WHAT IS RANK?:
In case you hadnt heard of it before, rank is the term used to describe an invisible system of sorts which a shoot-em-up will use to automatically adjust its difficulty level based on the players status and/or performance. One simple example is the Gradius series: in those games, the more powered-up your ship is, the harder the game gets. Different games use many different factors to determine rank, but Battle Gareggas rank system is particularly complicated, and dependent on a large number of factors which the player MUST understand and consciously manipulate in order to complete the game. This makes Gareggas gameplay system much more unorthodox than it first appears, and quite challenging to master: the information contained in this guide exists to give you some idea of what exactly youre up against.
WHAT DOES RANK AFFECT?:
A games difficulty, of course, is dependent on several factors, and depending on the status of Battle Gareggas rank, the following elements can change:
Enemy Aggression:
Enemies are more willing to attack you point-blank, charge straight at your craft, or engage in other aggressive behaviors.
Enemy Fire Rate:
Enemies fire bullets at you with greater frequency.
Enemy Bullet Speed:
Enemy bullets travel more quickly.
Enemy Bullet Number:
Enemy bullet patterns contain more bullets and tighter formations.
Enemy Resilience:
Enemies take more shots to destroy. Note that this particular characteristic recedes much more slowly (if at all) compared to the others: basically, if the games rank increases by a large amount (thus intensifying all of the factors listed here) and then is decreased by a large amount, enemies aggression, fire rate, etc. will drop substantially, but their resilience will remain at or close to the high level they were at before the rank drop.
Item Falling Speed:
Items dropped by enemies fall offscreen faster.
Needless to say, its to your advantage to put forth sufficient effort to keep the rank under control: if you fail to do so to enough of an extent, later stages of the game will become literally impossible to beat. Not very hard, not extra difficult, Impossible, with a capital I. That said, there are several things you can do to control and manipulate the rank in this game, as detailed in the following sections, so read on.
BASIC RANK-CONTROLLING STRATEGIES:
Now that you know what the games rank can do to you if you dont handle it properly, it stands to reason that youll want to know exactly how to do just that. This guide will get into a bit more of the nitty-gritty aspects of rank control as you read further in, but for starters, here is a sort of digest version of the main things youll want to do to succeed at Battle Garegga, which breaks down at least most of the basic strategies youll want to use to successfully tackle the game and its demanding rank system. The guide will explain the listed items in more detail later on, but the stuff here ought to give you at least a general idea of what youll need to do.
Dont hoard lives.
Perhaps the toughest of Gareggas rank control methods to get used to, but once you do so, things will actually get easier, rather than harder (as it might sound at first), for you. As you might have heard before even reading this guide, youll need to make sure that you get shot down periodically to lower the rank. Moreover, as will be elaborated upon below, the fewer lives you have in reserve when you die, the greater the (positive) effect the death has on the rank. As such, youll want to never have more than one or two extra lives in reserve at a time, so that your deaths, whenever they happen, help you the most. This means, if youre scoring well enough to be earning regular extends, you should make sure to lose a life or two on a regular basis, rather than hoarding them and then dying a whole bunch of times at once (likely at a rough area). Obviously theres a good deal of risk to having fewer lives to fall back on, but as you practice youll become confident enough to tackle previously-tough areas without a whole lot of backup.
Play for score.
As the previous item brought out, youll need to sacrifice quite a few lives along the way to keep the rank from getting too high, and aside from the single item extend in stage 3, the only way to earn those lives back is to score well. Battle Gareggas (default) extend rate is pretty generous when youre taking advantage of scoring opportunities properly, so you definitely want to exploit that fact as best you can. In some shmups you can more or less choose to play either for survival or for score: in Battle Garegga, the two are, to a large extent, the same thing. You MUST learn to score well to survive in the long term, so read the stage-specific guides or watch some superplays (or just do a bit of experimenting) to figure out how.
Dont hoard bombs.
