After going through the Valis series and finding them fascinating but not especially great, I kind of lumped Gley Lancer in there with them since they’re all part of a care package Retro-Bit sent me. I figured it would be a niche title that was forgotten because it wasn’t especially noteworthy. That is not the case. Gley Lancer is beyond rad.
What’s Gley? I’m assuming it’s an off-white color, similar to cleam or beice. If you guessed mistranslation, then that seems to be the case here. The Japanese language doesn’t have any distinction between “r” and “l” consonant sounds, so someone was so absolutely certain that they had translated it correctly that they put it on the title screen. Let’s cut them some slack. The internet wasn’t what it is now. It definitely gives it that ‘90s charm.
Similar to cleam or beice
Gley Lancer was created by Masaya, and the development team has a lot of great crossover. Producer Toshirou Tsuchida is credited with creating the Front Mission series and served as director on most of the titles. Looking into other members of staff, you see them wind up working on Arc the Lad, Cybernator, and, uh, Cho Aniki.
Gley Lancer didn’t get a localized release until just recently on the Switch. However, that version, handled by Ratalaika, took the weird approach of translating the cutscenes with subtitles rather than having the text actually within the game. Retro-Bit sent me the recent Sega Genesis re-production, where they went to the effort of actually translating the text within the game itself.
Retro-bit’s reproduction is in exactly the same style as their Valis series rerelease, and I go into more detail about it in my write-up of Valis. To sum it up, however, it’s very nice, from the packaging all the way down to the printing on the PCB.
Your dad’s missing. Oh, and we’re screwed.
While a translation is usually not really required for a shoot-’em-up, it’s worthwhile in the case of Gley Lancer. That’s because the game includes some rather lavish cutscenes that show up at certain junctures of the game.
The narrative itself isn’t terribly special. Humanity is losing a war against an alien threat. However, for some reason, during a key battle, they choose to teleport a human flagship off to a remote corner of space rather than just destroy it outright. Lucia, the daughter of the ship’s captain, is distraught. Even more so because she’s told that humanity is losing the war, and their only hope lies in the completion of a super-rad space fighter. Unfortunately, it’s still in the prototype stage, so saving her dad is going to have to wait.
So, Lucia takes the logical, level-headed approach and steals the prototype fighter to go and save her dad. And maybe save humanity while she’s at it.
It’s the standard tale of one spaceship going up against an army, but the cutscenes are really nice for a Genesis/Mega Drive game. It’s at least nice that the protagonist of this particular shoot-’em-up has a name and a face, even if she’s just killing aliens out of a personal vendetta.
Gunner but no bombers
Gley Lancer is a rather standard horizontal shooter, but it’s refreshingly simple. Rather than having a slew of different power-ups, you basically just gain additional “gunners” which are the equivalent to the “options” from Gradius. There are different flavors of gunners, but you can only have two, and the configuration of them depends on what you choose at the beginning of the game. You can have gunners locked forward, backward, ones that fire in the direction you’re moving, or ones that automatically select a target and shoot. There are flamethrowers, lasers, and other types of lasers, but that’s it as far as power-ups go.
The speed of your ship is actually toggled between four levels, so you can select how fast or slow you want to move. This is handy because it means you can slow down to avoid oversteering into obstacles or speed up to dodge projectiles. There’s a lot that’s up to you, and not a lot of variance you have to worry about. You don’t have to keep in mind whether you’re picking up blue or red power-ups, nor do you have to watch an upgrade bar to know when to activate it, and there aren’t any screen-clearing bombs to lean on.
So, that’s cool.
But the best part is definitely in the presentation. The first level sets you off flying through a gas giant’s ring, with mad parallax layers on the background asteroids. The music is killer, easily one of Gley Lancer’s high points. Aesthetically, the whole thing is butter. Some levels look a lot more vanilla than others, so the quality isn’t maintained throughout, but it’s good at always delivering something new and shaking things up.
Balls of garbage
The downside to the simplicity is that the game gets a bit stale over its runtime. It’s rather long for a shoot-’em-up, clocking in at around an hour if you absolutely never die. Chances are, it’s going to weigh in at two or three hours for a normal human, and that’s extremely long for the genre.
Meanwhile, the bosses are easily the weakest point of the whole experience. Most of them might as well have just been balls of garbage for all I can remember of their visual appearance. A lot of them go down with very little fight, and a few of them have easily exploitable holes in their defense. Better bosses, and maybe even the addition of more interesting sub-bosses, would have gone a long way in reinforcing Gley Lancer, but unfortunately, they’re all a letdown. Yes, even the final boss.
Entirely top-shelf
I was certainly surprised by Gley Lancer. As far as shoot-’em-ups go on the Genesis, it’s an entirely top-shelf title. This mainly comes down to presentation, which is often the case for the genre, but it also stands out for its simple mechanics. The simplicity doesn’t necessarily make the game any easier, but it definitely helps. Really, though, it’s the excellent graphics and outstanding soundtrack that make it worth visiting.
It is pretty amusing to have a game with such an egregious mistranslation in the title, and perhaps even funnier that its re-releases didn’t bother to fix it, but really, it’s part of the charm. Otherwise, Retro-Bit’s localized re-release is extremely solid, but, like their other games that I’ve covered, it’s completely sold out. I’m hoping they eventually do a non-limited run of their titles, but I understand that retro reproductions are a difficult market, and having strict production limits is a good protection.
So, for now, you can still get Gley Lancer on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox, and it’s definitely worth checking out.
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