Yeah, Sine Mora is a mess.
For a while, several of us over on Shmups.com tried our best to break the game down for competitive scoring:
Kill everything (not so much for the points granted for destruction but for triggering the bonus coins and power ups)
Always be firing (rank is tied to your auto-fire rate, the faster you fire, the more the rank meter increases)
Don’t get hit (your multiplier gets zero’d out and you drop a letter rank)
Never use your special time abilities (your multiplier gets zero’d out)
Never use your bombs (your multiplier gets zero’d out)
Oh yeah, and buy a controller with a turbo fire function.
The fact that so many systems in the game are at odds with each other is aggravating. Nobody has a problem with bombs resetting the multiplier, but why does the special ability do the same thing? Isn’t the core of the game these special abilities? Why does using them negatively impact your scoring? Shouldn’t they be tied directly into the scoring system like in ESPGaluda, Giga Wing, Mars Matrix, Chaos Field, etc?
Secondly, the power-ups are generated randomly (unlike in anything by Eighting/Raizing where everything functions on a trackable counter) with spawn percentages changing as the player holds onto various limited resources. This results in scenarios where you’re waiting for a certain item and it never appears. The only non-random drops are the coins, which have a countable frequency. Also, 10 power ups levels are just mindless (we only let Kaneko get a pass on this one) especially considering that level 8 is much better than 9 or 10.
The auto-fire glitch (which I’m going to assume hasn’t been addressed in this revision) is some Mushihime-sama level shit. Essentially, the rank system is tied to your auto-fire rate and guess what? With an auto-fire controller you can fire much faster than the in-game preset auto-fire rates (which results in maximizing the rank much faster). It also makes the even weapon power-up levels completely redundant (as their entire purpose is to raise the fire frequency of the prior shot level). Oh, and bosses become a joke when using assisted auto-fire (especially Papa Carlo, whose weak-point hit box is just stupid).
Things also got really weird when I tried to extrapolate the Time Mass Stabilization scoring system but found that the values aren’t absolute. They’re around 10,000 pts per remaining second (IIRC), but the base values were always random. So at first you’d think that killing bosses quickly with lots of time remaining is the way to go, but considering that you’re granted bonus score at the end of the level for the amount of time spent in a stage (the longer the better) wouldn’t it make more sense to milk certain sections to as close to 0 as possible? Well, seeing as the point value at end stage worked out to something slightly higher than 10,000 pts per second this would appear to be the case. However, due to the fluctuating values this became a complete coin toss… maybe it ended up being higher… maybe lower… who knows?
And I’m not even going to get into the nuisance that is the garbage chute (in stage 3) and the fire caverns (in stage 4).
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the asinine piano “power-up”.