A French show called "Au service de la France"

The end result is an arcade game with all the upsides that roguelite elements offer ,with barely any of the downsides, which is a statement I never thought I'd ever say. Honestly, more arcade games in the future could stand to look at how Sektori applies its RNG

While the controlled nature of Sektori's upgrade systems means it will have nowhere as much macro-level run variation like in most roguelites, it certainly helps deliver a ton of micro-level variation, and even then it mitigates the former with plenty of bonus modes and three different ship types

The semi-random nature of Sektori's enemy wave and room, and upgrade selection means that this randomness will probably play a larger role in the upper upper echelons of the scoreboards, but this isn't the worst trade-off considering it will only affect a small number of dedicated players

Sektori makes it work because it is more loose in how you can keep up your scoring chains and multipliers, but not so loose that you can auto-pilot it. Sometimes you'll get a disadvantageous area or a situation, but you're also given ample opportunity to mitigate them and keep up your chains

Arcade games have traditionally shied away from using RNG in enemy/area formations like Sektori does because it would make scoring potential too random at most levels of scoreplay. Then again, most such games tended to be very strict in how to go about your scoring, and thus not RNG-resistant at all

More importantly, the upgrade system being this controlled also allows Sektori to have a scoring system without it being completely destabilized by RNG, like it would in most roguelites

-but even then the upgrade order can be manipulated by discarding upgrades and when to 'unpack' upgrade decks. Your upgrades being known ahead of time and assumed that you'll eventually get all of them also allows the game to prevent OP synergies or metaprogression gating from happening

So Sektori has you construct your upgrade pool ahead of time, which has to be a fixed size. This lets it assume that you obtained most upgrades by the end of a run, which then allows Sektori to prevent the usual wild swinginess in player/enemy power. The main random thing is then the upgrade order-

The presentation even had me fooled on the direct upgrade system, it being ordered bottom-to-top instead of left-and-right prevented me from realizing for a bit that it's actually the Gradius power bar system

Feels like some devs are still stuck in the post-2006 casual gaming boom mindset and are unable to process how to deal with your potential audience gradually skewing more towards veterans than total newcomers

Like at some point you're just going to have to accept that there's already games built top-to-bottom around easing players into a genre that everyone will direct newcomers to, and that bending your design backwards to do the same is tantamount to reinventing the wheel

Fighting games underwent the same kind of thing where they invested extra effort and altered their design to appeal to newcomers, but what do you do after you've already captured most of that audience? Being beginner-friendly stops being a distinct selling point if everyone is doing it!