huh, the multiplier does go down during cutscenes. i uh didn't intend that, i only intended the 'going down during bosses' part...
so the way you gain shine is by damaging enemies (especially at point-blank range) and grazing bullets, and you have a fairly wide graze radius. when you use it, all full stacks are consumed at once for a tiered boost based on how many stacks you spent. all enemies also gain a similar buff that's also proportional to the tier of the boost. shine tier affects damage, bullet size, and the number of bullets the center shot will cancel. each cancelled bullet decreases the center shot's damage.
if you have at least one stack of shine or one bomb, you can use it in response to a bullet that would kill you. if you do, you spend all of that resource at once, and what comes out is maximized in power (for bomb it's a special deathbomb, for shine it's a tier 3 shine buff). if you're already in shine mode, you have to spend bombs. using a bomb at any time cancels shine mode
multiplier increases by cancelling bullets and killing enemies. if you have a shine buff active, both score gain and multiplier gain get an additional multiplier. if you bomb or die, it decreases. so basically to score high you want to graze to get single shine tiers, spend them on max-tier shines by getting hit, then survive the shine while cancelling as many bullets as possible and making sure you get at least one shine tier by the end of it to rinse and repeat.
once while testing i accidentally set nue's penultimate attack to fire the pink blades way more often than it should ahve and this was the result