I wasn't suggesting that I am a superplayer. The thing is that it's pretty much impossible to actually experience an arcade shmup if you credit-feed to the end because you will never, ever fathom the level design that the developers put so much effort into. This is why shmup-style games are reviewed so poorly in America, and this is why the genre is dead outside of Japan. Reviewers simply continue until they kill the last boss and they throw the game off as another one of those Japanese bullet dodgers with 15 minutes worth of gameplay!

It's not about going hardcore and devoting five months to getting a 1CC; it's about realizing that it's okay to never make it to the final stages if you don't want to invest the time to get good enough to make it to those stages on a single credit. When you really give these games your all, and you keep trying, from the beginning, you start to understand what the designers are trying to get you to do in each section of each stage, and they start unfolding into something very artistic and intuitive. It's an amazing experience that, to me, is pretty much the whole point of this style of games, I'd say. A beauty that is in the design of these games that worthless Western game reviewers will never know.