Anti-Climax Boss: The Final Boss of GG Aleste has some painfully easy patterns, and if your main shot and subweapon are maxed out then each of her forms goes down in no more than five seconds.
Awesome Music: The teaser trailer for Aleste Branch is set to a remix of the series' main theme. The Aleste franchise is officially back, baby!
The bosses of Power Strike II (SMS) look fantastic, having a lot of character and uniqueness in their designs for a game on the Master System. Unfortunately the backgrounds become solid colors when they are shown because the bosses' visual assets are using up so many resources, but you'll probably be too amazed by the bosses to care. The game was released in 1993, late into the SMS's lifespan (in fact, it is the second-to-last Aleste game released by Compile, with GG Aleste II released later in the same year), so by then the developers had a lot more experience with the hardware than when they made the original Aleste in 1988.
GG Aleste 3 looks gorgeous, with detailed and vibrant artwork of the ships and background pieces. It's hard to believe that this is a game made for the Game Gear, which itself is 80s game console hardware in a portable device; you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a Game Boy Advance game.
Best Level Ever: Wave 5, "Lunar Crisis" from GG Aleste 3, which has you taking off after a rocket while fighting off waves of enemy fighters, and even rotating around the rocket as you fly your way to the top of it. It eventually culminates in destroying the rocket, followed by an epic showdown with the boss, who steals your weapons and you resort to just using your standard weapons to defeat him, eventually getting your weapons back.
For games with multiple difficulty levels, every difficulty level is available to play in Aleste Challenge, meaning you can easily farm several hundred thousand points by playing Power Strike II challenges on Comfort and Crush and GG Aleste II on Easy.
The bosses are generally easier to farm points from since they are typically shorter than the stages that precede them. GG Aleste II in particular gives you Smart Bombs, allowing you to bypass a good chunk of the boss's health. Aleste can be trivialized by using Weapon 0 or Weapon 6, both of which can nullify every type of projectile thrown by the bosses (for Weapon 0, you need max power, but for each boss your weapons are maxed out anyway).
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Expect most GG Aleste 3 players to use the C (Chain Chaser) subweapon, due to its ability to home in on and attack enemies anywhere on the screen, making it a "no-brainer" subweapon. This is only on Normal difficulty however; on Special difficulty, where enemies fire back "revenge" bullets upon defeat, the C subweapon's inability to cancel revenge bullets and in fact create unwanted revenge bullets by destroying enemies you aren't prioritizing makes it prime Schmuck Bait.
Contested Sequel: Senxin Aleste is seen by many as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel to the Compile-era Aleste games as a whole due to being a much beefier game with Bullet Hell, hyper modes, multiple playable characters, and an in-depth scoring system (something that previous Aleste games notably lack, typically amounting to "just kill stuff and collect items"), while others don't like it precisely for that reason, feeling that it strays from what gives the Aleste series its own identity and is basically "just another CAVE-like shmup" in a market that has so many of them already.
In Aleste, there are yellow enemies that, if not destroyed quickly, split into two indestructible halves and fire a few bullets. As if they weren't problematic enough in the game's Spiritual PredecessorZanac, the split halves also cross paths with each other, making it harder to dodge them. Chances are, your first death (potentially setting off a Disaster Dominoes scenario where you lose all of your remaining lives — even if you have 20 — due to losing all of your powerups on death) of the run will be to one of these jerks.
In Power Strike II, one recurring enemy that appears starting in the fourth stage is a rather durable ship surrounded by an Orbiting Particle Shield. The spinning bits are not only lethal on contact, but you can barely shoot past them without a piercing subweapon or main shot powered up by at least one Pierce-type Spin Shield (assuming they haven't been replaced by two Wide-types already); without one, your only hope is to spam the Super Shot. The ship will also try to move around the screen to chase you, potentially backing you into the screen edges or another enemy's attacks.
