Description of Gaiapolis ROM - MAME

Gaiapolis is a fantasy themed, top-down isometric hack-n-slash RPG, released by Konami in 1993. And let me tell this straightaway, it’s epic—completely epic. The story, the length of the game, the gameplay, it’s all just plain awesome.

As far as the story goes, I won’t go into too much detail, for it would be a real shame to spoil the whole plot before you even get to play the thing yourself. — Suffice to say, you take the role of one of the three playable characters, who (not willingly at all) set out on a journey to save the world from the forces of an evil empire that plans to destroy it.

Like several other games of the era (King of Dragons, Knights of the Round etc.), the game also uses an RPG-like experience system, with the characters gaining XP points for slaying enemies, defeating bosses et cetera. Collecting experience allows the character to level  up; the higher the level you have, the more points you have to gain until you reach the next one. Levelling up makes your character stronger and more powerful.

Aside from collecting bonuses like golden coins or books, you can also pick up gear upgrades and super-attack tokens (small blue gemstones). These basically allow you to kill everything that’s on the screen, but since they are rather rare to find, use them wisely.

Both the current experience level and the gear upgrades are fully transferable between the heroes, so should you die (your HPs drop to zero) and choose to continue as a different hero, you’ll still have the same XP level and the same gear upgrades as when you died.

In addition to that, Gaiapolis also features a kind of a savegame system, which gives you a string of characters you are supposed to note down and save for later when you want to play again. The string is basically a heuristically scrambled state dump of all the important game variables, and upon entering it into the program again, the game starts right where you last ended (when the system boots up, select the PASSWORD option from the main menu to continue the game from a “password”).

The controls are simple. An eight-way joystick and two buttons: one for regular attack and the second one for the aforementioned super-attack. There are no combos per-se present in the game, but double tapping the joystick in the same direction triggers a character specific special attack (for example the dragon spits fire) and drawing a full clockwise circle with the joystick produces a roundhouse-kick move.

What’s about the most impressive feature of the game thought, is Gaiapolis’ length. Really, an hour long gameplay is remarkable for an arcade title. The unique mix of sci-fi, fantasy and alternate history theme makes the story captivating and fun. And even though this game is a kind of a money milking machine, because—let’s face it—some of the bosses are straightaway unbeatable without buying additional lives, I still believe that playing Gaiapolis was worth every dime even back then, in the time when you had to actually pay real money for it. And living in the 21st century, having almost unrestricted access to powerful computers and thing MAME at one’s disposal, it is a virtual no-brainer.

So what the hell are you still waiting for? Hit the download button and save the world!

 [Veo94]