Trivia / Aleste

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Manabu Namiki took the role of directing GG Aleste 3 because at the time the project was in a Troubled Production state and he liked the idea of a new Game Gear shmup enough to salvage it.
• Channel Hop: The series was originally a Compile property before Compile would go under. 20 years later, M2 obtained the rights to the series and produced three new Aleste games: GG Aleste 3: Last Messiah, Aleste Branch, and Senjin Aleste. They also put out a Compilation Re-release featuring four of the Compile-era games and GGA3.
• Creator-Driven Successor: The first game, to Zanac. Both games feature nearly the same backstory (involving a rogue AI that a lone ship sets out to stop), high-speed backgrounds, special weapons that you obtain with numbered items and which have limited use (in fact, several weapons from Aleste are lifted right out of Zanac), and extensive use of Cores-and-Turrets Bosses. Compile was tasked with making a game for the Sega Master System, but Nintendo's anti-competitive practices prevented them from doing a port of Zanac on the SMS, and thus the Aleste brand was born.
• Development Hell: M2 has gone pretty silent with Aleste Branch, though they eventually released a gameplay video in September 2020.
• Dummied Out: Senjin Aleste has non-accessible console-style menus, suggesting that the game is planned for a consumer platform release or was originally planned to be one. These were revealed when fans cracked the game for use on home PC hardware.
• Milestone Celebration: The upcoming Aleste Branch is to celebrate the franchise's 30th anniversary. Ellinor Waizen, who was the protagonist of Aleste 2, M.U.S.H.A., and GG Aleste, is also set to reprise her role as the main character.
• No Export for You: Aleste 2, GG Aleste, GG Aleste 3, and Senxin Aleste were never released in the West. Compounding matters for Senxin is that it's an arcade game. GG Aleste 2 would get a European release at the least. Power Strike II (SMS) is notable in that it was released in Europe but not North America (as it was made specifically to cash in on the Sega Master System's enduring popularity in Europe and Brazil going into the 90s), and actually inverted this trope by not being released in its native Japan until 27 years later as part of Aleste Collection.
• No Port For You:
  • Aleste 2 and Aleste Gaiden have only been released on MSX2, and have yet to be rereleased to later platforms.
  • Senjin Aleste is arcade-only with currently no known plans to port it to consumer platforms, unusually for a series that had previously been exclusive to consumer platforms.
• Referenced by...: The Zero Fire version of Hellfire (1989) features modified versions of the game that change the behavior of weapon-switching. One of these options is "Galcanic Gamma Array 3rd", which shares the same initials as GG Aleste 3. Like the 'A' shot in GGA3, this option changes the player's shot type based on the direction of movement and reverts to forward shot when in neutral directional input.
• Sequel Gap: GG Aleste 3 was released 27 years after its predecessor.
• Short Run in Peru: If "27 years" counts as "short"; Power Strike II (SMS) was released in Japan in 2020 after having remained a PAL-exclusive since 1993.
• Similarly Named Works: One of the boss themes in Aleste is called "Street Fighter". Note that the game was released one year after the first game in that series.
• What Could Have Been: The series' protagonist, Ellinor, was originally named "Misato".