Game:

Battle Garegga (1996)

Duration: 0:00

124 views

12

A 1-credit clear of the arcade game Battle Garegga [bgaregga], played with WolfMAME 0.273 for the 2025 Summer Yolympics score contest. This run uses the Zakk patch, which removes the ~40 second startup time, and displays shot rate + rank. Score: 4,856,520. I tackled this game once or twice before, and each time the difficulty and complexity scared me away. Now the Yolympics game me a push to study the game, route it out, and practice, practice practice. Overjoyed to get a clear, hands shaking.

Garegga is a famously deep game featuring many secrets (like the flamingos you reveal by bombing stage 2) and a complicated rank system. A strategy thread on the Shmups forum explains rank in detail (https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=351. One big consideration is that rank (difficulty) goes down if you die, and goes down more if you die with fewer lives in reserve, so the route include several planned deaths to lower rank. The run follows the Fufuchicken ultra-low rank strats where I try to avoid any medals for the entire game. (Reference run:    • HOW TO CLEAR BATTLE GAREGGA - LOW RANK MET...  )

The stage 3 death is unplanned (and I blame bullet visibility!), although I was planning a suicide anyway just before blowing up the hovertank for the hidden 1up. The next unplanned death is on stage 6, where I screwed up the sprite-sealing trick to prevent the third big green tank from spawning. I also died to the winder attack from Black Heart 2 (even after trying to bomb through it), and died to Glow Squid - my prayers to the RNG did not grant me destructible bullets this time around.