Past meets present: GG Aleste 3
New developers and a new era, but same old Aleste, in a good way.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Aleste was a dead franchise for years — the developer of those games, Compile, closed shop in 2003, and that was well after the studio had shifted gears away from shoot-em-ups in part to focus more on their most successful franchise, Puyo Puyo. The final Aleste game released in 1993, an entire decade before Compile shut down, which is not a coincidence: a not-insignificant chunk of Compile’s staff left the developer that same year in order to form Raizing in conjunction with former Naxat staff. The joining of these STG enthusiasts resulted in a library that included was not limited to classics like Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, and the shooter/racing hybrid Kingdom Grand Prix.
All this time later, and Aleste has returned, with plans for even more of it in the future. Compile isn’t back, but the license is, and it’s in worthy hands. M2, a developer known for their excellent work at bringing classics back to life in enhanced, exquisitely emulated forms with some modern bells and whistles attached, currently owns the rights to the Aleste franchise. M2 does great work in a variety of genres — the Nintendo 3DS line of Sega 3D Classics was M2’s doing, for instance, a group that includes 3D Super Hang-on — but shmups are an area where the care they put in to making sure everything emulates fluidly can be easily appreciated. “Input lag” is one of those things plenty of people might not notice when playing games from an era of wired controllers and CRT screens on HD sets, but if you’re very into STGs, well, you’ll notice when there’s an issue on that front or with emulation in general. M2’s releases tend to avoid these kinds of problems, which is why Sega trusts them with… well, everything. Retro collections, releases of Sega 3D Classics, Sega’s mini consoles, some Sega Ages games, whatever needs doing.
M2 isn’t known for their original games nearly as much as their ability to preserve and reintroduce existing ones, but they delve into the realm of new on occasion. Konami had M2 develop their series of ReBirth games — one for Gradius, Contra, and Castlevania — on the WiiWare downloadable service a couple of console generations ago — and they’re also responsible for 2020’s GG Aleste 3. That, for those keeping score, is the sequel to 1993’s GG Aleste 2 — the last Aleste title Compile released before the series went silent, and all the proof that was needed to show that M2 gets what made Compile’s series sing. It helps, of course, that M2 developed GG Aleste 3 along with some ex-Compile staff.
The “GG” in GG Aleste 2 stands for “Game Gear,” since that was the platform it released on. The “GG” in GG Aleste 3 isn’t just for show, despite releasing in 2020, 23 years after Sega discontinued worldwide manufacture of the handheld: it is truly a Game Gear game, built for the platform and playable on it. M2 even made a mockup of the box and cartridge, what it all would have looked like were it to have received a physical release:
There is no actual physical release of GG Aleste 3, but it’s instead included in M2’s Aleste Collection, which released in Japan for the Switch and Playstation 4, as well as on the Game Gear Micro, Sega’s mini for its 1990s portable. So no, it’s not in an actual Game Gear cartridge, no, like we sometimes see companies like Limited Run Games do for physical re-releases of discontinued platforms, but if you took a ROM of GG Aleste 3, loaded it onto a Game Gear cartridge, and slotted the thing into a Game Gear, it’d play. Just maybe don’t do that for commercial reasons unless you work for LRG or M2, yeah?
When you see it in action, it’s actually a little difficult to believe that GG Aleste 3 can run on a Game Gear, but your evidence outside of actually seeing it happening is in the screen flicker and slowdown. Here’s quick clip I grabbed from the first stage of the game, which is loaded with background details, enemies, lasers, bullets, and a massive end-level boss, as well as screen flicker and slowdown:
It’s the colors and quality of the graphics —the Game Gear was “just” an 8-bit handheld — the sheer volume of stuff that’s on screen sometimes, that makes you wonder if this truly was built for Sega’s portable, Game Gear, but all that screen flicker tells you that yes, it was, and also, M2 really pushed the hardware as much as it could be pushed in order to get GG Aleste 3 to exist the way it does. Time and experience, as well as a lack of budgetary and storage concerns that existed back in a cartridge console’s heyday, means you can get away with a whole lot in the present you maybe weren’t able to decades ago. Which is also why you see indie developers or fan developers putting together NES games in the present day that look like there is no way they actually were made for that hardware, but they were! As I’ve said many times before and will say again, everyone moves on from hardware before it’s given us all it’s capable of giving, and GG Aleste 3 is evidence that the Game Gear hadn’t shown all it could before Compile and Sega stopped turning to it.
You might have noticed quite a bit of information in the letterboxing of the above video: those are “Gadgets,” which M2 employs in all of their ShotTriggers releases. ShotTriggers is a series of collections and re-releases of classic STGs — the aforementioned Battleship Garegga is one such ShotTrigger release, as are Cave classics like Esp Ra.De and Dangun Feveron, the Toaplan Arcade Garage collections, and the Aleste Collection that most people who will ever play GG Aleste 3 will play the game through.
Very basic information like your score and the number of lives you have left are shown in the Gadgets, but the real meat of it all and the reason they exist is for the additional info that, back in the day, you would have had to either keep track of yourself or figure out. The Aleste games have a relatively simpler set of Gadgets — there are ShotTriggers’ titles with maps in the Gadgets that show you where bonuses are or count how many shots you’ve made in a loop to help you unlock said bonuses in the first place — but there’s still plenty of useful real estate here. Under “Player Info” is a headshot of your ship’s pilot, but it’s not just there for looks: you sometimes have brief windows of invincibility depending on items you’ve collected, and that acts as a way to see how much you’ve got left. It shows you which track is currently playing, which buttons you’re pressing as they would appear on a Game Gear itself, your achievements in battle — i.e. just how well you did in an invisible segment of the stage you’re in, represented by trophies — and, on the right, information about the kind of secondary weapon you’re using, which others are available, its power level, and how strong your main shot is. As well as how many more of those orange P-Chips you need to collect in order to strengthen it further.
