Played on MAME 0.217
Also known as Dimahoo.
Great Mahou Daisakusen came out in the year 2000 and was one of the last titles prolific shoot em' up developer Raizing would make. It's the last game in the Mahou Daisakusen series. Design-wise it certainly feels more 'modern' than the older ones, with a complex score system, small hitbox and high bullet count. Even though it has jarring design, I consider this my favorite Raizing game. Love the aesthetic, the scoring is really interesting, fun characters, top tier music.
The presentation is absolutely out of control. Everything looks polished right down to the stupidest of details. Maybe it's prerended, I can't tell regardless it looks nice. The music is also REALLY good, stage 3 track is meh but all the other ones go hard.
The main mechanic is the charged shot, after powering up magic holding A makes you switch between red and blue magic and releasing it will unleash your character's charged shot, this is also integral to the scoring system. Enemies and bullets can also have magic polarity, being hit by a bullet of the same polarity isn't deadly instead you level down.
Scoring is very complicated. When destroying enemies with the charged shot they'll drop specific items. Each item has 8 levels, when you get all levels of the same item said 'set' is completed and you get an item score multiplier. Now, how do you know what enemies drop what you need? You don't. Assuming you do it quickly becomes difficult to route since some items are more frequent than others and how many you got in a stage affects how you route the next one. I actually don't mind all of this instead what you need to do it.
There's an item viewer to keep track, while it helps the way to use it is completely clunky. To open it you hold start for a second, press A, release start and now start navigates through the menu. Why couldn't it just be start to open the menu, hold to close it? It feels senseless. Also having to look at a small digit at the bottom of the screen while charging instead of just displaying it right next to the character is obnoxious. Knowing how fast your meter charges and your magic polarity (assuming you start charging from level 1) you can tell without having to look at it but the charged shot doesn't always collaborate and muscle memory stops working.
The item collecting becomes huge in stage 4 since the treasure chests will drop what you're missing and when everything is done they drop secret items (100kx12=1.2m). Secrets items are hard to get and can have bizarre requirements like must use lvl 1 charge only or specific magic polarity or it doesn't count. Getting all 108 items is a 1m bonus at the end.
Other scoring aspects:
-Killing enemies of the opposite magic is x2 score.
-Killing enemies of the same magic is 1/2 score.
-Killing enemies with bombs is 1/10 score.
Not really important besides bosses.
A big problem are the bosses. They can be described as just RNG. You can have a good grasp of what they can do but most of them it's never a fixed array of attacks and can randomly be easy or hard between runs regardless of how well you've been doing. For example Infernon (stage 5 boss) each phase is either free or so absurd you have to bomb all the time.
Honestly when first playing back in like early 2021 this game left a bad impression. I found it very sensory-overload and weird, it wasn't until much later when I found out it was pretty much shmup of the year 2020 in Japan and started watching replays that I understood a lot of it and thought it was cool.
There are 4 default characters and 4 secret ones, Gain and Chitta (Mahou Daisakusen) and Birthday and Golden (Batrider). The secret characters are fairly hit or miss. They're mostly clones of the default ones only with different charged shots, these changes contribute in jank factor more than anything.
Chitta is a Karte clone. A trait both Karte and Chitta have is the main shot is strongest at the lowest level and level ups weakens it. I don't know how Raizing didn't notice this to begin with but basically it means you have to dodge powerup coins in order to kill shit safely. This is already obnoxious when scoring HOWEVER P bags are more frequent if you haven't powered up in a while, and inevitably you'll nerf your shot since they always get in the way, this is why I avoid them and take seemingly random level downs at times. When first playing I didn't know any of this, I just picked Chitta because I like her and she's best girl, then eventually because I was too stubborn and didn't want to not do anything with my strats lol
Also if you're wondering why I took a death with 3 bombs in stock against the final boss instead of just ending it there, that's because it's a 1m point from the kill and I would've gotten 1/10 of that had I continued with the bomb spam. It was rather silly, but I had enough lives (and score greed) to attempt it.