The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Flashgal
Check out this weirdly delightful and fast-moving Sega beat ‘em up with some bonkers enemies.
RELEASE DATE: 1985
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Sega
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
Sega’s Flashgal is, first and foremost, a very weird game. The titular character seems to be a blatant rip-off of Marvel Comics’s ninja heroine Elektra and the game’s enemies include rampaging emus, rolling tires, ninjas, jetpack-wearing bombers, potato-headed guys in boxer shorts, monkeys throwing objects at you, gangsters wearing suits and fedoras and, for some reason, a knock-off of R2-D2 from Star Wars (though this list is far from exhaustive!). The bosses include a portly gangster wearing a white suit who can turn you to stone with a ray gun and a hulking gladiator with a sword and shield. The levels bounce all over the place and include an American stage where you walk past both the Statue of Liberty and the White House in a matter of minutes, the exterior of an Egyptian pyramid, a bamboo forest in ancient Japan, an alpine trail and a Chinese city at night. There are even multiple transition sections where you fly an armed autogiro or ride a jetski armed with a vertical missile launched in fast-moving side-scrolling vehicular action sequences.
If you’re thinking, “this game sounds amazing! Why haven’t I played it?” the answer is likely that you live outside of Japan, because it’s the only country where Sega ever released Flashgal. Fortunately, the game’s entirely in English and thus is well worth playing via an arcade emulator.
Flashgal is basically a side-scrolling single-plane beat ‘em up with basic jump and attack buttons, but it has two unique quirks. Firstly, the screen auto-scrolls from left to right at a pretty fast clip, quickly moving you through the level whether you want to advance or not. Secondly, Flashgal’s health is managed by a power meter that depletes when she takes certain actions (particularly jumping), but which refills as she defeats enemies. This means that if you take a couple of careless hits and manage to focus your play to deal with bad guys more effectively, you can bring Flashgirl back up to full health. I found once I mastered the basic controls and enemy patterns, I could easily make it through several levels without dying. It’s rare to see an arcade game from the 1980s be so generous, and this might be one reason why Sega never released the game outside its home country.
Another unusual mechanic for a game of this vintage is that you can occasionally pick up weapons that are not only unlimited use (though only on the stage where you find them), but also extremely deadly. The easier of the two weapons to acquire is the sword, which only shows up in Japan but allows you to cut down the samurai who will otherwise put a big dent in your health meter. On some of the other stages, if you can kill the green emu, you can get a gun that makes short work of any enemy you’ll see, including the bosses.
If Flashgal has a fault, it’s that the game feels slapped together rather than intentionally designed. The animation doesn’t quite fit the scrolling and the game feels like it’s stuck on an airport walkway or a treadmill rather than giving you agency to move at your own pace. The wide variety of enemies and stages is novel at first, but even with all the crazy stuff going on, the game starts to feel repetitive by the fifth or sixth stage. The two types of bosses who show up on most stages also get old pretty quickly since they’re not hard to stagger so you can land multiple hits and are so easily dispatched with the sword or gun.
Even so, Flashgal is decent enough to be worth tracking down and playing today. The learning curve isn’t too steep, and it even allows you to have continues based on checkpoints rather than forcing you to replay entire stages. Once you figure out how to deal with the different varieties of enemies, it’s fun to spend a half an hour or so blasting through it. It’s not Sega’s best game, but it is a fun one you’ll probably have to play via MAME since it hasn’t been ported to other platforms or included in any English-speaking collections. I’m honestly surprised it never wound up on the Sega Master System; it would have been a great fit.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
Flashgal's character model gives off some strong Wonder Woman vibes.