Shippu Mahou Daisakusen (Arcade) - 2-ALL (Chitta)

Played on MAME 0.217
Also known as Kingdom Grandprix.

A lot of what is good about Mahou Daisakusen goes for this game too. Amazing spritework, unique characters and enemies, nice OST and very charismatic presentation overall. Even addressing some of the jankier aspects in the first Mahou, notably how the home stretch in there was a complete endurance test full of roulette bosses that would eat up all your resources.

As you'll quickly realize, this is a racing shoot em' up, a very unique concept I don't think many games did at all. This means there are racing mechanics thrown in, it's pretty confusing at first but if you sit down and watch the attract mode (or just read this page for a LOT more info: https://shmups.wiki/library/Shippu_Mahou_D...) the game does a decent job at explaining itself so basically:

-Flying to the upper half of the screen makes you accelerate.
-Slowing down (bumping, pushing against walls or the bottom of the screen) makes you go at minimum speed.
-Holding the A button makes you boost and go at max speed. The obvious caveat to this is you can't shoot while boosting.
What's interesting about these mechanics is that several enemies are tied to the screen scrolling speed so you can do things like boost to despawn enemies or going at mininum speed to not get overwhelmed by tanky enemies rushes.

The characters also have their own racing stats these being:

-Acceleration.
-Boost.
-Weight.
-Brakes.
-Wall brake.

The power up system is pretty simple. Collecting coins increases your shot power while the H and F items act as secondary shot.
Homing: self explanatory.
Frontal: generally narrow coverage but (usually) stronger than Homing.
The Wide weapon from the first game is strangely absent.

Character choice was Chitta, who is considerably weaker compared to her first appearance. The Homing weapon has good range but it's fired in a wide arc making it useless for stages with tight spaces in them (aka most of the game), it also doesn't cut it at all against loop 2 enemies. The Frontal weapon on the other hand is extremely strong and has virtually no cooldown between shots, the only problem is coverage but it's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Her bomb is unremarkable and the only real benefit is having an absolute fuckton of i-frames.

That's not all though, there are still her racing controls. Movement speed is slow, really low weight and horrible regular brakes, taking several seconds pushing down to reduce speed.

Personally, I find this the cutest Chitta ever but sadly good looks aren't all in a game like this.

At the end of a stage you get to choose which one to play next. For a 1-ALL you can pick whatever the fuck you want but for a 2-ALL stage order is important because the only way to enter loop 2 is by winning the tournament and as it turns out, many stages it's tricky to place high either because of gimmicks or crazy AI rubber-banding, so you want to route it to have easy wins in loop 1 and also easy stages in loop 2. The loop 1 stage selection was:

-Air Circus. Nuts in loop 2 while Velmatic Ocean is fine.
-Outcast Castle. Crossfire is awful for racing and it has 2 bomb drops, leave it for loop 2.
-Cold Corridor. Deeply Dungeon sucks for racing.
-Forest of Dead. YMMV with this one because both choices are difficult to win and very hard in loop 2.
-Kingdom Grandprix. Bashinet boss is pretty hard in loop 2 while the satellite one plays by itself. Yashiki of Ninja has a complete bomb dump boss no reason to go there besides swag points.

A frequent strategy to win races is bomb at the start to knock the other racers. In loop 2 racing is ditched because trying to win is complete suicide and even if you somehow did there's no loop 3 or anything, the game just ends there. Dying in loop 2 makes you lose all your subweapons and extends are disabled, easy to chain death if it happens in a bad spot.

I bomb at the start of Forest of Dead because this was one stage I never tried racing and before I had runs I 1-ALL'd but didn't enter the loop. I had to slow down before the eye guys section to make it easier and the racers caught up so this didn't work out at all lol, then it's smooth sailing until 2-5 which was a bit ugly.