>You get extra lives (extends in shmup lingo) every 1.000.000 points. Considering that losing a medal means you miss out on around 126.000 points, you can see how not playing for score is going to heavily penalize you
>Having high rank makes the game pretty much impossible. The bullets also blend in a lot with the scenery, so you will absolutely be overwhelmed at some point. The only way to bring rank back down is to die, so your extends are probably going to be used for rank control. That's right, the only way to win at garegga is to suicide at very specific points in the game and have routes planned for score so you can have enough points to do so at the desired moments.
>I repeat: EVERYTHING you do increases rank, not just powerups. It increases with time, every bullet fired, every enemy killed, every bomb fired, every medal collected, 'sealed' enemy bullets (enemies killed before they can fire bullets will add to your rank per-bullet not spawned), etc. You will reach too high a rank eventually.
>The higher the rank, the more score you get. Trying to play only low-rank for survival 'works' but you will potentially have a harder time surviving without resources to progress. The game is quite long and very difficult.
There are way, way many more intricacies than these. Like 'special' option formations available only after letting certain items fall off-screen and picking up a specific one, button codes at ship select to unlock ships with different attributes than the default ones (just like in Raiden Fighters!), different Hz autofire rates, the secret extend in level 3 where you have to bomb the turbine off each airplane, and much more.
For a better rundown of what a good run looks like, look no further than T3-KAMUI's commentated world record run from Special Demonstrations with translated commentary, where every single aspect of the strategy used for the run is explained in somewhat good detail.
You can also check out the shmups wiki for a more detailed guide, and if you ever want to try the game, you fortunately don't need to live in Japan, next to an arcade with an ever-increasingly rare and expensive CRT candy cab, and dump ALL YO YENS every day: M2 has done a port of some of the best, most relevant shmups to come out in the past decades for the PS4, and they are absolutely faithful to the source material. Their 2016 port of garegga is one for the ages. Truthfully, these ports are beyond accurate, and besides buying an original PCB for a cost of around 1500-2000 USD depending on condition (which, like in the case of batrider, has more input lag than even some dedicated emulation setups because of a whopping 18ms delay, or like 3 frames because of bad polling) or using a MiSTER (if the core for these even works now, which i'm not even sure), this is the absolute best way to play the game today. Besides, the PCB and the emulator do not have the extra widgets like the Rank graph or the item tracker. If you want to sink your teeth in something truly special and difficult, i guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Oh, and this isn't even touching the music aspect of the game. We have Manabu Namiki's impeccable score, as usual; if you're talking shmups, he's the real, OG soundtrack guy. It's so true that for the M2 port, we even have arrange tracks of the whole ost, made by small names in the japanese techno music scene like DJ SHARPNEL, Yamajet, M1DY, and more.
It's great art, great gameplay, and great music. While this is probably Raizing's best and more popular noscript, don't be fooled: all their work has had this level of class and polish behind it. I personally also really like Kingdom GrandPrix, a shmup where you have to race the other player characters, and the game's ending and score, besides having to clear the quite difficult game itself, is determined by your position in the finish line. You can't go too fast or too slow, and you have to play well.

And now for some history! This isn't something completely new, because, in fact, garegga's rank and score system don't come from nowhere, but they are directly inspired by Yagawa's personal favorite shmup: Taito's Gun Frontier!
Bearing no relation whatsoever to the Leiji Matsumoto manga of the same name, Gun Frontier is a sci-fi shmup with western influences where everything is shaped like a gun. Basically texas, but in space. This game featured many elements that would end up in Garegga as a direct 'port' or just as homages: bomb fragments, different frequency autofires, Silver Sword's bomb being a direct homage to the bomb in this game, and, of course, Rank control. In fact, rank is arguably more brutal in Gun Frontier than it is in garegga, because dying doesn't fully reset it, but only drops it a bit, and every stage you clear gives you a rank level which you cannot go below of. It's a game that wants to be played a certain way, just like garegga does, and seeing it in action is indeed somewhat weird! Jaimers, YouTube's arguably most famous shmup player in the west has a very interesting commentated run of this game, where you can appreciate the subtleties of it all. In fact, this rom is actually modded to include a rank gadget on screen so as to have a concrete point of reference for what the game is actually doing behind the scenes. For illustrative purposes, it's phenomenal. Just make sure to turn captions on for commentary!
Also of note is the Sega Saturn port: none of the source code was used for its programming, it's an copy job made by another programmer using only the sprites, music, and the original game as visual reference with a limited time, and a budget. It's a very, very different game than the arcade, but it's actually quite good for something made this way. So good, in fact, that it is worth playing even if you've only played the arcade original.

