DEFENDED THE HOUSE!
Raiden Fighters is a 1996 arcade game by Seibu Kaihatsu and it introduced new unique gameplay elements that were quite a departure from the original Raiden series.
Slave I've found is the most versatile ship in the game in terms of overall scoring, however if you want to go for world record tier scores you'd want to go with the Judge Spear itself as grazing with Slave's small hitbox is super difficult and grazing is a big part of extra score.
The game has a million secret scoring techniques. Can you guess them all? You probably can't so just look at the walkthrough for that.
rf-emporium.ghe...
The most important part is getting the medal value up as soon as possible in any case which is quite tricky to do. You need to get all 10 to 80, 100 to 800 and 1000 to 9000 medals before you can trigger the 100k medal range after having ten 10k medals on screen. Which range you are in is determined by the amount of slaves you currently have.
It's quite funny how the game has this complicated medal system that completely goes away from stage 2 onward if you get the 100k medal range in stage 1. Dropping a medal resets the value back to 10k but it never drops lower again.
Missed a few 100k tricks but overall it was a pretty solid run with my current routes. The death on the stage 3 boss was obviously an intentional suicide to lower the rank.
Done for TRP-STGT.