Been playing Pink Sweets again. I love this game...it gets a bad rep due to its scoring but I love the rhythm of fire and then stop firing to charge up Rose Crackers. Rhythm is everything to me in shmups and a good dance between tools gets me excited.
I can see this game being one that has a high entry barrier. You got to research it to get anywhere. You need to know how many of each enemy type to kill to get a powerup and that letting 4 powerups fall off the bottom of the screen gets you the coveted special power up that maxes your damage output beyond the norm. There's also a way to get homing shot by letting I think 4 rose hip power ups fall off the screen. Finally, the only way to 1CC the game is to use the deliberate infinite lives exploit called "multiply mode' which is triggered by getting a 1up when you got 5 stocks of ship and you can only get 1 ups by filling an invisible counter above 2500+ and the counter goes up for every enemy/shot destroyed and down for everything destroyed with Rose Crackers. (you can also trigger one ups in certain stages to appear, but I think theres only like ...2)
So much of this game is not explained or easy to just catch by simply playing it. However, the music is great, its colorful and it has terrific ships and fun bosses. The rhythm of shoot, pause and fill the rose cracker to either shoot or use as a shield to cancel type 1 bullets is terrific. Its a give and take game that has elements of Summer carnival 92 recca and Ibara in it.
I encourage folks here to play it. Its great. Its challenging and its got a good rhythm. Its not very forgiving and it has odd power up secrets, but its worth it. Just remember to play the ver 1.01 mode so you can derank by letting medals drop to keep enemies easier and so you can use multiply mode or arrange mode which has extends and a lot of good stuff done to score.
