Yeah, the constant popcorn enemies in the last stage really don't give much breathing room when their spawn points are near the bottom of the screen. The worst part for me was stage 6's enemies that drop revenge bullets when killed, that gets hectic way too quickly, I need to be MOAR AGGRESSIVE bout using those bombs. Something else I noticed of interest - the game's got a minor Progear style element to it. Killing enemies in normal mode will cancel any bullets that are caught in their blast (you'll notice the bullets near the enemy vanish and turn into the bright star items).
I thought I 1cc'd normal mode on a crappy run, but then the EX boss appeared as was all like "lol, no". She doesn't seem to show up on Easy mode.
Holy shit, that EX boss. It's a massive difficulty leap from the final boss! This game gives you a ton of extends and bomb items, but the bullet patterns are incredibly tough later on, and there's a lot more to remember. It's also hard going from Espgaluda to this as you've gotta remember bullet hitboxes are much bigger, particularly the large orbs.
B-Type's pretty good aside from the final bosses... most things its laser can hit with all shots, and its spread is extremely handy in popcorn-rich areas. Its bomb also does crazy amounts of damage even just from tapping the bomb. The downside is that the bomb fires instantly, so if you're not in front of the boss, it can miss, and the damage is only good if you actually get it to hit. This isn't normally a huge issue though.
C-Type is... interesting. It's a bit annoying that your 'main' beam isn't coloured or shaped differently so you can easily identify where you are based on your shots without having to look at your ship and its cluster of pods. Not so much an issue when fighting bosses as the laser is visually distinct. It's great for bosses when you cram all the gunpods on yourself and laser away, but they don't like to stay in position for long since you need to go back to rapid shot to dodge a number of patterns.
A-Type's classic forward shot works great, but the bomb doesn't seem to be terribly powerful unless you actually get the laser sword to hit, which isn't going to happen if you have to tap the bomb.
And 1cc'd Normal. Had a bunch of unnecessary deaths as usual. I realized you could get on top of the stage 3 tank to avoid its shots, Solid State Survivor style (I'm sure both are probably a reference to an arcade shmup I haven't played).
Normal
BKR & 349,973,800 & B-Type &
edit: ALL+TLB apparently TLB isn't guaranteed to show in normal
What's the end bonus for remaining lives in stock? I know I can do better than this.
The extra ships are kinda cool. Original should probably be on a different scoreboard once more scores get posted since the pseudo DFK bullet hypers are unusual, and might not actually be competitive scoring-wise with 100-500x cancelling. It's also extremely easy to survive with it. The Extra mode black ship is outright ridiculously powerful. At first glance it looks like it's a thin shot type with a lockon ketsui style... but go into Accel mode and it turns into Asagi from Espgaluda 2, complete with CRAZY damage. Your gunpods latch on to things and just murder 'em, and when you're hitting with the laser too, you can rip through bosses ridiculously fast.