In most shmups, players are encouraged (even rewarded) for using bombs as little as possible, letting them go only when in a tight spot or to make up for a mistake. Garegga, on the other hand, includes bombs (or, as some have argued, not really even bombs but special weapons) primarily, not for survival purposes, but to help you score more, largely through background scenery destruction and a few other tricks. As such, for most areas of the game (barring a few exceptions, like the flamingoes in Stage 2), youll want to be using your bombs regularly to destroy scenery and uncover hidden medals to boost your score: oftentimes this means having no full bombs on hand, using only a few fragments at a time (since thats all youll have handy) to take out the scenery. In similar fashion to having fewer lives as explained above, having fewer bombs to rely on to get out of a tough spot can make for some extra-tense situations: in the same manner, though, practice will see you through.
Limit your firepower.
Similar to the above-mentioned treatment of bombs, most shmups encourage you to power yourself up fully as fast as you can: if you do so in Garegga, the rank will likely end up out of your control before long. To prevent this, do your best to get as far as you can with as little firepower as possible: until youre forced to upgrade, stick with a lower-powered main shot (use the tables below to decide with which planes/characters this will be to your greatest advantage), fewer options, and non-hidden option formations. As with the previous few items on this list, doing this may sound prohibitively difficult, but give it a try and you may be surprised how far you can get with what you might have previously viewed as a mere pea shooter. Of course, later levels pretty much require you to have high firepower to progress, but the longer you can go without it, the better.
Limit your shooting.
The more shots you fire the angrier you make the rank, so as a matter of principle, when theres nothing to shoot at, let go of that fire button and stop shooting. Unlike in many other games, where you have little incentive to ever let go of the fire button, in Battle Garegga youll want to conserve ammo in the few spots where youre able to do so, although most of the time youll have no choice but to fight enemies off. Just keep this thought in the back of your head and youll be fine.
Use large items to power up when possible.
Using small shot or weapon items a handful of times wont utterly decimate your rank, but when possible youll want to use large shot or weapon icons to power yourself up, as in each case they end up doing less damage to your rank than their smaller counterparts will, especially in the case of the small shot icons, which can permanently affect your per-frame rank (detailed below).
Beware of raising the autofire rate.
Battle Garegga gives the player the ability to raise (but not lower) the games autofire rate during play, which gives you the ability to do more damage to enemies more quickly. This is certainly tempting, but it comes with a steep price: raising the autofire rate has a drastic effect on the rank, and should be used with extreme discretion, since its effects are impossible to reverse once activated. As mentioned earlier, later levels require greater firepower, but earlier on try to go without it.
Dont collect power-ups when your power is maxed.
As in many shmups, if you collect additional power-up icons after youre already at full power, you get a few extra points. However, in Battle Garegga, such items give you only paltry points in most cases (especially compared to the regular 10,000 apiece you can get from keeping your medal chain going) and increase your rank much faster than if they were collected when not at full power. As such, its generally in your best interests to avoid collecting further enhancements once you get to that point.
Dont lose your medal chain.
Speaking of medals, this point bears repeating: not only are medals a vital source of points (and all-important extra lives), but losing your chain and being forced to collect lower-value medals instead of higher-value ones will raise your rank many times faster than if youd been able to keep the high-value medals coming. As with everything else, practice makes perfect.
Make sure the starting rank level is as low as possible.
A relatively minor thing, but every little bit helps: in short, every time the game is played, the starting rank will become slightly more difficult. As such, you might want to either reset it (via switch or Option menu) or let the attract mode sequence run for awhile before trying again, to ensure that you dont have the odds stacked too high against you right from the get-go.
Dont seal too many enemy bullets.
Also relatively minor compared to some other tips, but it can make a difference: while it may be tempting to sit right on top of that big ol tank to take advantage of its dead zone and prevent it from sending that nasty spread at you, those bullets are still hurting you, so to speak, even when theyre not actually fired at you. Sealing a few bullets here or there wont destroy your game, but do it too much and youll likely wish you hadnt.
Persevere!
Battle Garegga is a tough game by almost any standard, and its unorthodox play style goes even further to ensure that youre not going to master it quickly. As such, dont get frustrated or discouraged when you have a tough time; you can always try again later, and the more you play, the better youll get. Starting off focusing on certain rank elements only, while not bothering with others (or maybe even none at all), might help to ease you into things, and gradually work your way up to trying to handle everything at once, but theres no need to rush yourself, just so long as you dont give up. Youre supposed to be having fun, after all.
