Time Gal is a classic Laserdisc title from way back in the day. It’s probably older than most of the people who read this site! While not as popular as the legendary Dragon’s Lair, Time Gal had its own flair and style alongside a few tricks that help det it apart from the other games of the genre.
For those that don’t know, Time Gal is essentially a mini movie that is broken up by having the player push certain inputs at the right moment to progress the story. If you miss a command, you’ll be treated to a silly death animation, and you have to start again. It also allows the player to pick options on screen which really help break things up compared to something like Dragon’s Lair. Games like these were serious quarter munchers back in the arcades with the only reason you’d come back is to see the next part of the movie after memorizing the pattern that never changes.
Time Gal was one of the lucky few Laserdisc games that got ported to a couple of home consoles, most notably on the Sega CD. That version was butchered to hell in back because the poor Sega CD format simply couldn’t handle the visuals and so the game suffered from compression and visual issues. But now, some four decades later, Time Gal is back with a full HD remaster. A remaster that looks to be relying heavily on AI upscaling which I’m not a huge fan of because it’s not quite there yet in terms of perfection.
The game itself sees you step into the shoes of Reika, an anime cutie time-traveling cop known as Time Gal, as she races across history to stop the sinister Luda from rewriting reality itself, although her reality is a little different than the one we live in. Stages range from all over time and space and feature futuristic cities to ancient battlefields. Each will have you dodging traps, outsmarting enemies, and battling everything from sword-swinging gladiators to those futuristic biker madmen that absolutely roamed the lands in 2001—all with split-second reflexes.
Originally an arcade hit in 1985, Time Gal was one of Taito’s pioneering laser disc titles, delivering cinematic animation way ahead of its time. It really did feel like you were playing a Japanese anime, something that in the late 80s was unheard of as the genre had yet to really even cross the ocean, not even to the legendary Suncoast Video stores where true anime lovers shopped. Now remastered from the original source, this interactive anime action game lets you guide Reika through danger with perfectly timed inputs—or laugh at the wild, a little lewd, and totally over-the-top failures that come with a mistimed move.
Laser disc games were a revolutionary arcade experience, blending movie-quality animation with quick-time gameplay. They looked decades ahead of something like Pac-Man in the arcades. Everything in this release is on the money with mostly solid visuals and that incredibly tight gameplay. What I’m not quite sold on is the AI used in the remaster itself. The AI used has some issues, especially with faces leading to some strange looks, and I swear that a couple of scenes snuck by that didn’t get any remastering treatment. I personally would have loved a fully hand redrawn remaster, especially considering the game costs $25 on Steam.
That’s a fairly steep price for what I can only assume was a quick AI remastering and for a game that isn’t all that long to begin with, especially with unlimited continues and the newly added pause feature. Sure, the extras are nice, and the redone audio is great, but I just can’t help feeling like this one is about $10 too much. If Time Gal were bundled with Ninja Hayate, another Taito Laserdisc game that released alongside it, then I’d say snag this one. But as it stands, I’d wait for a sale unless you have a lot of nostalgic love for Time Gal.
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