Presented in a window with pretty graphics borders around the outside, Time Gal, plays very much like Dragons lair in that it’s all pre-drawn and recorded animation that plays out depending on the players choice. Now before people run away with the thought of multiple choices and routes this is not how these games work, one either selects the correct course of action or a death animation is cued and it’s game over. Controls are extremely simple making this much more of a interactive anime rather than straight up videogame and with this in mind it’s extremely shallow, simple and lacks replayability. What it does have going for it however is a mixture of presentation, great animation, cool story and bags and bags of humour and charm.

Each level is essentially a time zone where Reika will appear and almost instantly be in serious peril. Animals and soldiers, monsters and explosions will fix on her as she essentially run’s, jumps, rolls, stumbles and shoots her way through more and more insane situations.  From Sea Monsters to gladiators in roman style arenas everyone is out to get her, all the while she has to keep pace with Luna and bring him down. To begin with you are gonna die, a lot! Because the whole point of these types of games are a mixture of muscle memory and learning the sequences of things. Controls are a matter of tapping up, down, left or right on the D-Pad as a light indicator appears on the screen around the main action window and sometimes pressing a button to fire Reika’s gun. From an interactive point of view it’s the bare minimum however back in the mid 1980’s when this first was created technology didn’t allow for the complex nature of 3D action adventure games like we have now.

The Mega-CD version includes several extras over it’s arcade original such as scene select menus, opening and ending title sequences, extra music and the ability to play it all back as a movie once completed. It also have several difficulty levels with the top one having no hints at all so that’s where your memory comes in. Part of what was referred to as the ’Reaction Action’ series of games that originated as arcade titles ported by ‘Wolf Team’ and others Time Gal with it’s use of anime drawing styles looks cleaner and more graphically pleasing than the others like Cobra Command and as such has absolutely aged the best out of the whole series, in my opinion that is.