Scrappy Mechanic / Shoot 'Em Up

• Raiden:
  • In the spinoff Viper Phase 1, you get a multiplier applied to your end-of-stage bonuses dependent on what percentage of enemies you killed. If you destroy every single enemy, the muliplier is x100. But if you so much as miss a single enemy, that multiplier drops to a x50. It won't matter much in a survival-oriented run, but in a score-based run, missing one enemy can make a massive difference.
  • Raiden Fighters has the Micluses, little blue critters that spit out medals and then explode to give you a point bonus. Not too bad at first, if it weren't for the fact that nearly all Micli are hidden in nondescript locations or require obscure conditions.
  • Raiden IV's Light Mode is a Scrappy Mode at its best, for those who are lazy or don't bother to go on game settings. Some knowledged players would rather play Original Mode in Practice difficulty over this.
• In Mushihime Sama Futari, bombing takes 1,500-2,000 from your counter/multiplier, and dying takes off 1/3 of your current total, so it's in your best interest to bomb if you're in danger. But in Futari Black Label, it's roughly the other way around; dying takes off 1,500-2,000 and bombing takes off about 6,000-8,000. So if you wanna cash that huge 30,000 multiplier in God mode, but dying appears to be inevitable (which for inexperienced players is most of the time)...
• Want to score high in Ikaruga? Prepare to spend endless hours practicing and memorizing chains, giving yourself absolutely no freedom as to how to play.
  • Its Spiritual Predecessor Radiant Silvergun is worse. Not only can a chain consist of only one color, forcing you to leave roughly 2/3 of enemies intact and allowed to attack you, but while scoring in Ikaruga is completely optional, in Radiant Silvergun it's mandatory. Why? Because your points are used to level up your weapons, and if you can't score well, your weapons will be underpowered and you'll be unable to rapidly damage later bosses, which can lead to a very quick Game Over.
• Parodius features a powerup roulette (called Blizzard in Europe),which is triggered by a random power capsule in the game.The mechanic wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the existence of the !?/OH (MY GOD)! "powerup" on the power meter, which nullifies every powerup you have. Woe the players who raged when they hit that so-called "powerup".
• Touhou Project:
  • Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil's rank system, in which the longer you go without dying, the faster and denser the bullets get. Max-rank Patchouli is harder than the final boss.
  • Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom and Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night have non-spellcard patterns highly resistant to bombing. Less bad in IN, since relatively few of these patterns are difficult, and a Last Spell^note unique to IN, bombing immediately after death will produce an exceptionally powerful attack at the cost of two bombs will still deal significant damage, but PCB has a number of very long, very difficult nonspells, and no way to deal with them other than toughing them out.
  • Scoring systems in early Touhou games are generally a pain to figure out, but Imperishable Night in particular is pretty bad. To put it simply: Main body of stage? Don't focus, ever. Bosses? Don't un-focus, ever.
  • The Faith system in Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith, where scoring high means no deaths, and exclusively deathbombing (and even then, only at certain points). This wouldn't be too annoying, but extra lives are only given upon reaching high scores, essentially forcing players into a scorerun (in a fandom where the number of players who play for score can be counted on one hand) if they want more lives.
  • The continue system introduced in this game in which continuing snaps you back to the beginning of the stage with a mere two lives, beside being incredibly frustrating to redo 4-5 minutes of gameplay, you also can only practice levels you've beaten making every difficult moment in the game a solid wall, and most Touhou players would be aiming for a continue-less run anyway without the momentum-killing snap-back. Thankfully, Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires has fixed this particular mechanic, returning to the old continue system.
  • The weather system in Touhou Hisouten ~ Scarlet Weather Rhapsody is generally okay, but Typhoon Weather eliminates hitstun and blocking for about 45 seconds. Spring Haze Weather prevents both players from using physical attacks. River Mist Weather moves the characters back and forth, screwing up tons of combos and attacks that require certain spacing. Amusingly enough, River Mist is representative of Komachi, the character who requires the most precise spacing to fight well, and whose in-canon power is defined as "manipulation of distance." Spring Haze was nerfed to near pointlessness in Hisoutensoku, though^note instead of disabling physical attacks it allows them to be dashed through like bullet attacks, but at the cost of rapidly lowering the meter used for most attacks. Also, the time it lasts was lowered, and dashing through any attack lowers the time even further.
  • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object's UFO system is actually quite nice, but most of the UFOs change color periodically. It's not uncommon to need one more UFO in a sequence, then have it change color right before you get it, screwing up your whole plan. Trying to collect a quickly-moving token randomly floating around the screen in the short time frame that it's the correct color doesn't exactly mix well with Bullet Hell. To make things worse, it's the only way to gain lives or bombs.
  • Ten Desires spirit system for gaining lives and bombs is moderately irritating on its own, since they don't fall down the screen like regular items. The real scrappy mechanic, though, is the trance system. You build up a meter by collecting spirits (most of which don't act as bomb/life fragments), and when full can activate it for a Super Mode. Two problems: First, it also doubles the effect of bomb and life spirits, and, second, you automatically use it if you die. This essentially means that you're denied from using a powerful attack as an actual attack, you need to memorize the best places to use it, and dying generally throws off your rhythm for around a stage.
  • Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character and its system for gaining additional lives and bombs. Basically, you go to the Point of Collection to auto-grab every item on screen, and the game gives you a multiplier for the score from these items and drops a live/bomb fragment depending on how many of those items you grabbed. On one hand, it makes collecting lives simple and quick, on the other, trying to do so in Bullet Hell-heavy sections is almost impossible, and every time you do get to the top of the screen there is a chance of getting slammed into by surprise by something that just entered the screen.
  • Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom with its Pointdevice mode, which removes lives and instead has checkpoints. Remember what Fujiwara no Mokou said about dying repeatedly without actually dying being painful? Now you get to learn the daily life of Mokou. Have fun raging at spellcards that you cannot seem to clear, have no bombs left in stock, while your capture records states "0/99+". There's Legacy mode, which does have lives, but getting the good ending requires no deaths in Legacy.
  • The teleportation mechanic in Hifuu Nightmare Diary ~ Violet Detector suffers from wonky controls. It's activated by pressing Shift twice in a row without holding any direction, so it's pretty easy to accidentally activate if you find yourself focusing and unfocusing frequently. And when you do need to use the mechanic, having to hit Shift twice makes it annoying to teleport in time to get away from a threat. It also means that repeated use of the mechanic can be painful and has an annoying habit of triggering Sticky Keys. Many players prefer to use an unofficial patch that just lets them use C to teleport instead.
  • Touhou Kikeijuu ~ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature sports a revamped version of the UFO mechanic with spirits, which is actually very welcome (considering life and bomb pieces don't cycle anymore, for starters). However, there's the Rare Creature mechanic to sour your day. You can get a Rare Creature in each stage that's completely separate from the three regular ones, which will grant you with bonus items if you can get it and manage to finish a beast release with it, without breaking it (read: don't get hit for however long your release lasts). Problem 1: the way to get each rare creature differs depending on the stage, and some of them can be aggravating. Try clearing a mid boss at point blank in a bullet hell game aggravating (and the game's definition of "point blank" is finicky, to say the least). Or clearing a spell card while being unable to use half the screen for dodging. Problem 2: nowhere in the game you're told how to get a rare creature to appear until after you make it appear for the first time. Problem 3: each creature is tied to a trophy, so better get those creatures to appear if you want to 100% the game.
• Battle Garegga's rank system. Want to keep the last two stages possible? Don't power up and don't trigger special option formations! The rank scale for enemy aggressiveness is capped in the last two stages to playable levels, in a rare show of mercy by the developers. However, if you raise the rank to extremely high levels beforehand, there is no such cap, and you are treated to literally undodgeable patterns, especially on the Stage 4 boss and Stage 5 midbosses.
  • This is a trait seen in games programed by Shinobu Yagawa, resulting in a Broken Base. The association has rendered CAVE games with these traits black sheep.
• Dangun Feveron never shows your total score during gameplay; it's only shown at the end of each stage, as well as after getting a high score and ending your game, which wouldn't be as big of a problem if the lowest default high score of 1.2 million wasn't difficult to obtain for new players. This caused a huge problem at a shmup tournament where many players who couldn't get on the in-game high score table either manually calculated their scores by hand or simply didn't bother to submit scores.
• Guwange has you collect coins to raise your score, while shooting enemies to keep the coin collection timer from running out (at which point your coin count drops to 0). And the chain timer is more lenient than DoDonPachi's, so chaining in this game shouldn't be as big of a pain in the ass, right? Well, here's where the game kicks you in the face: your coin count carries over between stages, meaning that in order to obtain a very good score, you need to keep your coin timer from resetting at all throughout the entire game. Have it reset halfway through the game? Time to Rage Quit!
• Heavy Weapon for the PC. Your tank aims using the mouse cursor, that's fine. The problem is that it also moves towards the mouse cursor, making it annoying to dodge attacks while aiming. This makes facing enemies like Bulldozers (which move towards you and One-Hit Kill you if you brush against them) a complete pain. Thankfully, Pop Cap realized this mistake and made aiming and moving separate in the PS3 and Xbox 360 releases.
• In RefleX, using a continue will let you keep your score, but it will be nullified afterwards. Now penalizing a player for using a continue is fine, but this means if you set a record score on your first credit, and you decide to continue (e.g. to practice or unlock later stages), then the game will invalidate your score. The worst part is, the developer knows this, as there is a line of text stating that your score will not be saved in such cases. This is in contrast to the other two games in The Tale of ALLTYNEX series, where using a continue will still allow you to save the score you got on your first credit.
  • In RefleX and ALLTYNEX Second, the stage select will only let you practice up to the highest stage you cleared. So that stage you're struggling to clear? To be allowed to practice it, you have to clear it in a full run in the first place!
