For the editing I show when I continued in the early stages, unedited. For the last few stages I show the first set of lives lost on each new stage but edit out all other failed attempts (going back to continue screen). The reason for that is because the last few stages force you to beat them on the 4 lives you have, otherwise you go out to the continue screen and have to restart the stage with those 4 lives.
The final stage took some tries but was much easier then beating it in the Saturn version of Strikers 1945. In that version I had bad input lag on the emulator meaning I had to memorize safe positions for each attack, rather than being able to react to the bullets. It took around 6 hours to beat this final stage on that version which I have a tutorial of here:
That was really more of an emulation issue, but I was stubborn. When the game runs as it should its a challenging stage but not too bad for me. You have limited lives to beat the last few stages. Previous stages are in the credit feeding style, pay to win, respawn where you died.