Okay, I gotta rant a bit on this one.
I'm not above playing games with save states if that helps me skip a section I've done a million times, or to skip some nasty RNG, or even just to not have to play a balls-hard stage I overcame again.
But I don't like using them to brute-force a difficult section. I did that when I was a kid, and it just turned games into chores and made it hard to differentiate between a huge challenge and a game that's just badly designed.
As such, I didn't want to use savestates for Gaiares. Hell, I played it on an actual Genesis, perfecting my run through the first stage until I could finally beat it--only to immediately get killed by something flying onto the screen at ludicrous speed that you can really only defend yourself against if you alraedy know it's coming.
So I put the game down for a good while, until this current Backlog Attack I'm doing. This time I'm playing on the Steam Deck, so I can use save states to save my progress between stages and not have to worry about limited continues.
That quickly went to "saving between sections because losing everything is pain".
Gaiares basically uses my least favourite combination of punishments. There's a checkpoint system, you lose your weapons and everything when you die, and dying is very easy to do. You start off bare, where one hit from anything will kill you instantly. Occasionally you can get a shield powerup, which thankfully can tank several hits, but it's incredibly easy to lose it quickly because the feedback isn't very good and the game is absolutely *filled* with ultra-fast trial and error sections. If you are in unfamiliar territory, this shield will not save you.
But still, I can't move the goalpost to "save every time I achieve something", because that just isn't fun to me. Outside of a brief breather at a checkpoint, shmups get their challenge from making you navigate a gauntlet. Negating that by saving every single formation you clear is like doing a time trial race but stopping the clock at every corner and repositioning your car to the best angle at your leisure.
But I would have to to get anywhere in Gaiares. I saved at checkpoints. I did each section over and over until I memorized it. It still didn't get me that much farther than playing without save states at all, because every time I figured out where to be and who to shoot to survive, something else would immediately swoop in and kill me. And it is brutally hard to even remember the position that will happen in on your next attempt, because a lot of the game--no, a lot of stages 1 and 2, because I can't get any further--take place in big open voids.
And so, I don't see any way out but to shelve the game. I'm not sure it's worth it to keep banging my head against the wall just to say I beat it, or to try and understand why some people really love this game. It doesn't even look that incredible and the music is very forgettable, which is pretty weird for this genre. Sometimes, you just gotta call it.