Over the past few weeks, my routine for playing a credit of DoDonPachi was to note the places in which I died and rework my bomb distribution. But a few days ago, I decided to break this routine and battle Hibachi, the final boss. Battling it made me realize that I'm going to need plenty of bombs to destroy it. And tonight, I figured that I should determine the minimum number of bombs I need to destroy Hibachi, so I can distribute the rest of my available bombs throughout the rest of the game (in which the enemies don't have anti-bomb barriers!).

So far, how many bombs can I allocate before Hibachi? It's thirteen. We can allocate at most thirty-six bombs against Hibachi. That's because the other fourteen bombs come from bomb item carriers. And if I collect their bomb items, my bomb stock would overflow. So I would end up wasting a bomb. To avoid wasting bombs like this, I should use a bomb before I collect another one from a bomb item carrier. But I prefer to collect a surplus bomb item anyway in Area 1-2, because nothing troubles me in the first two stages. So I'm left with thirteen bombs.

Of course, I'm uncomfortable with having only thirteen bombs. So I want to reduce my bomb usage against Hibachi as much as I can. I would start by doing this. Once I'm satisfied with the reduction, then I would reallocate the bombs to throughout the rest of the game. And once I'm dissatisfied with the bomb distribution, then I would return to battling Hibachi to further reduce my bomb usage. I keep repeating this process until I can beat the game.

Basically, I'm facing the reality that Hibachi has a stupid anti-bomb barrier, and that I'll need plenty of bombs to wipe out its bullets. I hope that my new strategy, which is created around this insight about Hibachi, will save me time in the long run.