Japan Version, Set 2.

Loop 2: 35:24

The very first game in the famous Raiden series that originated in 1990.
Just like Raiden II, this game loops forever, with the bullet speed getting increasingly faster every loop. You can see a glimpse of how crazy fast the bullets get in the 3rd loop.

This one didn't have the crazy shrapnel effect yet.
As always, the design philosophy behind Raiden is old Toaplan.
Meaning lots of small sniper tanks with limited firing angles that you can abuse and get screwed over by. Emphasis is on very fast aimed bullets rather than many bullets.

The game has two different versions, one with checkpoints and one without. I'm obviously not going to play the inferior version.
I choose the P2 ship because it makes the game easier (it thinks you died before, so you never get no-miss rank).
Boss HP is determined by the weapon you have going into it (red = lower, blue = higher). Switching to blue after it spawns makes it die significantly faster. This is only really useful on the stage 3 boss however.
Homing missiles are super strong in this game and have crazy homing. There is really no reason to ever use the nuclear missiles (which are also super weak). Same story goes for the blue laser really, apart from the one time you use it on the stage 3 boss.
Bomb items are pretty buggy. They can easily clip out of the screen if you scroll it in a certain way.
You can seal bullets in this game by going on top of enemies, but the seal range gets shorter and shorter the higher the rank is.

Items in this game are fixed until you die. I guess the items you release after death count towards the item order. Because there are less weapons in general, it's also easier to get items.
It's always guaranteed that you get a full power item on your first death, assuming you fully powered up your shot and missiles. You're still pretty crippled without full-power homing missiles mind you, but at least you have a fighting chance. Ideally you want to grab at least one missile item before picking up the full power item to fully power up both.
I'm a bit conflicted about Raiden I and Raiden II. Raiden II is definitely a step up in terms of level design, but they added a bunch of mechanics that are really unnecessary and dumb. Items in that game are completely random and you almost never get a full power item on death, making recovery almost impossible. It's like taking one step forward and two steps back.

This run was quite silly. I tried to pointblank the 1-8 final boss but got pointblanked myself. Because of this I had to recover from scratch starting the 2nd loop which was quite a thing to pull off.
Because of the death, the item order was also messed up so I had to improvise around the items. The end of the 2nd loop was also quite silly.

The drive-by popcorn in stage 7 are quite annoying but they are static, thankfully.

There is a bug in Mame where the stage 3 boat boss will leave behind an 'after-image' of itself, obscuring the screen until you reset the game. This is pretty much a run-ender because it obscures everything and doesn't go away ever. Luckily you can consistently avoid it by doing it like I do. Grab an item to lower its health, laser the first phase and only bomb the boss until after it cycles to its 2nd phase.

Many credit to saucy again for a lot of the strats.

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