This is the first ever completed run of Sharks that did not use save states or some other form of TAS.

I saw a comment from the user cassettecobra3848 on a YouTube video (titled Action 52 15 Sharks - uncommentated playthrough) of someone beating Sharks using save states. The comment by cassettecobra3848 suggested hugging the right side of the screen for stages four and five as the sharks that spawn there are unable to hit you. This gave me the idea to try it out on the jellyfish stage, which didn't work, but it did actually work by hugging the left side of the screen. If you do that the jellyfish that spawn on the left will not hit you, although they still can change direction and come back and kill you.

So huge shoutouts to cassettecobra3848. I wouldn't have been able to do this had I not read that comment and learned about the exploit.

I lost a bit of time in stage four because I thought I could swim up farther than is allowed and didn't have enough room to move out of the way of a shark. Oops.

After finally beating this my considered opinion of this game is that it is bad.

Played on RGB-modded NES console using EverDrive N8 Pro.