Battle Garegga (Arcade) - 1CC (Silver Sword)

Played on MAME 0.217

Raizing's most famous shoot em' up this time played with the signature ship. I already wrote a huge wall of text last time I touched this game, talking about the rank system and all that (which you may be unaware of since like barely 20 people follow me, and I wonder how many of them even read these fucking descriptions). In any case to do a little summary:

-Play with low autofire frequency for vast majority of the game (8hz/10hz will do).
-Don't go mental with powerups.
-Learn to medal chain.
-Bomb for more medals.
-It's (usually) ok to die.

This ship felt kinda finnicky at first for a few reasons. If you look at a picture of the ship's hitboxes (https://shmups.wiki/library/File:TBut...) you'll see Silver Sword has it placed all the way at the bottom of the sprite, this made dodging kinda weird for a while as I had the tendency to accidentally
kill myself while moving downwards. However, this hitbox placement also has the side effect of being able to grab items that are seemingly about to escape and go offscreen and it can be surprisingly helpful. Similar to Grass Hopper (a ship I have done before) the default speed is...not that good so faster speed variant is ideal, in this case the variant choice was ABC. About the player variants, this depends on what button you press before starting:
A button: no changes.
B button: faster speed.
C button: smaller hitbox.
A+B+C (or just time up): faster speed and smaller hitbox.
Overall it's a pretty solid ship if a bit on the weaker side.

This run started kind of dumb at first with many unintended things happening, but I managed to keep my medal chain up to stage 6 and still clear considering one of the last bosses was pretty mean (and also the sixth boss being kind of a clownfest on my part lol) and I'm really happy about that.