Taito never toned them down much though.
The funny thing of most Taito games is that difficulty scales actively depending on how good you are at the game.
Just take Bubble Bobble: if you defeat enemies with combos, you cause extend bubbles to spawn.
If you make an extend, you get an extra life.
The more your bonus lives, the more the game makes enemies fasters and spend less time trapped inside bubbles.
If you start dying, the difficulty scales back, enemies gets relatively easier but your life supply runs thin and you feel stressed.
And Symphony is even worse at that, entering secret rooms, beating stages without dying, calling second player, all stuff that does nothing but increase difficulty: this additionally gives bosses more hp and harder patterns too.
If you die a lot = the game doesn't feel that hard.
You don't die = enemies becomes hyperaggressive and the bosses sings your funeral.
Its an incredibly cruel and punishing system that one day or another I'd really love to slap on the face of a game journalists that loves to talk about how good adaptive difficulty is because... No.
all way easier than actual BB games.
Since special items spawns by fulfilling specific conditions, you're technically capable of popping 15-20-25 water bubbles in stage that generates them, in order to summon umbrellas that let you skip 3-5-7 stages, plus, if you Reach stage 50 without dying, you'll spawn a door that sends you straight to stage 70.
I don't think those spawns in symphony, and I have no idea of what spawns them in Memories, although that one game straght up cruel, less because of the conditions to get true ending, but rather because its "SUPER MODE" doesn't just swap enemies, it gives you a brand new tower with 80 completely different stages and while the bosses aren't replaced, the drugs you need to use against them are, and you can really feel the difference most of the times.
