this first stage many, many times. Good developers also realize this, and attempt to add layers of depth into stage 1 so that even players who have played it a hundred times will still have something to challenge and engage them.

Which brings us back to this initial formation. Let’s assume you want all the bombs you can get. Well, turns out you gotta pull off a complicated routine to scrape up all 30 chips. Timing your shots to hit every tank is a precise affair, and it requires quite a bit of practice to execute the whole thing without compromise. Fortunately you get the opportunity to practice each time you start a new game. Having this sort of bomb-collecting minigame helps to get people fully engaged right from the very start, no matter whether this is their first or fiftieth time at it.

Next, you’ll notice that a similar railing appears around the time you get your first option item. It’s difficult to pull off, but here it’s also possible to pick up three options where you previously got only one. Once again, powerups are always available when you need them.

Players will also notice that the option cycling allows you to aim your options backwards. However, they might also notice that no enemies actually appear from the bottom of the screen. This begs the question: why even have it in the first place? Maybe it could be used on a boss? It’s up to you to figure it out.

Lastly, if the player decides to bomb, they’ll notice that their bombs affect the environment. Buildings will be burnt to the ground, and railings will collapse in a heap of medals. While doing this is pointless now, it will become a very useful mechanic later. Nevertheless, making the game consistent with these rules from the start is a nice touch.

The beauty of Garegga is in how it brings out the personalities of its players. Every puzzle has multiple solutions, even for the same ship. Some solutions are easier, some are harder but more lucrative, some are necessary as a tradeoff for something else, and some are just flashier. But you get to choose which one you’ll employ. And maybe seeing these backwards options will get you to experiment.

If you made it this far then props. This is only an analysis of stage 1(some parts taken from shmup forum) and only scratches the surface of what this game has to offer. There is so much more to the scoring system and the way it's rank(difficulty) adapts to your play. I didn't even mention the soundtrack that went on to basically influence the entire genre's sound for the next 20 years. It's one of the most ambitious designs in any genre and one of the best games ever made.

Undertale took the video game world by storm in late 2015. During a time when RPGs were increasingly defined by the graphics budget, and how open the world is, Toby Fox single-handedly took us back to an earlier time. And I do mean that quite literally. Toby Fox wrote, composed, and directed the game himself - and also provided most of the art.

The graphics are minimalistic at best, there's no vast world to explore, and on its face it's just like plenty of other game maker games that have come before and since. It has all the hallmarks of a standard RPG: silent protagonist, you need to travel to [place] to do [thing], random battles, towns with shops, etc. But when you scratch beneath the surface, you discover something truly breathtaking, and you begin to understand how it captivated such a large audience.

Perhaps the most well known feature is the potential to resolve combat without violence. You can fight enemies, or you can talk to them and learn about them. And maybe, just maybe, you can get through this fight while avoiding bloodshed. Or maybe not. It's up to you. Regardless, it makes each encounter totally unique and keeps the player's attention throughout.



It's also a great example of the gameplay lining up extremely well with the plot/story/characters. Because really, that's what this game is all about: the underlying story and how the player feels going through the game. Very clearly inspired by some of the classic RPGs of decades gone by (such as FFVI and [undrafted]), this game is full of heart. It's hard to not love the entire cast, and it really thoroughly explores a common 'core concept' in many games - that the player is fundamentally a good person, or that there's good in all of us. Even more impressive, it did so in a way that came across as very heartfelt and genuine, and more than anything else it was the cornerstone for such a large fan-community to grow from this game.

I'm not too close to the community personally, but like most internet fan-communities it has their good elements and their toxic ones. To focus on the good, I don't think there are any other game-maker games out there with such a wide variety of creative tributes to the game. It ranges from some of the standard works (musical remixes, fan art, etc.) to some pretty wild stuff, including a 4 hour musical with nearly 1.5m views on YouTube. If you like that sort of thing, then this game is definitely for you. And if you don't like that sort of thing, well I'd suggest ignoring it and playing anyway, it's absolutely worth it.