Even Better Sequel: GG Aleste II is already a fantastic game that demonstrates that shmups have a place on the Game Gear, with fast-paced firefights against enemies. GG Aleste 3, released 27 years later, stays true to the spirit of the series and features fantastic visuals, a great variety of levels, and intense boss fights that push the Game Gear specs to their limits. As such, many fans are confident that the series will do well in M2's hands.
Game-Breaker: Neo Napalm Gun in GG Aleste II shows that sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. It shoots out bombs that explode into flame trails that do massive damage and pierce through indestructible enemy features, easily trivialing several bosses such as the Stage 2 boss (where you have to shoot its eyes, but they tend to hide behind the indestructible main body of the boss), and cancels bullets; at max level, the Napalm shoots a spread of four bombs, easily obliterating anything in front of you while keeping you safe from even the thickest of bullet curtains. The only other weapon that can cancel bullets is the Delta Formation, which does so at a dangerously close radius to your ship and doesn't really do much to augment your offense.
Harsher in Hindsight: The scene near the end of the intro to Aleste 2, which has the Vagand's first target on Earth being New York, complete with the World Trade Center being present, can be much harder to watch in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The Aleste series came into existence because Sega approached Compile to make a game for the Sega Master System but the latter company was forbidden by Nintendo from simply porting Zanac to the SMS. Years later, Compile would make an Aleste game on a Nintendo system (the Super NES in particular), Super Aleste. A couple of decades after that, well after Sega ceased to be a console maker and became a third-party developer for other companies' platforms, including Nintendo's, many of the Aleste games on Sega systems would make their way to another Nintendo platform, the Nintendo Switch.
Just Here for Godzilla: Plenty of people got Aleste Collection for GG Aleste 3, the first new installment in the series.
Polished Port: M2's porting chops are once again on full display with Aleste Collection. Unlike their past M2STG releases, this one ports not one, but five different games (one of which was a PAL-exclusive for 27 years, and another of which is a new Game Gear game in 2020), each with the usual bells and whistles of a ShotTriggers port such as M2 Gadgets that show real-time play information, savestates, gameplay customization options not available in the original releases, and a Challenge mode. Perhaps most of all, each game has the option to disable slowdown and flicker, allowing for super-smooth, super-challenging gameplay that isn't possible on the original Master System or Game Gear as well as mitigating a recurring complaint of Compile shmups being too long for comfort.
In Aleste, subweapon items can be found on the ground (in addition to being carried by the occasional item-carrying enemy), and shooting them will render them collectable. This is problematic in higher-speed sections as you might not notice a particular subweapon pickup you want until it's too late. While this mechanic is also in the game's Spiritual PredecessorZanac, here items on the ground only need to be shot once to be made available, and items slowly float up and off the screen, meaning you could shoot a subweapon item the very moment it scrolls down onto the screen and you'll never realize you missed it.
In Power Strike II, Spin Shield items come in two flavors: fixed items and items that cycle through the three different shields. However, the cycling is so fast that it's hard to get the shield you want unless you are really good with timing and know the exact sequence of shields. If you try to get a Power or Pierce shield, expect to get Wide shields instead. Sure, there are subweapon items that also cycle through the available types, but they cycle at a slow enough rate that it's relatively easy to get the subweapon you want.
In Collection, if you use a continue, your score will not be accepted for rankings, not even the score you got on your first credit. The only game where this doesn't happen is Aleste, which has a different flow for continuing after a game over: game over -> score upload -> title screen -> "Continue game."
Self-Imposed Challenge: GG Aleste 3 is rather prone to slowdown given that it is pushing the Game Gear specs to their absolute limit, so disabling slowdown makes for a faster, much more difficult game.
Shocking Moments: Shmup fans who go into GG Aleste 3 with little knowledge about its staff were surprised when they got to the credits screen, as it credits shmup soundtrack legend Manabu Namiki as not only the composer but also the director of the whole game.
So Okay, It's Average: The original GG Aleste isn't an awful game, it doesn't do anything horribly wrong. But its slow pace and lack of any real challenge doesn't do anything to make it stand out from its competitors.
