Raiden Fighters (Arcade) - All (Raiden mk-II, 33 millions)

Played on MAME 0.256 So this is one of the 3 hidden ships in the game, the others being Judge Spear and Slave. If you look any footage of RF1 online you will quickly realize Judge Spear and Slave are by far the best ships, now considering they borrowed the "Raiden" name for marketing purposes and this ship is from said series, maybe you would expect that same treatment BUT nope the Raiden mk-II is terrible for several reasons. Starting with the most important factor: extremely low damage. You have the purple laser and homing missiles from Raiden II, which feels like an odd combo to me. I guess having the blue laser would have made several of the "destroyed at a time" bonuses too hard, but if that's the case why not just go with the vulcan shot instead? And it's not only the damage but how unreliable it feels, the laser has this frequent habit of either hitting the wrong thing (like how at 14:35 the laser randomly decided it didn't want to damage the big plane anymore and forced me to do a bullshit dodge, first time that happened to me lol) or not hitting stuff at all, like when it's bending while not attached to anything it tends to get stuck that way. Furthermore, having the laser and missiles be upgraded individually makes the power down after dying x10 times worse than with any of the default ships since there is twice the amount of powerup items you need to collect to get back on track. Then there is the bomb which is the very delayed red bomb from Raiden II. Admittedly it's really fucking strong it just doesn't work as a panic bomb. Also, you start with 3 bombs and have no special attack, this leads to the slave formations when you used a special attack to be permanent when you trigger one (happens when you pick a surplus slave item). To be fair, I understand why they did it because otherwise there'd be no way to use them but in practice it's just obnoxious, since half of them usually get your slaves killed immediately.