Raiden II is the second game in the famous Raiden series. It was the game that first featured the effect of shrapnel flying everywhere from explosions, which was really crazy for its time.

Raiden is the series that's pretty much the epitome of old Toaplan design. Almost everything shoots fast aimed bullets at you and you need to make sure you know all the locations of the enemies in order to not get sniped. There is also a heavy focus on pointblanking enemies and bosses for quickkills. Like most old shmups, your hitbox is pretty huge and bombs take a second for them to actually go off (at least with the red bombs).

Raiden II is pretty notorious for its difficulty. The first loop is already about as hard as a 2ALL of other games that follow the old Toaplan formula. This game loops infinitely and gets harder and harder every loop.

These old Raiden games are pretty much onelife games. Once you die once it's extremely hard to recover, if at all. I got super lucky this run since I got a full power item from a death, making it actually possible to recover. Getting a full power item from a death is extremely rare.

The color of the items are random. This can be really annoying and is often the cause of deaths (like in 23). Grabbing the wrong weapon is also instant death sometimes.

For secrets there is a secret medal randomly placed somewhere at the end of the stage. You can usually get these by remembering landmarks and sweeping horizontally at the bottom of the screen.
If you shoot a tree in stage 1 and 4 then you can get a fairy to pop out. These give you 10k points and also give you extra items when you die (usually doesn't help anyway).
For the stage 3 secret extend you need to have the popcorn tank run over the box. Easiest way to do this is to use the nuclear missiles to destroy the item carrier and then switch to homing missiles.

The easiest way to score in this game is to keep picking up the same type of bombs and not use them. If for example you have 7 red bombs in stock and you pick up another red bomb, then you get 50k.

The item order got a bit messed up because of the death in 15. The first item carrier in 17 is supposed to have a weapon drop but instead had a bomb drop. Luckily the second carrier still had a weapon drop.

I accidentally grabbed the nuclear missiles in 17 instead of the homing ones. This meant that I had to pick the red weapon for the latter half of the stage because otherwise I'd have no defense against the random popcorn.

This run was pretty much over as soon as I died in 23 but I still managed to limp to the 24 boss somehow.


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