There are a lot of reasons Battle Garegga is a top pick of any hobby-horse STG contrarian, self included, but some are more obvious than others. Yes, such a mechanically dense and exacting game was not too incredibly exacting about its own visuals – brown bullets on mechanically intricate brown and grey backgrounds. Yes, the rank system actually works in reverse of intuition by quickly scaling the game to be impossible for rookies and forgiving for die-hards, and doesn’t even properly reset¹ between runs. Yes, the stage 2 music is uncomfortably similar to this classic Detroit techno stunner.

It’s easy to fall into a pattern of thinking a scoring system is just that – a system. A modular, self-contained system that imposes its own repeatable rules to the game as a side goal. Arcs, loops, blah blah. The levels become content for the scoring system to consume, perhaps recontextualised by a few smart rules to incentivise taking risks or defeat a few dominant strategies. How many games have you played that have something like a bonus “Arcade” or score-attack mode with a perfunctory base-and-mult time-based combo mechanic and no other alterations? But the best thing is that it’s optional, right? Rookies can just try to stay alive, masters can go for world-record glory.

This is another thing that Greg completely upends. Medal chaining is the system, and an important one, but it doesn’t fit this definition. Medal chaining is a very “negative” system, though it does a good job of creating dramatic moments.

But even so, it only matters as much as medal generation, and beyond a drip-feed from rank-and-file enemies, there is no consistent and elegant rule for generating medals. Each stage has its own rules, its own secrets, its own gotchas, and not just for medals. Once again, we are at the foot of Druaga. Some things must be taken apart at specific times, or with bombs, for medals. Some things generate so many medals that it instantly becomes a horrible problem to deal with.

Atop this; Score rewards for boss part destruction, some requiring the player to use specific bullets of their shot pattern to destroy specific pieces. The infinite worlds of milk and chip. Bombing the flamingoes, bombing the shrapnel. Medal chaining exists to thread the player through all these little stunts and puzzles, nothing more than the means through which many of these little hustles pay you. Most scoring systems are expressed as an interesting rule or two; Garegga scoring can only be truly expressed in a document that reads like the disassembly instructions for a particle supercollider. Beavis, you dumbass! You were supposed to destroy that part with non-piercing shot!

But what a variety this creates! Each stage of Ole’ Butt Greg has a very distinct feel and pacing with completely different scoring objectives – coupled with some legendary difficulty spikes and brick walls made of turrets – to create a 1cc run that truly feels like a journey through a hopeless midnight raid. You see brown and grey, I see a game that feels like smoking cigarettes at 3AM. Stage 7 might be as muted and dark as every other stage, but with that music, it feels like you’re flying into a sunrise – you’ve made it this far. You set yourself up in the valley, built your chain at the plateau, carefully picked the factory apart, all ideally in a low-power “stealth mode” to keep rank² under control. You cashed in at the plant, took a breather in the clouds before facing its boss rush, the first big hurdle of any run. You survived the base, a complex and murderous stage, holding onto as many resources as possible – constantly feeling the rank breathe down your neck – for this moment. Now, the sun peeks over the horizon, and only two insane and random-as-fuck bosses stand between you and feeling that sunrise on your fatigued metal.

So you’d better read up on those instructions. Controlling rank means feeding the beast with your lives, lives acquired via extends, extends acquired through scoring. I’ve seen some True Greg Insanos that play for golf scoring, seeing what kind of perversely low score they can clear the game with. They gather in darkness, showing off their malformed 1.5m clears to each other like European aristocrats and their dogs. The rest of us simply try to flatten the curve, earning lives faster than we need to burn them. Scaling our power up and down to achieve our goals while deceiving the demon a little longer. Some sections are such a slugfest that indeed you’d better stock up, but most of the time, hoarding lives creates a safety with no future. Every Garegga player has their own “all-in” point where they crank the auto-fire and try to clear the game before rank-based doom can catch up with them.

This is the seductive thing about Garegga. There are so many ways to be good at it, and any route that sees that sunrise is a good route. There’s always something to work at, multiple ways to improve – yet it’s all small stuff, all just parts of a whole. It’s rather on-brand that the most impressive things a Garegga player can do is rescue a dead medal chain, and yet a layman would have no idea that anything even happened at all. There’s no one unified scoring system – only hundreds of individual medals, all stars in a leaden sky, all worth 10,000 points a piece. And with enough of them, and plenty of planning besides, you too can be COMPLETED!