Battle Garegga (Arcade) - 1CC (Chitta)

Played on MAME 0.217

My third Battle Garegga clear.

So something I didn't mention last time is that by inputting a secret code in the title screen after inserting a credit you can unlock 4 secret characters, all coming from Raizing's first game Mahou Daisakusen. No clue how the fuck they got there in the first place, but hey it's cool so (probably) who cares if one lore contradicts the other.

Naturally, they play more similar to the default Garegga ships than their appearance in the first Mahou Daisakusen (since that could be pretty broken), with the same option formations and all that. The Mahou cast has some of the most popular characters in this game like Miyamoto and Gain, solid for survival and very high scoring potential.......and then there's Chitta.

Yeah if you've played most of Raizing's shmup library even a little bit you know this little witch is usually really bad. Chitta's options have special homing bullets which sounds great, homing shots in shmups are usually pretty good. Well in this case they have the tendency to not only often hit targets you don't want (the first boss with the spinning turrets is a good example), but also completely misaim (6:55). The real bitch is the bomb, though. The bomb has a huge delay before being deployed making it take forever + you stop firing for a bit, sounds like a really small detail to mention but this can legit get you killed sometimes (26:41). Despite the long delay it ironically lasts very little once it's there and deals low damage, making it completely useless as a panic bomb. Whenever I got caught in a really spot while playing I'd generally just take the death since the bomb wouldn't come out in time. Chitta's shot also does low damage and her movement speed is fast, feels pretty nice actually so any variant will do the job. In this case I picked B (faster speed) just for that extra degree of control. I could have played ABC to add the smaller hitbox into the mix but I was dropping medals a lot with it.

Speaking of dropping medals this run was fairly bad for what I wanted to do. I was planning to go for the Mad Ball outer rings trick, basically you can not only destroy the outer rings but the several connectors inside with a bomb. If done really well this is almost a free extend with Chitta (you can read a much more detailed explanation here https://shmups.wiki/library/Battle_Garegga...) but I botched scoring badly and didn't have enough bomb fragments to even attempt this (the plan was to reach the first extend at 1m then die to reach the ideal amount of fragments). After that I dropped medal in stage 4 and honestly I gave up trying to rebuild the chain lol.

Another bomb related trick is the shrapnel in the Slayer midboss in stage 5. When the hatch is destroyed several pieces of debris are sent flying across the screen (this is kinda hard to notice at first, for awhile I didn't even know it existed lol) that can be blown up for 10k each if using a bomb. This is really finnicky with Chitta since you need to bomb and try to destroy the cockpit with your bullets as the genie is coming out, sadly here I overdid it with the damage and it was too late.