Hard difficulty is no joke. It's like a completely different game from the other difficulties.

Even though this did not take long to accomplish and despite being a short game, every moment of trying for this was quite stressful. You need to have a plan of attack, and everything has to be executed without error. If you get hit once, you power down, so whatever your original strategy was won't work anymore. For example, Hikaru's fighter's level 3 beam shoots over him, in front of him, and below him, but if he gets hit and downgrades to level 2, his beam only fires in front of him and no longer has top and bottom beam range. When you get hit and your strategy falls apart, you only have seconds to make an alternative strategy to make up for the downgrade, but, most likely, you'll get hit again, downgrading you to level 1. There are a lot of dangerous parts in the game where if you get hit once, you're 50% more likely to die, and if you get hit twice, you're pretty much dead with no way to recover. Example of this situation are the wave of homing missiles right before the 3rd to final boss.

This game is deceptively harder than it looks. Even though there are things I make look easy, it is actually a lot harder than it seems. More specifically, what you see is the only time I was able to get these results (like the no damage on stage 4 boss which was really lucky as it's very easy to die to that boss, and having full life for the final 3 bosses has never happened until this playthrough). Just play it, and you'll understand the pain of hard difficulty. =(

The enemies are so cheap on hard. They come in large waves. They are fast with some being so fast it's hard to react. They even seem to predict where you're going to be and fire in the most inconvenient locations to mess you up. They also seem to have more health, and it's not always consistent like some enemies should be dead in one hit, but they require two instead.

Max is no doubt the best character of the 3. His fighter level 3 has spread shot fire, his weird guardian beam can be used to block bullets, and his battroid mode has homing. Hikaru has none of these making him quite a challenge to use. His level 3 fighter is very useful until you get hit and downgrade (level 2 is still good, but level 1 is nearly unusable). One thing I do like about this game is how battroid mode is clearly the strongest form of the 3 giving you reason to use it.

My ally of choice is Glaug because it's one of my favorites from the enemy side. Glaug's drawback is it only fires in a very limited range and can only shoot forward. Who you choose to be your ally can really affect your playthrough. For example, if you choose Pac Man (don't know what it's called, lol), that thing goes around chomping every enemy it sees and does good continual damage on bosses. I could have made life easier if I chose that ally, but for favorites sake, I preferred Glaug as my ally.

My special requirement for this playthrough was to finish off the final boss in Battroid mode. This is not easy since Battroid is really slow, and the final boss likes to spam that fast pink homing blast that follows you around everywhere. After many failed attempts, I did get to the point where I didn't care anymore if I couldn't finish off the final boss with battroid and just wanted to finish the game without dying. Fortunately, I was able to fulfill the requirement, which I am very happy about. It's very satisfying to bombard the final boss with a level 3 Battroid. =)

I'm very glad this is over and done with because I don't plan to ever try a no death ever again for this game, lol.

Paranoid Andy, hope you enjoy this playthrough. This was for you. ^_^

(Note: the thumbnail is from the beginning of the 1st stage, but I edited the Battroid's color from yellow to red to make it look like Hikaru's mech since that's what I'm playing as, and Roy's valkyrie isn't even a playable character despite being shown on the cover.)

This was played on emulator. No cheats. No save states. No toolassists.

Thanks for watching. =)