I did as promised: I’ve S-ranked all the inital missions in Shattered Soldier. It didn’t take that long, the in-game clock (though I think it’s very screwy) says I haven’t broken the four-hour barrier yet. Mission 1 S-rank was probably the easiest/fastest to get, while Mission 4 was the slowest. Took me almost a whole hour. The big mecha at the very beginning was annoying until I figured out you could place yourself under his backpack (where the mines come from) and just flame it from there. It should be possible to destroy the backpack the first time you’re behind him.

After S-ranking Mission 4 I continued playing and S-ranked Mission 1, showing I do have some consistency going on, but just barely failed to S-rank Missions 2 and 3 on that run. Got 98% and 96% respectively, all deaths which were a result of misplacing or mistiming jumps. Mission 5 was unknown to me so naturally I died a lot, but I still got to the boss fight(s). I think I got to the fifth boss but I might’ve lost track.

It was fun getting the S-ranks on the stages and the main reason for this was because I was able to play any of them at will. Now that I’m up to Mission 5 I have to play almost 30 minutes before reaching it. And to open it up in Practice mode I have to clear it with at least B ranking, if GameFaqs is to be believed. That’s quite stupid in an otherwise great game (Neo Contra improved on this by opening stages for Practice upon reaching them, if I remember correctly). I am having fun with the game and want to continue playing it, so I guess I could play it on Easy and abuse the 99 credits available there  to get my practice.

That still leaves Stages 6 and 7 to deal with…and they too have the same asinine “Clear the stage with a good enough rank to open it up in Practice”-requirement. Sigh.