DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou (Arcade) - Hibachi ALL (A-S)

Played on MAME 0.256

My first clear including the TLB this time around which was quite the step-up compared to before. A-S is one of the better ships for this and personally the one I found the easiest and most consistent for stages. I also played with autobomb enabled which is something I didn't do before.

Autobombs eat up all your bombs in stock when used and have a very short duration compared to bombing manually. Bomb stock doesn't increase after dying so in this case it's 3 bombs max instead of 6. Previously, I never played with autobomb since I wasn't thinking about Hibachi and I would bomb spam stage 5 all the time (in which case it's still better to play with autobomb OFF if you ask me).

For reaching Hibachi, however, the plan is to enter stage 5 with a level 10 Hyper for easy midbosses section and low rank. The biggest hurdle with this approach is the 4th boss as its first pattern can sometimes be super bullshit and hit you immediately, the autobomb protection is really important for that whereas without it there is no such privilege, you can't bomb manually without going through the Hyper first.

To fight Hibachi you need to meet two conditions after defeating Kouryuu/Big Bee:

-Get Bee Perfect in at least 3 stages. 'Bee Perfect' means you need to collect them all without dying.
-1 death or less.

Hibachi is pretty fucking hard and honestly like 70% of the difficulty of this clear (though the stage 4 midboss+boss and big bee can be quite the gatekeepers so even reaching her is not free). You really don't want to die in the first phase more than twice even if you entered the fight with 5 lives, but the second phase is the true make or break moment and where a lot of potential clears will collapse.

The second phase alternates between the washing machine and DDP final/fugusashi. Washing machine is nigh impossible to survive making the DDP final the only chance to do damage, this is another moment where autobomb really helps because manual bombs skip a long portion of the pattern, ergo less damage. The loop of dying→bomb and pointblank for Hyper→use Hyper on DDP final is about the best you can do during this. However, the DDP final can randomly be extremely hard and if it kills you too soon the chances of clearing will lower significantly because you'll need to bomb through the rest of the pattern (depending on how early you died) + washing machine, leaving you usually with no bombs for the next time she uses it.

In this run I fall behind in damage during the first phase and have to dodge the third pattern a second time for longer than I'd like, but I tried my best during the DDP final in the second phase and managed to win.