S-ranked Mission 5 yesterday and played two runs today. I seem to average two S-ranks per run and I keep finding new, inventive ways to die. Basically small things that happen rarely but are fatal if you haven’t taken them into consideration. In Mission 1, right before the boss with the bees that carry you off, I was picked up by one right between the two metal bars you hang from, and upon flaming the bug fell right off the screen. In the second run one of those small bugs the boss’ first form releases managed to get through my grenade barrage and hit me. In Mission 4 my normal “Flame the backpack from below”-approach went perfect up to the point where a missile hidden behind the backpack hit me right after I had begun moving away, thus directing my protective flame elsewhere. Mission 5 would’ve been perfect if I hadn’t ran into a spider while flaming a propeller out of the way. Did this on both runs actually, never had much of a problem with it before. And so on. They’re all easily avoidable, so now I should be prepared for these particular incidents.

Anyhoo, the first run ended at Mission 6 boss. I had learned enough of the (awesome-looking transformer) copter to defeat him easily. For the second run I decided to take advantage of the Konami code, get me 30 lives and open up Mission 6 in Practice mode. This was an excellent  idea as I certainly would’ve needed to start taking blood pressure meds had I tried to do it the proper way. One of Mission 6 boss’ forms (the blob) took waaaay too many lives before I even figured out how to hurt it, and quite a few more while I did the hurting. In the end I managed to clear the whole game (with 0 lives left) and open up both Mission 6 and Final Boss Battle in Practice mode, even though I averaged only B-rank. All the FAQs say you need at least average A-rank for the Final Boss Battle to open in Practice mode , but I’m not complaining.

The next step, of course, is to practice these two until I can S-rank them both. The idea of S-ranking the whole game on a proper run doesn’t feel impossible, just really hard but something I should be able to do if I just keep playing.

I do like what Konami did with the lives and credits. When you start aiming for All S-rank the credits effectively turn into lives. At this point my Hit Rate for any stage is 100%, anything below that is the result of a death. But since one can Retry a Mission at any time from the Pause menu and it will not affect the final ranking, it’s possible to make three mistakes and still finish the game with S-rank. That’s pretty nice.