markmsx did a video on the somewhat facile "SUPEREASY" modes included in m2 shottriggers ports. i think he's right -- i'd feel like i conned someone out of money if i told them to buy those ports just to play the supereasy modes. i commented with thoughts about interesting easy mode in stg:
i prefer to simply say difficulty is the means by which the player is compelled to engage with mechanics -- the player would have no need to care about bombs if every attack was trivial to dodge
however, it is not really the only way to do this. scoring is another way to compel a player to engage with mechanics -- and it is done in both a rewarding (get the 5-chips for more multiplier) and punishing (if you die instead of bombing, your stage-end bonus gets smaller) manner. yet, the average player doesn't really care about scoring past perhaps extends -- leaderboard placement is not really very important for the average player, especially a rookie
however, we can casually observe that players can easily be made to care about illusory numbers -- playing a modern popular game often involves earning and managing 100 different currencies, and players generally enjoy optimising this process. hook this up to a very rich scoring system and we no longer have to rely so much on difficulty. what do they spend their ScoreBux on? it could literally be anything. they could be building and upgrading a little doll house, i earnestly believe this -- it seems like a gimme to tie these bux to some sort of ship upgrade system, but i think it's stale thinking, and i would avoid this as much as possible. good STG is balanced on a knife's edge, and is incompatible with conventional upgrade systems.
this is how i would do an easy mode that is still interesting, and probably has a quite broad appeal. double down on scoring, reign it back on "game over" style difficulty. a purist's "hard mode" must still exist because the 23-minute mountain climb 1cc is a beautiful thing and is very core to STG. thats what i think anyway
fwiw I do think the supereasy modes (the more recent ones, anyway) are tuned more like caravan modes with relaxed difficulty but high score ceilings, not just to give competent players a reason to try them but also as an attempt to ingrain the fun of scoreplay onto newer players before they "graduate" to the standard game
I say "I think" because I don't see much evidence to suggest it's working, and I don't think the devs have much hard data, either, just occasional testimonials from people saying they bought game xyz when they heard it had an easy mode
