Lol, I didn’t even realize the game was out, and I made the thread.
STG Weekly analyzed a superplay of it and the sequel. Maybe a bit more exhaustive than you are after, but unfortunately I am not familiar with it to give any basic tips.
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Been meaning to ask since GAF: what TVs are those? Low input lag?
Some good general strategy info I’m swiping from ResetEra posts by Glick:
There is some rank control in Mahou Daisakusen, but it’s not unreasonable.
The following things impact rank:
Rank increases each frame, determined by which weapon you have equipped on which character. Each character seems to have a weapon that boosts rank the most. I mostly play Chitta, and the ‘F’ shot boosts her rank far more than ‘W’ or ‘H’
Picking up coins boosts it (until max firepower, at which point they don’t modify it)
Completing a stage boosts it
Dying reduces itIn general, just avoid staying on the boosting weapon for each character for too long, and don’t power up your weapon unless you need to. I don’t think suiciding really is necessary for rank control in this game at all thankfully, but I usually only get to Stage 5 on a 1cc at this point, so I could be completely wrong.
There’s not a ton of info on the game, primarily because there’s no real depth to it. It’s more of a fun 2-loop 1cc style game than anything else. Your score is based on your ability to kill enemies, and that’s about it.
If you’re going to min/max, Miyamoto is by far the best character, both due to his insane speed (allowing him to pick up items and clear everything on the screen consistently), and his ridiculous W-shot.
Chitta is probably the easiest 1-ALL, although she gets a bit spooky in a 2-ALL imo, and Miyamoto really shines there.
I talked about rank control earlier, so you can scroll up to learn a bit about that.
As for scoring techniques, there’s not much to worry about aside from boss milking. If a boss spawns extra adds, keep it alive until 1s to get lots of points on them. This also applies to certain midbosses, like the stage 2 one. Destroy its cannons and then farm the blue things and tanks it spawns until the last second.
In general the game is tough to optimize though, due to the ridiculous boss RNG. Most shmup bosses, as you probably know, follow set patterns, or select random attacks in a sequence [like attack 1 = select(pattern1, pattern2), attack 2 = select(pattern1, pattern3)]. Mahou does nothing of the sort, and on most bosses literally just equally weights random selected attacks with no sequence whatsoever. As a result, bosses can sometimes go from being a joke to virtually impossible without a bomb, especially on the second loop. The third boss is notorious for this, and will easily end runs or consume enough bombs to end your run later.