I got the no-miss ALL S-rank clear in Contra: Shattered Soldier.

It’s been three weeks since my last journal entry, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been procrastinating with my gaming. After I got the S-rank clear with retries I’ve done a run of the game almost every day. I decided early on I wouldn’t succumb to the restart syndrome but would play all runs to their completion no matter where or how I died. I didn’t quite adhere to it completely, but enough that I got comfortable with the later stages. In fact, most of my deaths actually happened in Missions 2 or 3. Lots of little random things that can go wrong in those. I ended up re-learning the first four missions almost completely, so much have my tactics changed since I got the first S-rank clears on them.

The no-miss ALL S-rank clear run went pretty good. There are little flaws in it (fight against the first form of first boss in Mission 6 is fugly), but some cool stuff as well (EPIC battle against Lance). It’s really a testament to the game that even after so many runs I still learned new quirks; I had never before seen the Mission 4 boss do an extra across-the-screen-jump like it does here. It threw me off my game for a moment which is why the fight takes longer than usual.

According to my journal entries I started playing the game on October 18th so it took me about a month and a half to get this run. The in-game clock says my Total Battle Time is 16 hours, 25 minutes, but there’s some weirdness in the way the game saves that data plus it doesn’t count the time spent in Practice mode either, so I’d estimate the actual time it took me is around 24 hours.

Video of the run available at http://www.ghegs.com/movies/Ghegs_ContraSS_1LC_ALL_S-rank.mp4