• Like with RefleX above, using a continue in Ether Vapor also renders your score null and void.
  • The beginning of stage 6 is a behind-the-back segment, but there is one problem: the camera is at a Dutch Angle, making it hard to aim properly. Fortunately, the segment only lasts 30 seconds.
• Sine Mora gives you a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, and a special Time Capsule skill that will do things such as activate Bullet Time, reverse time (even after you die, thereby allowing you to negate death), or reflect bullets, a feature well-touted by the game. However, if you are playing for score, your character (which determines your secondary weapon) and your choice of Time Capsule don't mean anything, because using either of these resets your multiplier, in a game that touts time manipulation as one of its primary gimmicks.
• Eschatos can be extremely annoying to play for score:
  • In Original mode, your multiplier builds up as you destroy enemy waves. However, for each enemy that escapes, your multiplier decreases by one. If you die, you also suffer the same penalty...but during the time it takes for your ship to respawn, a whole wave of enemies may leave the screen, and depending on how high your multiplier is that means five to ten past minutes of hard work thrown completely out the window.
  • In Advanced mode, the penalties for enemies escaping is more lenient, but there's a new Scrappy Mechanic in town: Collecting a bomb item immediately clears all enemies and turns bullets into purple tetrahedrons that boost your score...but it also reduces your multiplier and reduces your shot power by one level. Collecting multiple bombs in succession is a good way to damage your multiplier and severely weaken yourself. Therefore, Advanced turns into a game of avoiding not only bullets, but also items.
• Are you playing the North American PS1 port of RayStorm? Bad Export for You! Specifically, not only are the default settings played around, with the most important change being that each stage's difficulty is raised from 2 (out of 8) to 4, but dropping any stage's difficulty below 4 triggers "Training Mode", in which the game ends after stage 4. This is not in any other version of the game, making it a slap in the face to anyone who prefers to play on more "official" settings. On the plus side, this version of the game does offer five lives by default instead of three, and that 5-life setting does not trigger Training Mode. Fortunately, RayStorm HD and the mobile ports don't have this issue, as Working Designs had nothing to do with these ports.
• All of the M2 ShotTriggers ports will disqualify your score from the leaderboards, even just the score you got at the end of your first credit, if you continue. While you are warned about this, the warning only comes after you lock in your decision to continue, so players not aware of this may find their personal-best run nullified because they decided to continue for practice purposes. That said, there is a workaround for this: you can do a quick-save at the continue screen, allow the Game Over sequence to unfold and your score to upload, then quick-load back to the save you made. This was fixed in Hishou Same! Same! Same! (a Compilation Re-release of Sky Shark, Fire Shark, and Wardner), where in games that have online leaderboards, scores are uploaded when you get to the name entry screen, or at the start of the continue prompt if you didn't make the local ranking table. This makes it so that you can use continues without having to use workarounds to ensure that sick new high score you just got doesn't get disqualified.
• Dezatopia does not allow you to remap the buttons in the Switch version, whereas the PC version does. While the idea behind the default control scheme is that you have four weapons that correspond to each of the four cardinal directions, hence why they are mapped to the corresponding face buttons, it seems to have been built on the assumption that the player will be using a conventional controller like the Joy-Cons or Pro Controller, at the expense of those who use non-conventional controllers like arcade sticks or "fightpad"-type controllers that use a 3x2 face button layout, as well as who just dislike the default scheme. The only way to get around this is to use the Switch's system-side button remapping feature, which is only available for wireless Bluetooth controllers, not wired ones (including wireless controllers that connect to a USB dongle, which the Switch counts as a wired controller).
• Star Gagnant: While the game is praised for its throwback to late 80s and early 90s shmups, Star Soldier especially, its rapid-fire mechanic, that is, having to mash on the fire button to access a more powerful version of the ship's shot, turned off a lot of shmup players, and was universally criticized by reviewers and content creators, even ones that specialize in shmups. While you do have a normal shot that you fire by simply holding down the fire button, it's much weaker and does very little damage to anything that's not already a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Continuously mashing the fire button over the course of an entire run might've been acceptable in The '80s and The '90s, but with more awareness of injuries caused by poor gaming ergonomics such as carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injury, you'll find very few people defending this mechanic, and a lot of "superplay" videos of this game will straight up use controllers with autofire.
• In many CAVE in-house console ports (and their Nintendo Switch ports by Live Wire and post-Xbox 360 ports by City Connection) there is a "Restart" function that seems like it would be handy for quick-restarting a run...however it restarts the current stage and invalidates any high scores achieved during your current session and disables replays, even if you restarted in Stage 1 and therefore there's no good reason for the game to invalidate scores or disable replays. If you want to start a fresh run and be able to record high scores and/or replays, you have to return to the title screen and go through the trouble of selecting game mode, character/ship, etc all over again. It can make one wonder why the restart feature even exists as it does in the first place, especially since the M2 ShotTriggers ports of CAVE games do have a quick-restart feature that doesn't invalidate the following run or disable replays.

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