エスカトス (Eschatos) - Original Hardest Clear (14,524,020 pts)

Well, that took me a bit longer than I expected.
A while ago Morsalty (thank you for providing the save file!) had cleared this game on this difficulty, and called it the hardest clear he's ever done at the time. After watching his video, I thought that just could not be true and I had to try it myself. Turns out the game really is very, very hard, but thankfully it's still somewhat memoable.
Apparently it took me almost 3 months to clear, though most of it was just very sparse routing sessions, and then a week or two of doing runs. I tried referencing other people's clears, but usually they just flailed like gigachads, so I couldn't copy much.
In this game you two kinds of shots that you can use with their own keys, 3 speeds that you switch between (like Hellsinker's three-speed mode), and a shield that you can use either by holding both shot keys or its own shield key. Switching between speeds or using the shield makes the energy metre go down, and if it goes down to zero, you can't shield. Your energy goes up whenever you're not using the shield, and it goes up faster if you don't shoot either.
Every 12.5 seconds the game tries to spawn an item container on the side opposite of yours (sometimes it fails and spawns it later), you can clear the screen if you shoot it down and collect the item. There also are some witch-like things that also clear the screen if you collect them, but I'm not sure how they work, other than they exist in specific places. You also get extra lives when you kill a specific number of enemies.
There's also scoring, but I don't really care about it.