XII Zeal (PC) - 1CC - 8.14m - 2P Ship

Also known as XII Stag. The 2P ship has faster movement speed than the 1P ship.

This is a quirky and fun game. I was drawn to it initially because it features rolling like in psyvariar. In this case, moving left to right results in a powerful side attack. Killing enemies with the side attack or the burn from your rear thrusters increases a multiplier up to x12. This, along with cancelling bullets with your bomb, is the scoring system.

This version of the game features an auto-roll button. It also has auto-fire, though the frequency isn't as high as it could be, I found it sufficient.

There are some aspects of the game's design I really like - the multi-part bosses, alternate stage routes and general level design - but there are also some frustrations - the pacing and difficulty curve feel a bit off, there are some sections where RNG can really screw you over and the rolling isn't really a movement tech in the way that psyvariar is, it feels a bit more clumsy. So perhaps it's not a stone cold classic, but it's still a fun and unique game.

I'm pretty happy with this run overall. The real hurdles when I was learning the game were stage 3 (which I'm fairly comfortable with by now) and stage 6 (which still scares me). But despite some close calls my first death was in stage 7. I'm honestly not sure what killed me there but I'll take a closer look. What matters is I only lost one bomb so all I had to do was keep my cool and fly to the finish.