Raiden V Director's Cut - ALL-S Clear with TLB - 100.3 Million

New commercial shmup in 2017 what the.

Raiden V is the latest game in the famous Raiden series. It came out last year on Xbox1 and got a director's cut with new content this year on multiple platforms.

I had my doubts about this, but the game far exceeded my expectations. The level design resembles and is up to the standards of Raiden, the scoring is good and fun and there are still mean sniper tanks everywhere. The game is most definitely worth being called a modern Raiden game. The music is also amazing and I really like the fast pace of everything. It gets quite hard later on too, the bullet speed gets super fast. My only complaint is that the game is somewhat lacking in the visibility department, especially in some of the very zoomed-out sections. Everything is really tiny and the bullets often blend into the background. It's not a deal breaker though, since you can work around it.

The game is quite long, about 70 minutes to complete. However this is about the length of a Raiden two loop clear, so as long as you see it as a 2-loop game with new content on the 2nd loop, it should be fine. The game doesn't feel that long though, because of the high pacing that the game has.

The game has a bunch of weapons but only three really have a use, since the rest are just inferior in comparison. The catch plasma kills popcorn instantly, which is incredibly good for scoring. The reflect laser does an incredible amount of damage if you manage to jam the crystal into an enemy. This is especially useful on the final boss.

In order to face the TLB, you have to 1cc and level each weapon to the maximum of level 10. Balancing this and figuring out what the optimal weapon is for each section in terms of survival and scoring is quite challenging. It's a bit like Strania in that way.

Scoring in this game revolves around speedkilling, collecting medals and not getting hit. By speedkilling you also increase the flash shot meter and increasing that increases the maximum multiplier that enemies give you. Medals give you about 1000 points each and 300 each at the scene clears. You can auto-collect all medals on screen by not shooting for a second. Balancing this with speedkilling is also pretty tricky. Not getting hit is also pretty big, since a full life meter is worth 100k at each scene clear. There is also a hidden sol and miclus in each stage. In order to uncover these, you have to hover over the sol for a few seconds and for the miclus you have to shoot it. The game keeps track of a whole bunch of score statistics on the sidebar, which I think is super neat.

The director's cut added these two mission stages. In these stages the boss is invincible, but shooting them makes them drop medals. The amount of medals depends on how much damage you're doing. Jamming the reflect laser into them does by far the most damage, so you want to do that to get the most medals. You don't lose any life if you get hit during these missions. Instead you lose 300 medals and 300 medals worth of score gets subtracted from your total score. Depending on the rank you get, you get a bunch of resources, a silly amount of resources if you did really well. This definitely makes the director's cut quite a bit easier than the original.

The game has this weird cheer system which I kinda ignore since it's kinda dumb and unnecessary. You basically get cheered on and cheer other people for doing stuff and that fills the cheer meter. Using it gives you a super attack, but it only gives you x1.0 on every kill, so it's not useful for scoring fortunately. It is useful on the mission stages though, so I do use it there. The cheer meter still refills by itself with the cheer system off.

I managed to get the JP voices by downgrading to version 1.00 and then copy-pasting the JP voices into the ENG voice folder.

Buy the game on Steam here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/570...

Intro - 00:00
Stage 1 - 3:03
Stage 2-A - 08:14
Stage 3-S - 13:56
Bonus Mission 1 - 21:11
Stage 4-S - 25:11
Stage 5-S - 32:53
Stage 6-S - 41:02
Bonus Mission 2 - 48:30
Stage 7-S - 52:24
Stage 8-S - 1:02:13
True Last Boss - 1:12:28
Ending - 1:14:36

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