Can someone help me with understanding the polarity system?

[ASHPoD]

So on Normal it says that only enemies of your polarity will shoot (or enemies of opposite polarity, whatever). The point is, both polarities are always shooting at me in Normal mode, regardless of whatever polarity I am. Am I misunderstanding how polarity works in the game (if so, please explain), or is there something up with my game?

[Mr. Domino]

You'll always see both colors; polarity affects how the game plays. The difference is that bullets the color of your ship will not hurt you; you'll absorb them, and that will power up your special attack gauge. In addition, you'll do greater damage to enemies of the opposite color, too.

[ASHPoD]

ahhhhhhhhhhhh, thanks a bunch

[EmeraldMegalith]

"only enemies of your polarity will shoot" refers to enemies releasing bullets in your direction upon death. On normal mode this only happens when the enemy is the same color of your ship; they will always fire their weapons regardless of polarity.

[DamoclesAlpha]

To elaborate, the difficulty level affects, when destroyed enemies release bullets against the player(s). While it may nominally be a minor difference, it can in practice require quite different strategies on different difficulty levels even when the enemy patterns are otherwise similar:

• Easy: Enemies do not launch any additional bullets upon death
  
• Normal: Killed enemies launch bullets at player, if the player kills them using bullets with the same polarity (white bullets against the white enemies and black bullets against the black enemies)
  
• Hard: All enemies launch bullets upon death at player. This requires extra caution, when player and the killed enemy have different polarities