Gaiares is beautiful on so many levels, but it's hard to recommend... to anyone.
The game takes place in space in the future as most Shoot em' Ups do where mankind has become so technologically advanced that Earth has become a poisonous toxic waste dump and man currently lives in space. The Earthling HQ however gets a message from a nearby galaxy called Leezaluth consisting of Earth-like people with only say one naturally green haired person to establish the difference between them and humans. The message tells the humans that in their galaxy a space pirate/terrorist/saturday morning cartoon villain organization known as Gulfer is waging a war against the rest of Leezaluth led by the hilariously named Queen ZZ Badnasty (No. I'm not making that up). Her Bad/Nasty highness has plans to use the Earth's toxic chemicals to create the ultimate space weapon to use against the prissy Leezaluthians. The Leezaluthians have decided that the best way to keep her highness (I can't say her name with a straight face) from doing this is to use some weird device that causes stars to go supernova in minutes and thus destroy Earth.
However, they propose to keep Earth in-tact and promise to help rid it of its chemicals so long as the humans help them in their fight against Gulfer. Of course, seeing how the future has to involve a lack of military funding and a bunch of incredulous wussies, only one white guy out of some millions of Earth people left is the only one to jump at this proposal and the Leezalthuian's royalty is so overwhelmed with his idiocy...er, bravery that only one of them decides to help him out.
Now, I gotta say right off the bat, Gaiares has a pretty damn original opening premise for what it's worth (okay, it had me going until the whole one man out of millions aspect came up). However, I've found that in most cases in video games there's a tendency for game stories to start off with an original premise that seriously blows you off your feet but the plot tends to meander around before plunging head first into a cement mixer of either A) in-numerous little plot holes that serve only to cause the original premise to hemmorage, B) an excuse to show off every point of plot inspiration to the point where the entire story is dependent on its blatant sources or C) containing an atrociously boring, apathetic or black and white cast of characters that makes you wish the ending was written by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Admittedly there's only one game I can mention that has all three of these aspects tied to it's seemingly brilliant premise (cough, The Room, cough), but the absolute worst of these three aspects is the very latter and it is the only aspect that Gaiares has attached to its story. Having a bland or black and white cast with no middle ground or real depth to either person only entices player apathy like a gourmand to The Montgomery Inn.
It's bad enough we have an attractive female antagonist with such an atrociously bad last name that just screams bad guy naming from a series like Beanie and Cecile, but the bountiful hero/heroine cast is just about as painful.
* There's the seemingly god-like omnipotent green haired Princess Alexis who seems to be so unfazed by turn of events that you'd think she was really an aging John Carradine doing a role for a low budget movie, just WAITING for his paycheck at the other end of the set.
* The princess' misty-eyed, gray-haired, swooning romantic sister Natasha whose sense of romanticism and praising of masculinity out-weighs that of most anime bishojou heroines which use that veneration as their sole motivation.
* And then there's the dashing Prince Valiant of Shmup games with just about as laughable a name as the villain: Dan Dare whose very dialogue and design that, despite featuring a decent haircut at least, just screams big fat CHODE. Which seems appropriate because the understandably nameless space-fighter-jet he and Natasha pilot looks so painfully generic and silly that it's the kind of ship that every other horizontal space shooter ship would beat up during recess on the schoolyard to bilk it of its lunch money and tie it up with its own underwear onto the school's flag pole (right next to the dorky, pink & blue bubble-domed ship from Blazeon).
As most of my reviews imply, I like a game that takes itself seriously despite having badly written story lines, because if a game developer cares about their work enough to make it hard to laugh at (ie: not having a game story where you're fighting enemies like tiny, twenty year old raisin wrinkled European terrorists dressed up as Napoleon), then to me that's a sign that they want us to care about it as well. Although Gaires shows attempts at taking itself seriously, it's impossible to do so because the characters are so short-lived, cheesy and emotionally unattractive to begin with.
Thankfully, the characters, nor does the plot, invade the game play, but to be perfectly honest, I was rooting for the bad guy, probably because she has a lot more to use against the heroes including game design. And admittedly, she was a pretty hot Genesis girl for her time especially when paired with the ladies of Streets of Rage, Phelios and El Viento.
The game's gimmick is that you possess a weapon that allows you to drain enemies, big or small, of their energy, allowing you access to different weapons depending on different enemies. As innovative as it is the method of enemy draining gets a little confusing during combat, especially when you lose track of what kind of enemy you're draining.
Many times you use the TOZ system, you'll end up draining the one enemy in a crowd of them that has the one weapon you didn't want and sometimes constantly draining the same enemy will somehow reduce the strength of the weapon you gained from it. Every time I found a really powerful weapon (thus one I really liked), I refused to suck on any other enemies for fear of diminishing its strength or replacing it with a weaker weapon I had to continuously power-up before it became useful.