I could ramble about this game for a long time and not cover everything I want to (especially without going into spoiler territory); I think though that for anyone who has any appreciation for classic RPGs or story-driven games, this game is an absolute must-play. It really rekindled my passion for games like this, and proved to a lot of people that a really deep, interesting, thought-provoking game could still be successful in this landscape. I only have 16 hours played, and it has stuck with me for years. The characters, the story, certain mechanics, it's a truly memorable experience and one that absolutely reached into the core of why a lot of people play video games.

One area I feel that's specifically worth highlighting, but may not perfectly fit into the actual write-up, is the soundtrack - particularly the use of leitmotifs. Toby Fox composed the soundtrack on his own, and not only does it help thematically tie the entire game together, but it's one of the best video game soundtracks ever.



(yes, that is a video game track with >50m views)

Similar to how RPGs in 2015 had begun to skew towards open worlds, they'd also skewed towards sweeping, orchestral, cinematic OSTs. Think lots of violins swelling towards a crescendo. And there's definitely nothing wrong with that - but personally I feel that style is more suited towards cinema as a medium (where games are generally longer, with far more player agency, which lends itself better to melodies and leitmotifs), but that's a topic for another time. In any case, true to its ethos of being designed as a love letter to the 90s RPG, it sticks to soundfonts that are similar to that era, and is very much rooted in the idea of melodies, themes and leitmotifs depicting people, places and events.

And the game is so much stronger for it. Toby composed a lot of the music before finalising the storyboard/dialogue, which means it all fits together very smoothly, and creates a fantastic end-to-end experience. Even more impressive is how much variety the game gets out of a fairly simplistic set of sounds. There's high-intensity music like what I posted above, quiet introspective tracks, tracks that are blatant homages to previously drafted games, and everything in between.

What I really want to highlight though, and the reason this is it's own section, is the use of leitmotif in the game. A leitmotif is usually a short phrase of music that's associated with a place, person, idea, etc. (think the imperial march in star wars, or the jaws music, or indiana jones...really anything by John Williams). It's very common for these to appear in games, and once you start listening for them they're absolutely everywhere. Usually one or two leitmotifs will be used in a number of different tracks to build familiarity, particularly to help us accustomise ourselves to transitions in the game. For example, in FFVI, Awakening is one of the very first tracks we hear in the game (and it's very much tied to a particular character), and arguably the most distinct part of this track is the melody from 0:25 to 0:50. Later in the game, we find ourselves on the world map, and we immediately hear that familiar melody. Subtly, this (and other examples) helps to anchor the player, and creates little connections in our head while we're playing - leitmotifs are a very powerful tool.

And I've encountered very few games that have done it as consistently well as Undertale. Not only do you have recurring themes and musical phrases, but there will be songs that combine three more different leitmotifs (sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly) when certain themes/characters/etc. happen to intersect. Or even better, sometimes as foreshadowing, or as a callback. It really helps to subconsciously get the player into the right frame of mind for certain plot points, and helps 'frame' the action in a way the player can easily understand.

Just a quick example to highlight this, one of my favourite tracks in the game, Death by Glamour, can actually be traced back to 4-5 different leitmotifs that are sprinkled throughout the rest of the game:



A lot of these intersect, but here's a very amateurish attempt to call some of these out:
0:00 - 0:12 - the piano is a take on the opening few measures of CORE (what could be considered a 'location' leitmotif')
0:12 - we get the strings melody from Another Medium
1:04 - the 'main' part of the song begins, and it's inspired by Metal Crusher (an 'event' motif, mostly 0:20 to 0:37)
1:29 - the song seamlessly transitions into It's Showtime

It's a real benefit to having the same person write and compose the game - these cute little things are possible, and it helps create one of the most cohesive and 'game-appropriate' soundtracks out there.

MINECRAFT