I figured something out! Was messing around with Saigo no Nindou's "Hard" difficulty. I don't recommend it TBH, except perhaps as a practice aid. Does little for the easy breezy st1+2, makes the remainder annoying. The first boss fires outright danmaku, but 1) this causes frame-crushing slowdown, and 2) it's as cancellable as ever. Moving on, large enemy HP is buffed perilously close to Euroshump territory. Not enough to force alterations of strategy, but it's a burden, and checkpoint recovery is nasty.The flip side is, going back to defaults feels amazing - highlighting how perfectly-judged its enemy resilience is. Weapons hack and blast through heavies not like butter, because that would be lame, but with a decided impact conveying the sense of a hard target shattering under immense force. So near, yet so far to Euroshump awfulness. Not that it makes that shit any more forgivable.
Speaking of heavies - the AC version's Giant AI is so much cooler than the PCE conversion's. There they lash out automatically at set intervals, forcing you to work around their timing - but hobbling their chances of catching you. In AC, they attack based on proximity, relentlessly homing in. Returning to the AC version, I had a great minor scare when a rotting behemoth I was counting on to contentedly swipe thin air had very different plans! It's a shame their st6 boss incarnations are such washouts - had they teleported in at random locations, it'd likely have been the best zombie gameplay ever. (witness the best stealth gameplay ever - ceiling homies are tracking you by sound not sight, makes sense mirite?
)It's one of those tiny PCE changes that weirds me out, given how accurate its mechanics are. The PCE does at least grant the Giant its awesomely morbid official name: Ghost of Fugitive Warrior. Sheeeit that's grim, especially with that wakizashi stuck in their guts!
Sadly, the accompanying manual illustration is just some big hairy dude, not the sepulchral monstrosity haunting stage 3's grassland. 
WTF happened with this game's peripheral materials, I wonder. The PCE manual is cool but very off-model, while the one piece of AC art (that I've seen) is completely off - and pure ninja generica to boot! Nothing of the game's necro-feudal menace or elegant Japonesques. Even the plot seems hopelessly garbled between page and screen. Odd, given the game's artistic accomplishment, and the care IREM put into the materials of Saigo's contemporaries. Oh well! I wonder if that care is itself the reason, not enough resources to go around. Maybe that's why Gunforce is so goddamn fugly compared to stuff before and after it.
Purely by chance, happened across artwork from an utterly unrelated game (Death's Gambit), which would do me fine for Tsukikage's portrait.
Pls don't chuck things at me if the game chokes balls, I ain't played it. Much on plate!
(Dream Game Hackz OMAKE: I'd be down with a Saigo gore mod. Nothing ridiculous, don't want dollops of red flying all over the place. Just Metal Slug-style "shredded to bits / ashes" for zako, and some nice "fatal collapse" animations for the heavies. Wanna see the Ghosts disintegrate like the undead automatons they are, Ryuichi go out with "Samurai Rival" venom worthy of Sanjuro, the monks do something appropriately zenful, etc.)Also, I wonder if Metal Slug shared any art personnel with this game - the way major explosions are peppered with solid-coloured spheres stands out.)
I've made my peace with st2 on both mechanical and aesthetic terms. It's the only place in the game where the player can simply enjoy Tsukikage's almost tangibly liberating jump - every other stage is either vertically confined, or too dangerous to fly through with abandon. It could use leaping zako for Kage no Densetsu midair counter-slicing, but given how mortally (and immortally) dangerous Saigo's remainder is, it's hard to feel much loss. And I used to find the scenery too clean-cut, but it's obviously meant to be a clear path through a wooded grove, not a viciously snarled Predator-style green hell. So it's cool. Stage 3 emphatically brings both the danger and the sweeping wilderness. I adore that placid moonlit gloom, with or without bullets flying through it.
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Anyway, the slowdown on the first boss's hardmaku, and comparing st6 footage with SaigoNoNindou's PCB captures, gave me a minor breakthrough regarding The Hellish Battlefield™. Projectiles seem to take a much bigger toll on the CPU than characters - the popup ninjas' "fan spread" causes chugging all on its own, and although the kites' moderate triple shots won't, a fully-powered Kusarigama attack while they're onscreen will. (this assuming real hardware or accurate emulation, naturally)
Obviously, this can be harnessed for a split-second's more reaction time. Expect no mercy and give them none in return.
I tried deliberately letting the green ninjas and kites shoot where possible, and sure enough it worked a charm. Wasn't recording unfortunately - OR SO I THOUGHT. 
Had no idea about the Share button voodoo. That's pretty useful! Relevant clip. WTF I love my PS4! Only got the bugger so I wouldn't wait a year to play TNWOA, but it's been a handy little AC emulation box / clip getter. 
Also nailed down my stage 5 boss speedkill. I could reach him with a Shield no problem, but safely shutting down his kunais was dicey and sometimes forced me to abandon the grenades. I noticed that a max-height jump up to the boss arena will guarantee a perfect opening volley. Above clip covers both the route and the speedkill setup. Outside of the last one, Saigo's bosses aren't particularly dangerous - but if there's one thing an easy boss is good for, it's punctuating a storming stage performance with an exclamation point of a deathsplosion!
This lazy practice run turned out to be a surprise no-miss, until I died at the last boss, who's still giving me problems. Current strategy is still to run underneath him, execute a max height jump to draw the bolts upward, then run back underneath him... which will usually work, but from there I get shaky. Pretty sure if I'd jumped even a frame late on my current 1LC, I'd have gotten fried. This time around, I got outright nommed by one of those patterns where two bolts pincer you mid-jump. Checkpoint recovery saw an instance of the "guillotine" RNG where a bolt kills me as I run underneath following a successful jump.
I wonder if there's just something I'm missing here. Harder than it looks for sure, but the lack of consistency rankles me. Maybe it really is just an RNG-fuelled nutsack crusher. The way the bolts move - hopping along a grid with erratic speed, rather than homing in smoothly - exacerbates things a bit.
but JP's the better-designed version and has shaweet Yasuomi Umetsu box art 
I don't know if PAL did anything interesting design-wise but it's got the usual kid-safe roboswaps. 
I already have all the stuff on there that I'd be interested in, but I double up on M2 releases out of principle. 
This game, I rove it. I rove NINJA. The best heavy head-smasher has truly gotten even better. Don't overlook his gorilla reach - if you're left at a loss by a skittish foe, punching them in the mouth repeatedly before battering their fuck in with the chucks is a generally sound gambit! 
You stab my back - I smash your face!
If you're forced into the corners, try to stay as near the ground as possible, aiming to return to the boss ASAP. A high jump towards the corner seems fairly certain to invite a lethal wall of multi-level death.
I am wondering if the sword might be my st6 jam the way it is in st3-2. Deflect mechanic can do some neat things, but it can also mess you up like a serrated knife getting stuck in a zombie head!
