Raiden Fighters - 1CC (Endeavor, 25.1m)

This took about seven hours to get. I love this game, I'm not very experienced with the Raiden series (tried a bit of Raiden 1 before this and it was cute but I bounced off) but Fighters has been a blast! It's ultra fast, the ship selection feels great, and the presentation is gorgeous--those aspects already speak for themselves but it's excellent for both survival and scoring as well. That said it does feel most "complete" when playing for score, I'm usually someone who focuses on survival for a first clear but Raiden Fighters scoring is so unique that it's a shame to not at least try it. I love the concept of needing to go on this elaborate earlygame "sidequest" to unlock the actual scoring system for the rest of the run, and it's fairly flexible in how you do it as well. I was going back and forth on whether I wanted to use Endeavor or Devastator for this run but I ended up going with the former. Endeavor's lasers are insanely versatile and can wipe the screen from almost anywhere, with the downside being that its damage is kinda poor if you aren't at point-blank so you have to be much more careful when it comes to big enemies and bosses. The bosses are quite fun though so I don't mind having to do a bit of extra dodging :D plus if you can learn how to keep your options alive for long enough they do a surprising amount of additional damage. The bigger issue with Endeavor is that its missile sub-weapon is unusably bad, it's almost equivalent to not having a sub-weapon at all. It's quite distracting to see all those power-ups flying around and knowing that picking up the wrong one on accident can derail the entire run, I even go out of my way to avoid spawning the last power-up in stage 6 so that it's not floating around during the boss. I'm incredibly happy with this run for a first clear, my original goal was 20m so this was way more than I could've asked for. I was having consistency issues with doing the second Miclus in stage 1 so I skipped it since it's pretty lenient to reach 10k before the first stage 2 Miclus. In general I skip a good number of fairies and micluses because I either hadn't routed them or didn't want to keep stacking on extra complexity to the run, as long as I got 100k medals unlocked by s2 and keep my chains for as many stages as possible that's all I wanted. I do have a very bad habit of being too aggressive while collecting medals and power-ups, they're mainly just distracting for me and I'd rather get them out of the way sooner than later but waiting till they pass the lower half of the screen would definitely have been safer. I almost completely stopped chaining during s6 and s7 which was for the better since I didn't want to gamble my survival chances. No-missing up to the final boss was surreal and I knew the clear was done; I was still deciding whether or not I wanted to do the phase 2 timeout strat to make the final phase spawn with less health, but I had the resources either way and the phase transition happened sooner than I expected so I didn't get a choice. It is unfortunate that I missed the full no-miss but I really can't complain with how well the run went otherwise. This isn't a super amazing score given how far you can push the game and I'm certainly not an expert but I'm still proud to have gotten it. Everything I know about this game was learned from the shmups wiki page, the Raiden Fighters Emporium, and crucially this phenomenal guide by Chinopolis:    • Raiden Fighters Comprehensive Guide - From...  . It is absurdly in-depth and tells you everything you need to know when starting out, I cannot recommend it enough. Played on Shmupmame 5.4 with 27hz autofire.