Final score: 19,300,410
Player: ec2151
Map: 39 (Consideration - Emotion - Consciousness)

Finally, I am free of this game.
This is the culmination of several months, if not years (looking at the big picture) of my fascination with the game. And let me tell you, it's taken me down to some pretty dark places! Since there are so few clears with the second Wave Rider, WR-02, and a paucity of good scoring runs with it, I foolishly thought that I'd make a name for myself by achieving a great score with it - after all, I loved playing as the RGRAY02 in RayStorm, and this would be more of the same, right?

Wrong.

Going for the 1cc (as per my earlier clear:    • TRUE 1CC! - RayCrisis NEO-HD/ レイクライシス...  ) with the WR01, the default ship, was, while tough, a relatively chill and enjoyable experience. Just enough of an edge to give you some resistance while you enjoy the cool visuals, godly music courtesy Tamayo Kawamoto, and unique cyberpunk flair. However, it's when you start going beyond a decent score and trying to get a high score - over 16 million - that the game's madness rushes down upon you. My goal: get 19 million.

The problem with playing for score beyond the need to unlock the TLB is that the game is insanely random in almost every respect. Enemies have a relatively fixed "area" they can spawn in, but many of them can vary in where exactly they show up. The Wave Rider is slow so an extra bit of distance means breaking the laser chain which threatens to increase Encroachment (lowering which gives you more enemy spawns and score). Many enemies fire randomly, or have unpredictable spreads. The first stage here has a particularly FUCKING AWFUL laser tower section: the order in which the towers spawn are random, the directions they fire are random, and how frequently they fire are RANDOM!!! Imagine getting there over and over again only to get blindsided by a laser that spawned practically on top of you. Each boss has some horrifying random element. PROTOR picks his attacks at random, some of which are necessary for a good score + low encroachment, most of which are bad. The bullet spreads he fires can be slow, or fast, dense, or light! I got lucky here with two cycles of the "easy" pattern which is good for score. SEMSLUT can suddenly decide to move to the bottom of the screen and point-blank you, and there's nothing you can do. And SEMLOKE uses the game's kinda shite tilted perspective against you, as you see in this run. And the secret final boss, INFINITY? Oh man...

So basically, to get a top-tier score in this game, you play over and over again and hope the god-damn stars align. My keyboard has been abused a lot during this quest...

This run in particular was one of my rare ones where I had great pace. However, a few dumb mistakes cost me 100s of thousands of points here and there (a mistimed bomb on stage 1 cost me 200k), so I noticed I was JUST short of my 19m goal by the time of the final boss, Infinity. Realizing that all this work would have been yet again, for nothing, I decided to play ballsy, and sacrifice my only spare life for an extra score-bomb to put me over the edge and pray I got lucky during the totally random final. Did I do so? Well, watch and find out!

Big shout out to ‪@sei-dragon6318‬ whose clears with just about every ship gave me the initial insight and inspiration to go for this goal. As well as the ancient, barely-legible superplay (   • スーパープレイ レイクライシス WR 02 ALL 22641050pts  ) where the player somehow gets 22 million! Getting that extra 3 million in this run would have probably taken me another year of grinding, lol.

00:00 - SELF
00:39 - CONSIDERATION
02:11 - PRO-TOR Antibody
04:08 - EMOTION
05:38 - SEM-SLUT Antibody
06:52 - CONSCIOUSNESS
08:22 - SEM-LOKE Antibody
10:06 - DIS-HUMAN
12:44 - INFINITY
14:40 - A FOREST WITHOUT FAIRYTALES (Good Ending)
16:27 - RANKING

#raycrisis #retrogaming #shmup