First of all, thanks to ZPS for his advice and numerous streams, smc for all the knowledge he spread about this game, jaimers and chum for their replays, and crossfish for his excellent guide.

Same! Same! Same! is one of the last Toaplan games made in their traditional style of sniper tanks and very fast bullets, this time taken to the extreme. Bullet speed is crazy in the first loop and snipers or planes coming from behind are everywhere. It's also one of their 2 hardest games, along with Tatsujin Oh, and one of the hardest 1-ALL out there. After that, they would go onto a different direction with various styles, slowly doing prototypes for bullet hells. It's a very fun game, especially if you can enjoy its difficulty. What's funny is that while bombs go off pretty much instantly, bullets are so fast that you can rarely use bombs as panic buttons because most of the time it's too late. International version (Fire Shark) is much easier but still challenging (difficulty-wise it's average or slightly above-average for Toaplan), so is the 2 players version of this game, but I had more fun with that harder 1P version thanks to the very brutal rank.

This game was the last Toaplan game I hadn't cleared yet, and my experience with the rest of their games really helped. Despite that, I needed a big amount of planning to get the clear. Learning the recovery checkpoints in the final stage is expected, and even then the best you can hope in that stage is to limp from checkpoint to checkpoint until the end. Recovery is more manageable in the other stages, it's simply that the final stage is extremely brutal and throws everything at you. I also recommend learning the Stage 8 and 9 boss checkpoints, as it would be hard to guess what to do in the middle of a run.

There's a lot to say about the game but youtube only allows 5000 characters in the description, so I'll keep it short.

Your worst enemy will be the green weapon change item, and parts of your routing are about avoiding spawning them. Avoid this weapon at all cost, aside from stage 3 and 8 diving planes, because the planes' drops depend on your current weapon. There, you grab green on purpose, kill some planes which will drop reds, grab Red, and the remaining planes will drop blue, which you grab once you're done. A similar strat has to be used in stage 10 if you're going for the no-miss, but I didn't have to do it as I was recovering.

There's a bug when switching weapons, and if you get 2 different weapon change items in quick succession while you keep firing, chances are that your new weapon will be the first item grabbed, and not the last as you would expect. Be very careful and take your time between both items.

Once you're at full power, avoid P items because they will be replaced by green items if you collect 3 of them and they fill your power bar.

Due to the shot limit, you need 2 autofire buttons: 30Hz for pointblanking, 10Hz or slightly less for most stage portions. I switch to 30Hz for some parts where I go to the top half of the screen (like stage 3 and 8 bosses), just to make sure I deal maximum damage and because the shot limit doesn't matter there. Also, you'll quickly notice that the red weapon doesn't work with autofire, so have another regular no-auto button ready, which you'll just keep pressed.

One interesting aspect of the game is that you pretty much get a full bomb refill in stage 8, as each submarine gives you a bomb when you kill it (9 bombs to grab, though you're likely to miss a few of them). My strat revolves around bombing a lot of the riskier places, keeping a few bombs in stock for panic bombing, and relying on that stage 8 refill to get me through stages 8 and 9. Then in stage 10 it doesn't matter as I have routes for every checkpoint. Limping from checkpoint to checkpoint isn't that hard if you're willing to bomb a lot, but I really recommend practicing it, especially the final one (you can't improvise that one). Also, you don't want to enter stage 8 with a big bomb stock: if you have full bombs (10) and kill one of the submarines, you get a green item instead, which would suck. If you have max bombs right before killing one of the submarines, I recommend bombing there even if there's nothing dangerous. Even if you can't catch the bomb item, it's better to have 9 bombs and no green item flying around than 10 bombs and green items. That stage can be pretty hard so you want to bomb a lot anyway.

This guide is excellent, and most people who cleared this game at least partially used it as a reference: [ Ссылка ]

I'm amazed I took me less than 9 days to do this and got it on my first day of doing full runs, the run was honestly pretty clean aside from one poor choice in stage 8, and a few very close dodges (stages 5 and 10).

0:00 Intro
0:14 Stage 1
3:43 Stage 2
7:26 Stage 3
11:10 Stage 4
14:53 Stage 5
18:36 Stage 6
22:17 Stage 7
25:53 Stage 8
29:35 Stage 9
33:11 Stage 10
39:04 Loop 2

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