Of course, Taito would go on to make some of the best shmups of all time going forward (i'm a big fan of Gunlock myself) and Yagawa, after Raizing's demise, would go on to make "garegga but at Cave" by way of Ibara, which would prove almost a case study in player expectations, since CAVE fans didn't want a Raizing noscript, and Raizing fans weren't fully on board with CAVE's visual style, but that by no means implies it to be a bad game. Ironically, we would get Ibara Kuro soon after its original release, which is an abridged version of Ibara without the rank control and that plays more like something Tsuneki Ikeda would supervise, and at only 250 PCBs made, it's now one of the rarest games to find out there. He would see a return to form years later though, with Ibara's sequel "Pink Sweets" (For the italians here: every single thing in pink sweets is in broken italian, and it is quite hilarious) which is even more unorthodox and weird (and hard, rank doesn't decrease in this one) than anything yagawa had ever made up until then, and then Muchi Muchi Pork, a fun cute-em-up themed around pigs and pork jokes, navigated by chubby, scantilly clad women who were transformed into antropomorphic chubby, scantilly clad pig-women that want to turn back human. It's as good as it sounds. Cave's lewd undertones is legendary for that era, but that is a story for another day: one i will gladly recount here, next time i make a long, long post about these niché things for you guys, and mostly myself. I just have a lot of fun writing stuff up, and i hope you had as much fun reading it, even just skimming through it.

Oh, one more thing. The last game actively developed by raizing was a GBA noscript: Kurukuru Kururin. Very frustrating puzzle game about an alien having to reach the end of a maze with a rotating, line shaped ship without touching the walls. I personally really like it! It just seems funny to me that the manic, military shooter company ended up making a cutesy (and still hard) game for the GBA as its swan song before disappearing off the map.

Thank you for reading thus far if you did! Have the 2016 garegga port OST + remixes, as a complementary piece to it all, and as a personal favorite freebie, have COOL&CREATE's arrange+mashup of the first level music for both Ibara and Battle Garegga (of touhou and shmup arranges fame, besides a few songs for BMS and the ever-present IIDX series) . Now that you know the history of these two games and how they came to be, and by whom they did so, you can appreciate it better.

Man, remember when games had imagination and took risks? I do. Nowadays games are made by a team of HR busybodies and corposlop consulting firms with the clear intention of not taking any risks, and it works, since they never risk making any fucking money whatsoever.

¹in reference to the first post: if anything of the sort has ever been implemented elsewhere and i'm wrong, i'll be ecstatic to stand corrected, but even thinking about it, i couldn't think of anything remotely similar.

Oh boy. That was a long one. But it's nowhere near long enough, in my opinion. I could go on for days.

I'll be glad to post more and if you ever meet me IRL over a beer (or twelve), i'll give you the whole enchilada, free of charge.

finally, a drink for me

You thought we were done with the Adam Freeland albums?

think again

And as an addendum to the shmup post from the other day, coincidentally, the ever-great Jaimers published a run for the Nokia flip phone spinoff for Deathsmiles, arguably Cave's most commercially succesful and popular shmup they ever released

There's actually a lot of phone shmup spinoffs made by Cave (even Ketsui and DaiOuJou had flip phone ports) and even nowadays, by way of Gothic wa Mahou Otome (usually abbreviated as gomaotsu) for smartphones, and the somewhat recent ports of mushihimesama for ios.
They're nothing compared to the arcade originals, of course, but they're still a novelty and worth checking out, if nothing, for curiosity and historical relevance's sake.

If you have a switch, Deathsmiles got a port recently. I don't know how accurate it is, though. You'll tell me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoMoxHw6NzY

on another note, i got my dedicated coffee brewing area set-up properly.
Love it.
I'll have to make an even bigger one once i move!

if you're more of a tea person, i get it. I like chinese tea also.
I would recommend you try Tie guan yin if you ever have the chance.

i'm feeling this year as the year i finally get into pop'n.

It will be easier too, since i actually can. We got good things cookin'.

i'm pinning it because

no reason, just because

just kidding it's because it's too long to be buried in the rest of the channel