Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer

released on Jul 17, 1992

Advanced Busterhawk Gley Lancer, commonly known as Gleylancer (グレイランサー), is a 1992 Sega Mega Drive shoot-'em-up by NCS released exclusively in Japan (despite having some of its text, such as in the Mover configuration screen described below, in near-perfect English). It was released internationally on the Wii Virtual Console in 2008. Despite the English configuration screen, translation group M.I.J.E.T. released a patch which translated the story text in 2006-2007. Lucia is the 16-year-old daughter of a fighter pilot who disappears while fighting a war between humans and aliens in 2025. He was captured by aliens whom he had captured earlier who had the ability to teleport. Lucia hijacks the prototype fighter CSH-01-XA "Gley Lancer" to save him.


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I normally loathe checkpoint shooters, but this one definitely hit different. You have a ton of different options for your, uh, options...but the clear winner here is "search" mode which will have them auto-target things for you.

Some people seem to get a bad first impression of this game due to how visually busy/distracting the first stage is, and to that, I'd say look at Thunder Force IV and its heaps of hard to read/follow projectiles and obstacles throughout the whole thing. It's definitely not a good thing, but I can assure you the rest of the game's art direction is fine although nothing groundbreaking.

Also, i gotta give bonus points to the OST. It may not hit the highs of Thunder Force, but the instrumentation sounds quite a bit like the stuff Buster's Hidden Treasure had going on and I love it for that.

Attempted to get a 1cc and then randomly lost all my lives to random crap in stage 9 and realized it was too long to justify doing again and settled for clearing it for maybe the 4th or 5th time now?

I'd love to say Gleylancer is a model 'beginners shmup' with its insistence on checkpoints that force you to learn stages while keeping the routing and patterns extremely simple, but it stumbles enough to delegitimize that praise. Levels all end to be a bit overly-long and safe, except for the couple random parts that get too bad. The giant selection of option control types feels ill-conceived and poorly balanced, like you can coast through 90% of hazards with homing but then you get those random sections where you're surrounded on all sides or have to destroy debris tiles in your way and it fails to resemble anything functional.

Major eurojank vibes in the way it insists so heavily on this huge cinematic story set across a galactic war, with this sweeping spacy rock soundtrack and tons of animated stills for the cutscenes. And then you get to the back half of the game and enemies are microscopic 8x8 pixel dots that tank 20 hits and dish hardly anything back. Some war.

I'd recommend the Ratalaika port to modern consoles for its inclusion of option aiming via the right analog stick, it adds a very unique scheme that most other shmups don't attempt while also easing the problems with certain setpieces.

Wish this was better - wish all of Masaya's shmups were better, frankly. This was one of the earlier shmups I played once I got my everdrive and its always a little disheartening seeing how it stacks up against the better MD shooter.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a Neo Geo game. It's nothing short of a crime that this never made it out of Japan, it's one of the finest shoot-em-ups on the Megadrive. Amazing anime-inspired cut-scenes, thumping soundtrack, and stellar gameplay. It's tough too, 11 levels of pure bullet hell. If it has any flaws it's that the main ship sprite is a bit sad looking (don't get me started on the obvious sexual connotations of the vessel during the cut-scenes).

Excelente gameplay, música y niveles.

No es injustamente difícil.

Last year I played this game and liked it quite a lot, so why am I redoing the review? I wasn’t really proud of that one, it felt kind of half-hearted so I replayed the game multiple times and will try to give it the better treatment it deserves. Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer or just Gleylancer is one of those well known Mega Drive shmups for not being released in Western territories back in the day and was usually said to be pretty good despite its mixed reception in Japan. This game was developed by NCS who you might know for working on stuff like Langrisser, Assault Suit Leynos, and the Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman series. Now onto the actual review for the game.

In this game you’ll be piloting the Gley Lancer and there are 11 stages in the game you have to get through. The Gley Lancer itself has no real special abilities of its own as it has a pretty standard shot. What makes the shooting fun is the many options to use your gunners as they have many movement options. First is normal where they face the same direction as you and holding C will lock them in the last direction they were at. Reverse is the same as normal but just…in reverse. Search aims at enemies on its own and you can use C to keep on one target or another, though the game does advise you to not rely on this movement when playing so keep that in mind. Multi will have one on the top and bottom that go in a half circle movement and C will lock their last movement in place. Multi-R is the same as Multi but just…in reverse. Shadow follows any movement you do and C will keep them in place but the cost comes to them only ever shooting forward. Roll will spin around the ship giving great coverage but offers poor concentrated firepower. Test these if you like as every game over will allow you to change the movement if you so please.

There are item containers found constantly that will give you weapons to use and it’ll give you a gunner if you don’t have any or just 1. The first weapon is Twin Shot which is your standard more powerful shot, it gets the job done and doesn’t really have any negatives. Laser is a little weak but it can pierce and hit multiple times if it’s a big enemy to make up for its power. Great for those weaker enemies. 5-way gives you great range with 5 small shots coming from each gunner but be aware as it has a low fire rate though personally it didn’t bother me too much. Burner lets you use a flamethrower with decent range that even slides along the floor and ceiling, it’s also got great power. Spread Bomb lets you shoot bombs that can do multiple hits but is a little slow and it’s oddly rare. Saber will give you a short range beam to continuously hit enemies with but you’ll have to be a bit of a risk taker at times. Bound Shot will have bullets that bounce off walls and ceilings making it great for non open areas especially the vertical sections. All the weapons do a good job at having sections worth using it in though I still wish the Spread Bomb was used more. If there was one gripe I have with them, I feel like the item sprites for them could be a little more distinguishable but it could just be me being dumb. Oh there’s also sometimes 1-ups in those capsules.

