[AC] Image Fight (JP Version) - 2-ALL Clear (No-Miss)

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Image Fight came out in arcades in 1988 and was made by Irem, the same company that made the R-Type series.
Image Fight was one of the few vertical shmups Irem made, and the game was pretty notorious for making the player do an insanely hard penalty stage if you didn't do well enough in the first five stages.

The game has a Japan version and a World version. The World version is significantly easier.

Image Fight, like all Irem games, is a classic memorizer. You won't get anywhere if you don't memorize everything, especially in the 2nd loop.
It's a very methodical game and you'll die very quickly if you don't know good strats, don't know exactly what you're doing and don't execute them well.
It's a very hard game to 2-ALL.

The game has two types of powerups, the pods and the attachments.
You can equip a maximum of three pods at a time and these act as options. The pods do contact damage to enemies but they don't block bullets. The pods come in two variants, red and blue.
The red pods shoot in the opposite direction that you're moving in while the blue pods always shoot forwards. The red pods are far more versatile, but blue has its uses in spots.
The attachments act a bit like the force from R-Type, it gets equipped to the front of your ship and every attachment gives you a different shot. Big problem with the attachments is that they get destroyed if a bullet or a wall hits them. You also can't switch to a different attachment until your current one is destroyed.

An interesting thing you can do with the pods is that you can launch them forwards. This will do damage to enemies and they can get stuck behind walls to do continuous damage. Good for attacking hard-to-reach places.

The game has four movement speeds that you can freely change between, indicated by the row of numbers at the bottom of the screen.
It works kinda weird though, pressing the button makes it go from 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 etc. You have to keep in mind if you're currently accelerating or decelerating if you want to quickly change speeds. Changing from speed 2 to 1 can either take one button press or five for example. In the run there are a couple of times where I subtly change my speeds so I can quickly get the next speed I want with the least amount of button presses.

An interesting aspect of the speed system is that the burner graphic that the ship emits when you change speed actually damages enemies.
So you can do a lot of damage to enemies behind you if you put autofire on the speed change button. This won't work if your rate is too fast though, 15 hertz is good.

Image Fight is a checkpoint shmup, if you die you lose all your power and go back to a previous checkpoint.
Recovery in the 2nd loop is extremely, stupidly hard, and some checkpoints are just almost impossible. This being my favorite: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm1755....
So if you die once in the 2nd loop it's likely an instant game over and you'll have to restart the entire game, so you have to be damn sure your route is solid if you want to clear it.

2nd loop differences are:
Bullets are much faster and enemies shoot more.
Lots of added enemies to stages, most of these new enemies come from behind.

Let's talk a bit about the Penalty Area. You don't see it in this run, but you'll be sent to the Penalty Area if you fail to have an average destruction rate of 90% at the end of stage 5.
At the start of the Penalty Area you lose all your powerups and there are also no powerups in the stage.
The Penalty Area is by far the hardest thing in the game, but it's easy enough to avoid luckily.
The 2nd loop Penalty Area is one of the hardest things ever made. I've never seen anyone do that stage without losing tons of lives.
Be sure to check it out here:    • 春のシューティング祭り2016　第5戦「イメージファイト　2周目(IMAG...  

Game doesn't have much in the way of scoring besides killing things, so optimal scoreruns checkpoint milk a lot. You can do a double KO strat on the final boss like in Formation Armed F, though it's much, much harder to execute. The checkpoints that are worth the most are the last checkpoint in stage 7 and the last checkpoint in stage 8.
Going to the Penalty Areas also gives some score.

Stage 1 and 2 have a stupid amount of dead air for some reason but I like the rest of the stages.

Played for Calice Cup Winter.

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