Nine years after posting my very first score here, am back :
Thelk641 - 24.551.900 - 6-7
Speedrunning this game taught me how to be more aggressive, and the game actually rewards this a lot more than I previously thought. The difficulty ramps, not based on level clears, but on the number of enemies that got to shoot. Going faster therefore means keeping the difficulty from snowballing too much. Scoring in SFZ is a balancing act as gold turns into score if you reach the end of the loop, so you have to spend enough to survive, but not too much, years ago I thought it was worth it to just keep my gold and risk it, but this run proved the opposite : play fast, spend to go faster and play the long game. If anybody else wants to score : laser, double missile, run fast, "speedrun strats" (except for boss and round 7, which would cost you way too much with the actual speedrun strat). Round 6 (aka hell), buy a bubble. Loop 1 and 2 can be done without this, same thing for round 1, 2 and 3 of each loop (buy a 1up at the start of round 3, for safety).
This was done live on twitch, here's a replay of the run :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oDScA1lLFw
I ran into one weird "bug" which I can't explain. Enemies "level up" in SFZ. At the end of loop 4 (59min20s), you can see them using their red shots (lvl 3), but just minutes later, during the boss rush (1h1min15s), the fourth boss (who uses the same shots as basic enemies) uses the green shots (lvl 2) and, after the credit, round 1 begins with enemies using, again, their lvl 2 shots instead of the level 3 (1h8min25s). I don't know what happen, I don't know if there's a "level down" mechanic for the last level, or if it's a bug, and if it is, I don't know if it's a game bug or an emulation (kega fusion) bug. With SFZ being as popular as it is (sarcasm) I don't know if anybody with the necessary skill would be motivated to dig and find out what happen, I'll be very curious to know but to be honest I wouldn't know where to start.