Shepardus wrote: According to Seahawk the rank is a sum of values based on your difficulty setting, the current stage (and loop), and your current upgrades, so your rank on easy would be equivalent to the rank on normal at the same location but with two fewer options (or some other combination). Importantly, dying multiple times doesn't lower your rank any further than the first death (which lowers your rank because you lose your powerups), unlike Gradius IV and the Parodius games.
I think practicing on a lower difficulty level is still helpful because a lot of techniques remain similar on higher difficulties and much of Gradius III comes down to familiarity with the stages.
Thanks for the info (and encouragement). It is frustrating that I essentially have to re-learn all the routes to get through these stages, since the margin of error is much thinner, and the discrepancy between easy and normal is huge. I made it back to the Big Core boss on stage 3, which uh, I guess to my credit, I never did that before on Normal difficulty. The bullet density is nightmarish now whereas before it was just tense. It's fun to look back on my early-days posts in that Seahawk topic where my initial impressions harbored both hope and frustration.pegboy wrote:The one thing I remember about playing on easy vs normal occurred at stage 7 (fire stage) when you die. On your recovery the zakos will not fire on you if playing on easy while on normal they do fire. Might be the same for earlier stages too, I don't remember though.
I am confused on the point about rank: so from what I understand then, dying twice in a row won't have any effect on rank. However, dying, surviving, and gaining power-ups (thus raising rank), and dying later - WILL - lower rank?
Sigh... I guess I can push back my hopes of beating the game about 8 or 9 months... I guess at least the stages can't overly surprise me with traps or gotcha moments.