One cool thing about Gleylancer is it has a bit of story to it. The intro is pretty long with it being about 4 minutes long. I’m not sure if the team felt like doing something like this due to the PC Engine CD loving to do cutscenes but here it’s cool to see on the Mega Drive. The only other shmup I can think of that tries to do a story like this is Gaiares. While it’s nothing special I do appreciate the attempt as there are a few cutscenes put throughout the game. Plus it gave us Lucia who is pretty cute. I wonder if it’s why the game never was brought overseas though considering they brought over Langrisser here as Warsong, I guess that leaves that theory in the bin. If the story annoys you for some reason, you can turn it off in the options though you will still see the ending.

Stages in this game go for the horizontal approach. There are many stages like I mentioned already though don’t let that intimidate you as they go by pretty quick a lot of the time. I would say stages are probably the thing that will get you killed the most as the game loves to put many enemies and obstacles in your way like debris, weird looking walls, and many many turrets my god they love using those. That said the game won’t blow you away as the most interesting things it’ll have isn't just destroying enemies there will be some sections like going fast in stage 4, fighting a big battleship in stage 5, and destroying pinkish looking squares that block the path in stage 9. That said there’s nothing awful in these stages that will have you going insane and the only notable complaint I have to give is I don’t like the beginning section in stage 9 because I swear it’s the hardest part of the game.

Dying in this game will send you back to a checkpoint and you have one hit deaths but don’t worry as you have multiple difficulty options including an optional one once you know the code on the title screen. This game is pretty friendly towards newbies of the genre so if you aren’t good at them or are wanting to get into them then this may not be too bad of a start. You even have infinite continues which is quite rare for a shmup of its time that wasn’t an Arcade game. It’s not even too hard to get back to full power as you only need to obtain your gunners for full power. This game even lets you control your speed but sadly this is probably one of the worst shmups I’ve seen with this feature as I almost never switch from the level 3 speed which is a shame since stuff like Soldier Blade and Thunder Force IV use it so perfectly.

I have to say though, when I went to play this game on hard mode earlier I was just not enjoying the game. It was kind of saddening me like it made me think I overhyped it last year and it didn’t even fix the problem that I’ll talk about later. I reached the end and thought not highly of it which made me think maybe it was the movement I had. I decided to switch from shadow to normal and even played on normal difficulty and my god did this fix my mood on the game immediately. I’m going to say it right now, never use shadow because they clearly designed the game with ways to shoot in all 16 directions. Normal movement makes this game so much fun and in fact I liked it more than last year playing it and it makes me want to replay it more someday.

If I had another gripe with the game, it would have to be the bosses. Now thankfully none of them are too frustrating but they’re also too easy meaning they leave barely any impression on me. Sure you may die once or twice on them but once you know the pattern, they’ll be down in less than a minute. The only one I can think of that’s a good challenge is the final one but that’s probably because it has multiple forms but even that’s not too difficult compared to other games I’ve played in the genre. At least some of them have cool designs like the one in stage 7.

One very odd thing this game does is in stage 10, you have to help Lucia’s dad not die and protect the pod he is in. This fight determines what ending you get but honestly I feel like the bad ending is so impossible to get unintentionally that I almost feel like they designed it that way. Like I mentioned before, bosses die quick so he’ll never destroy the pod fast enough and it can survive for a very long time. When I was doing my second playthrough, it didn’t even destroy a single piece of the pod which just goes to show how much of a joke it is. Though if you do have no sympathy and try to get the bad ending, you’ll get to see Lucia be depressed for the rest of her life and basically fail the whole reason she risked her life so hope you’re proud of yourself bozo! Oddly enough, the bad ending has text once the cutscene ends yet there’s no text for the good ending, how odd…

Graphically Gleylancer is good but nothing too amazing. This was 1992 so I’ll give it some slack but some areas really look bland and nothing really impressed me visually. There are a couple of stages I like the look of like stage 2, stage 6, and stage 7. It’s just nothing that’ll make you go “Wow this is the power of the Mega Drive!” The cutscenes look pretty nice at least and there’s some pretty cool big sprites for enemies and bosses. I also like those letters when putting your initials down for the high score. The game’s music is pretty good with some favorites being stage 1, stage 3, and the boss themes. Even the ending themes are pretty good too at reflecting what happened in each one. There’s also voice clips that sound robotic but I think it’s intentional? It’s not all bad but some of the lines sound rather strange especially if you listen to them in silence.

Gleylancer may not be the most pretty, the most innovative, or even the most exciting but what is here is a really fun shmup. I’m glad to have replayed this one and ended up enjoying it more than last time. Gleylancer would go on to make a nice legacy for itself as it even got a couple of re-releases with one being on modern consoles so any of you all can enjoy. It’s a shame this never came out here back in the day because I could have seen this being a notable hit for the console. Newbie or not, you should play this game as there’s fun to be had here and someday I’m going to buy it for Switch and continue to enjoy this game! Oh before I end I should say that I finally learned that the Gley in Gleylancer really was meant to be Grey! Though that was probably obvious for most of you...