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The first GG Aleste is not too shabby, but it feels relatively barebones and the stages seem to drag on, and the Final Boss is a pushover; you get the impression that the developers were being overly cautious about the Game Gear's hardware. You can set the difficulty to Special to make enemies release "revenge bullets" upon defeat, but it feels like artificial difficulty that doesn't really flesh out the game. GG Aleste II is significantly beefed up, featuring a faster pace and more intense firefights with enemy waves and bosses, reducing the amount of time that the player is doing nothing besides hold down the 1 button.
In Power Strike II (SMS), the Stage 3 boss is a jerk. It likes to corner you and make you risk Collision Damage in its first phase. In its second phase, it generates a circular formation of drones that you have to get through first if you want to inflict a reasonable rate of damage to the boss. Hope you brought a piercing subweapon (such as Weapon 3 or Weapon 5) or you have a Pierce shield (but in all likelihood, you'll instead have two Wide shields at this point).
GG Aleste 3:
The first midboss of Wave 4 consists of a gauntlet of trains that attack you with both non-cancellable bullets and explosive charges that linger on the screen for several seconds after detonating. At first you only fight one two-car train at a time, but then two trains of two cars each then show up simultaneously, easily cornering you especially since one of the train tracks is so close to the front of the screen.
The boss of Wave 5, its first form in particular: not only does it have an incredibly difficult-to-avoid rotating diamond attack, the player is forced to rely on the main shot as the boss steals the sub-weapons from Luna's ship.
The Bonus Levels in GG Aleste II if you are playing them in Collection's Aleste Challenge mode. Here, the requirement for a Gold Medal isn't "don't get hit", but rather "destroy every enemy and don't miss any shots." Silver, which awards 9,997 less points, is only slightly more generous, allowing you to be one enemy short, but you still can't miss. Any misses and you can only get Bronze. Did you tap the fire button one too many times? Time to start over!
GG Aleste 3 has several:
Wave 5, "Lunar Crisis". You're chasing after a rocket which rotates whenever you move. There are also fighters that can ram into you if you're not careful.
The seventh and final wave of the game, "Deeper Into Abyss", is abnormally difficult compared to the rest of the game. First there are these waves of battleships that you must get through, which can be hard to dodge. Then you have to deal with a bunch of turrets and an enemy tank where the game truly becomes Bullet Hell if you're playing on Special Mode. And finally the part right before the Final Boss, where you must deal with snake-like enemies that leave behind a trail of explosives and shoot out more revenge bullets whenever they are defeated. Oh, and it's also the longest stage of the game.
Visual Effects of Awesome: GG Aleste 3's fifth stage makes a valiant effort to emulate the player's ship climbing a rocket, with the rocket rotating and the field of play looping if the player moves far enough to the left or right.
Aleste Collection, like other M2 ShotTriggers ports, features a Challenge mode (in this particular release, Aleste Challenge) where you can choose one area, stage, or entire game to practice and try to complete without any deaths. Unfortunately, the stage sections aren't broken down very well; whereas other M2STG releases' Challenge modes usually divide each stage into at least four sections (Area 1, Mid-Boss, Area 2, Boss), here each stage is only divided into two sections: Field and Boss. This gets problematic for stages that feature multiple bosses, such as the latter half of the original Aleste. Unless you're going for 100% Completion, you might as well skip the Field sections and just do the "Round/Stage/Wave All Play" chapters if you're trying to practice the Field portions of each stage.
Aleste Collection also features rapid-fire options in the controller configuration as part of the M2 ShotTriggers framework, complete with multiple frequency options (10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 Hz), but it's not necessary for this particular release since all games in the collection have innate autofire that works well enough.
Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Thanks to one of M2's distribution partners having a hand in pirating Darius Extra Version, GG Aleste 3 contains heavy copy protection that prevents the game — which was designed as a showcase of the Game Gear's full capabilities — from even running on original hardware. This means that it was, for months, only playable, period, on a limited edition of an already limited edition mini-console or the Aleste Collection, both of which are only available in Japan.
for Aleste Branch is set to a remix of the series' main theme. The Aleste franchise is officially back, baby!