Well, I did it. Cleared with game with an all S-rank. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the Flawless Victory I had hoped as I had to retry Mission 5 twice. Good god those were the most embarassing deaths ever. First happened at the Alien Nutsack, the boss right after Lance, where I experienced a case of premature release and failed to produce a charge shot, which totally messed up my rhythm. The second happened only moments after restarting the mission when I was hit by a totally random mortar shot. I mean seriously, who gets hit by those?

And if that wasn’t enough, I had to retry Final Boss Battle. The one mission that I hadn’t failed in once since figuring it out. But I’m willing to chalk that up to nervousness.

Even though the game itself awarded me with all the rewards of an S-rank clear I don’t quite feel like I deserve the accomplishment. I did, after all, spend three credits doing it and the shmupper in me is yelling “Dude! You creditfed! That doesn’t count!” even though the game itself counts it as a legit S-rank clear and it’s not like it’s possible to creditfeed past a tricky spot when you have to start the mission from the beginning on a retry. I recognize that dying only three times during the whole game is most definitely not bad…just not as good as I want and hope to get.

And it would be nice to get a proper 1CC S-rank run of the game up to the Vault. Of course I recorded this run too.

Maybe I’ll work on the game a bit more. We’ll see.