Not all of this is essential information, no, but there’s plenty of useful stuff here, and it isn’t cluttering the actual playing field of the game by existing in the letterboxing like this. The Gadgets make some complicated or inscrutable old STGs easier to understand, but for something like GG Aleste 3 and the rest of the bunch, it’s just a productive and visually pleasing way of relaying basic information you can use so you understand some cause-and-effect of your actions and inactions, and can adjust your play from there. Knowing why you’ve earned a mulligan — you get a little shield around your ship after you’ve collected 20 P-Chips, and it will absorb one attack — helps you to earn more of them later, on purpose.
There is just the one ship to choose from in GG Aleste 3, but that’s because you’re not locked in to one specific style of play with your ship. The base weapon is rapid-fire and shoots directly in front of your ship, with its power level (just how big a shot actually is, the bigger versions able to tear through more faster) increasing as you pick up those P-Chips and level it up. Your secondary weapons receive power boosts as you pick up the larger P power-up, and there are six different weapons to choose from, each represented by a different letter emblazoned on a power-up, and each leveled up together as you collect those power-ups, so you don’t have to start over every time you switch from one to another.
“R” is the Rising Laser, which shoots out intermittently but takes out everything it touches when it does. “C” creates little homing orbs that help you clean up enemies further away from you before you can escape — which often leads to you discovering some bonus points for managing to clear out entire waves you weren’t aware were special and point-giving until you actually clear them out. “F” creates a series of three-shot exploding balls of fire, “D” creates a ring of rotating diamonds around you, “T” is a wide angle shot to complement your forward blasters, and “A” is a directional shot that will fire in whichever cardinal direction you’re pressing in. As you power these up, the size and scope of the secondary weapon increases: the fireballs, for instance, start out with just two, but their final form at level four will see four even larger ones erupt from your ship each time they fire, and they’ll also continue to move forward a bit after exploding.
GG Aleste 3 isn’t overly difficult, especially for STG veterans, but there are difficulty options to contend with so you can make it tougher or easier, and it’s not a simple one-credit clear even on Normal given just how crowded the screen can get late, and how limited your opportunities for additional lives are: you only receive extra lives through reaching progressively tougher to reach point thresholds, and whenever you die, the power of your armaments does decrease until you can work to boost them again, making it just a little bit harder to stay alive than it just was. Online leaderboards exist, but if you want to qualify, you can’t use one of your continues. Basically, if you just want to complete GG Aleste 3, it’s not so bad from a difficulty standpoint since you have a few continues to lean on, but if you want to qualify for the leaderboards and make your way up them to a respectable place, too? You’ll have to figure out how to 1CC it.
The only real downside to GG Aleste 3 is that it takes some effort to get it. The Aleste Collection might be on two platforms, but they only received a Japanese release. It’s pretty easy to create a Japanese Switch account, and loading that account up with the appropriate currency is also simple since sites like Play Asia let you buy Japanese eShop cards for the Switch and then just give you a code to input to load your yen up. It’s simple, and worth it to do this, not just for GG Aleste 3, but plenty of other Japan-only shmups you don’t need to be able to read the language to enjoy. Making a Japanese Playstation account isn’t overly difficult, but it’s more of a barrier than what the Switch has up, which is why I’m still missing one single ShotTriggers release in my collection. (Just release Sorcer Striker in North America, M2, come on.)
The developers who made Aleste games in the 80s and 90s might have eventually become legends in the bullet hell space, but their Compile efforts were far from being confused for danmaku shooters. These were more about crowding the space with foes than in creating a bullet curtain for you to navigate, though, the bosses of Aleste games certainly put enough stuff on space to kill you from a number of angles. All of that feels the same in GG Aleste 3: if you’re familiar with Aleste games and how they work, with their signature wide array of weaponry and power ups that help you find the way that works best for you to complete the game, then GG Aleste 3 is going to be right up your alley. And if you’re not an Aleste fan yet, GG Aleste 3 can make you one, with ease. Maybe you don’t know how much of a mark Compile left on the industry with their specific way of doing things, but there’s a reason Hudson Soft brought them in for Blazing Lazers on the Turbografx-16 and then aped that style for the console’s trilogy of Star Soldier games, just like there’s a reason Naxat was so obviously fond of and worked with Compile even before some of their employees formed Raizing with former Compile devs, and also why modern developers like Terarin still look to Compile when developing shoot-em-ups in the present.
The success of GG Aleste 3 in simply being a believable and enjoyable Aleste game also brings hope for the continuation of the series. M2 has already released an arcade-only Aleste title in Japan — somehow, the first-ever arcade Aleste — and is currently developing a brand new home platform Aleste title that isn’t meant to be a hardware throwback like their first effort in the space was: Aleste Branch was first announced in late-2018, and was supposed to come out in early 2022, but that hasn’t happened just yet. Not a huge surprise considering M2 is an in-demand developer and also a small studio, but it’s coming. And because of GG Aleste 3 as M2’s reminder that they can do more than just re-release other developers’ games, there’s reason to be excited even with the long wait.
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