Editing Rapid Fire King:Volume1 Chapter 1 (section)

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…''What’s going on?

Takamura tilted his head as he watched them increase the difficulty of the shoot ‘em up game.

…''Why raise the difficulty?

He thought of shoot ‘em ups as difficult games.

…''Even if the rules are simple enough.

In those games, you moved your ship around, fired shots in the direction you we removing, and destroyed the approaching enemy ships.

The screen automatically scrolled from front to back and the player would follow that path to defeat the approaching enemies and make sure they were not hit themselves.

If they were shot or hit, their ship was immediately destroyed.

In fighting games, you could take a few punches and even lose one round per opponent, but not so in shoot ‘em up games.

…''One hit from an enemy bullet and your character is destroyed.

And once you ran out of lives, it was game over.

Of course most shoot ‘em up games had power ups to help the player overcome that disadvantage. After defeating a specific enemy or a carrier craft, a power up item would appear. By touching that with your ship, your ship’s attack power or speed would increase.

Takamura did not know how powerful your ship could get in the end.

But no matter how hard you worked or how powerful you got, a single death would return your ship’s strength back to the starting point.

In fighting games, your endurance was restored at the start of each round, but shoot ‘em up games were different.

…''Once you take a single attack and die, it’s all over.

And the enemy attacks grew fiercer in each progressive stage. Extra lives were meaningless when the initial state of your ship was too weak to get back on your feet after a death.

…''Yes, it isn’t an out or a strike. You go back to zero.

Also, each stage took about three minutes and there were six or seven of them.

If the game had seven stages total, it would take at least 21 minutes to complete.

That meant you had to stay focused and consider the possibility of death from a single attack for more than 20 minutes.

That was one of the reasons Takamura did not play shoot ‘em up games.

He had seen it happen to other people often enough. There were relatively few customers at those games and when a middle or high schooler did sit down at one…

…''They game over in just a few minutes and leave.

They never played it again.

He was pretty sure he knew why. With a fighting game, a loss just meant you had to win the next two rounds, so you had less chance of game overing. The loss could even help you kill more time and most of the people in the arcade were just killing time until their train arrived.

So if you game overed in just a few minutes…

…''It isn’t worth it.

He would sometime watch someone play, but it only ever reminded him how hard it looked.

Those were the reasons why he considered shoot ‘em up games to be difficult.

He was pretty sure he was right about it too.

But the Freeter had actually set that shoot ‘em up game to its highest difficulty setting.

…''Why do that?

Takamura could not figure out what the Freeter hoped to accomplish.

He watched in confusion as the Owner shut the lower cover and stood up.

The cabinet was ready to go.