Battle Garegga (Arcade) - 1CC (Grass Hopper)

Played on MAME 0.217

Time for Raizing's most famous game, which would quickly become one of the most influential shoot em' ups out there, if you are even remotely into the genre you have heard about Garegga many times.

You can check this page for more info it's certainly better than annoying 5000 characters description limit:
https://shmups.wiki/library/Battle_Ga...

I decided to pick Grass Hopper since it has piercing shot once you reach shot level 4. Piercing shot is about as much power as you can have in this game it melts everything. The shot is really narrow however, and mixed with slow speed it's by far the biggest weakness it has, losing options after dying can put you in very ugly situations. A lot of people play Wild Snail because piercing shot + you don't need shot level 4 but I didn't vibe with its speed.

There's a little secret with ship selection in that you can play a variant depending on what button you press:
A button: Default. No changes.
B button: Faster speed.
C button: Smaller hitbox.
A+B+C (or wait for the screen to time up): Faster speed+smaller hitbox.
I used B variant since the default speed is kinda bad, and I didn't feel small hitbox made that much of a difference, what can I say the blue color scheme is super cool.

Generally speaking, Garegga doesn't play much like other shoot em' ups due to the rank system where all the mechanics tie into. Rank can only be decreased by dying and it influences almost everything in the game, notably enemy health and fire rate. On the other hand virtually anything you do increases rank making it easy for difficulty to rise fast if not paying attention. I won't go over every single rank detail though because their consequences aren't equal.

Garegga defaults to 8,6hz autofire frequency and shooting at a higher rate for a bit saves that frequency. Autofire frequency increases the "frame rank" that determines how fast rank rises, making it singlehandedly the biggest factor in rank increase as once it's done you can't go back. Grass Hopper's piercing shot can compensate for playing with 8,6hz almost the entire run but I found 10hz to be more comfortable, I bump it to 12hz in stage 6 and 15hz for the boss there.

For shot ideally you want to level up by picking big powerup items instead of small ones. In my case I get to level 3 via small shot powerups to reach level 4 a little quicker (stage 2), if I can't grab the big powerup after dying to the first boss then that's ok. By pressing the C button options can change to a variety of useful formations (except the rotating one). Most of the game 2 options handle things just fine there's not really a reason to go above 3.

A Raizing staple starting from this game is bomb fragments. You can bomb as long as you have even a single fragment but its duration will be extremely short, 40 fragments equal a full bomb. Also, bombs aren't instant screen clear like other shmups nor do they give a ton of i-frames. Several portions of the scenery can be destroyed with a bomb to reveal medals. With this in mind, it's better to save bombs to uncover medals for easy scoring (assuming the value is maxed).

You need to keep rank low before Stage 6 since dying there isn't a very bright idea, as the last two bosses can do extremely scary shit (that you barely see here as I got crazy lucky with them lol).

This is certainly a big infodump but just keeping a few concepts in mind and playing it's a lot easier to understand, and honestly half the fun in Garegga comes from figuring out what works best for you.

This was pretty close to what an ideal run of mine would've looked so might as well talk about it:
Stage 1: leave with 400k, die at the boss.
Stage 2: bomb birds, die at the boss for the railway.
Stage 3: not much going on here just try to die before the extend midboss. I broke the medal chain in a dumb way. Honestly stage 3 bores me to death until I make mistakes like these and have to start playing seriously again.
Stage 4: Normally at 11:03 I'd die to bomb the shacks + get rid of the orange tanks on the right. Because my medal chain wasn't maxed I didn't want to die but it happened anyway, then die in the green tanks for full bombs.
Stage 5: don't die and don't break medals. I bomb two carriers near the start because my bomb fragments were about to cap.
Stage 6: get homing options asap and bomb whatever looks dangerous. I had a unintended death near the start because my brain thought I should make up for the stage 3 chain break by trying to keep the medal chain, this quickly backfired lol. Afterwards there was the big 'oh shit' moment in the run as I fucked up my homing setup and had to resort to a backup plan I didn't think it would work.
Stage 7: I got ridiculously lucky with the last 2 bosses.