Sexy Parodius 1CC (Mambo, no special stage)

They should make this fish a boss in Darius, he's more OP than most actual Darius bosses.

This game turned out to be easier than I expected when I started putting actual effort into it - I didn't even set up any savestates to practice. As long as you're mindful of a handful of tricky enemy spawns and surprise attacks, then the game doesn't get especially hard until stage 5 (or stage 4, if you get the other version of the stage for completing stage 3's mission). This is largely thanks to Mambo's extremely powerful and versatile search lasers - I imagine the game is significantly tougher with weaker characters, though I don't have much experience with them. That said, even with Mambo this game isn't quite a pushover - I only managed to clear this time thanks to a couple really lucky shield timings.

It's a crying shame MAME doesn't correctly render one of the background layers in the final stage - it really feels like something's missing without it, and the bright background without the middle layer makes it harder to see bullets. Even so, that stage is one of my favorites in any shoot 'em up - the chaotic action, the structure of the stage, the music, and the visual theme come together splendidly even for a Parodius game, which is saying a lot. A truly thrilling finale to the game (save the special stage which I didn't qualify for in this run), and the series as a whole, as unfortunately seems to be the case.