All of this helps in establishing the studying necessary in knowing your enemy and replay value, but it's still let down not only by the enemy waves heading toward you at the same time, but the game's initial difficulty (which I'll save for last).
You also start out with missiles that change depending on which enemy you suck, something similar to that of Arrow Flash, but seeing how it's impossible to tell which enemies are worth draining it's hard to even say which enemies will give you the most effective missiles. You also get a shield and when I mention the difficulty of the game, trust me, you'll need it.
One thing that's worth mentioning is the fact that the far right side of the screen is inaccessible to your ship. Every time you dash ahead of the on-coming enemies for the far right of the screen, you end up running face first into an invisible wall that leaves you open to enemy fire like wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt in broad Texas daylight.
I know the Genesis has never really been known for good graphics and a lot of SNES owners used to slam the Genesis because of it (myself included, back in the day), but I have to admit that Gaiares changes my old opinion and stomps my old SNES favor deep into the mud. Gaiares looks so damn good at times that if you bred it with Lightning Force you will have spawned quiet possibly the best Genesis graphics ever conceived.
From the third level onward, you run into graphics that will cause your knees to quake and you'll fall on the floor gawking at the system you judged for so long asking it repeatedly "How'd you do THAT??" Of course all of this pertains mostly to the backgrounds some of which are just down-right fantastic while everything in the fore-ground from the enemies to your ship look like micro-machines in comparison. Some of the boss enemies don't apply to the Micro Machines comparison though especially seeing how most of them are enormous monstrosities littered with superb detail and shading.
Gaiares uses the Genesis color palette mercilessly though, a large percentage of the big bosses pulse with more color than a scene from 2001: Space Odyssey and encountering a giant mermaid mech that glows with a sickly thick red is like looking at the flame inundated face of Muhammad at a brightly-lit photo shoot.
The sound department is a double edged sword that runs both extreme ends of the gamut between a rockin' good time and a bland, boring tour into Dullsville. The sound takes the latter trip: virtually all of the explosions resemble a munching noise and every other noise past that and the sound of the TOZ flying around only makes the sound department sound very lazy.
The music on the other hand got much better treatment: for most of the time, the music consists of this wonderfully epic dance theme to it which is a very good combination to a shmup (if it gets too jazzy, smooth and/or exotic then it'll be just like Galactic Attack all over again). From the first level on, the game throws out some techno-like songs that just suck the player into the action.
Admittedly though, this being a Renovation game and extremely similar to that of Arrow Flash, some of the dance themes get a little too relaxed and bumpy for their own good. The second level hardly does anything to match the action and all of the even numbered bosses have this goofy boss theme that sounds like Miko Mido just jumped into the game and Shikma demon ninja had just jumped in after her inundated with tentacles.
With a description like this, it sounds like Gaiares is a winner, right? It sounds like it's got a lot going for it and it certainly does... until the very moment you die however and then all of this is overshadowed by the lingering tainted blood line of most shooters, that being the checkpoint system.
Plus, 90% of the levels drag out so slowly and painfully that dying and starting a level or checkpoint over means you have to tiredly run through all the BS you had to endure before at the same slow pace.
And if you take in the hurried TOZ combat that plays more like a guessing game, the bad positioning of screen limitation, boring cast of cheesy anime characters and the unspoken obligation of levels that stretch on longer than a TOAPLAN GAME, and you've got a winning formula for boredom, frustration and the desire to mournfully look back on the charred remains of your copy of Sinistron with apologies for having chucked it in the fireplace all those years ago. All of which not only makes the game hard to come back to, but it also makes it hard to compliment the game's art direction because when you keep dying and have to start over from the start, then all the pretty things you saw before hand will lose their flavor in an instant. Plus, it's impossible to immerse yourself into the game when it keeps throwing you back every time you screw up once.
Overall, Gaiares is a game that's hard to love, but is tailor made for a specific group of shoot em' up lovers. Basically if you liked Shmups that use checkpoint systems and level design based on the player's memory like Hellfire, R-Type III or Violent Soldier/ Sinistron, but want something harder or if you want a Genesis game that demonstrates the Genesis' true graphical abilities then you're going to have a ball with Gaiares, because it's both of those factors: Beautiful graphics that were and to this day are jaw dropping representing the facade over a game that is frustrating, irritating and down right EVIL.
If you're none of the above however, and especially if you don't have the humble patience and temperance of a gothic cathedral, then I would pretty much suggest you stay away from the game, but at the very least try it out once.