As promised, I’d get around to Espgaluda II‘s other modes. Tonight I’ll be going over Arrange mode.

I’ve tried a few Cave arranges in the past; Mushihime-sama was basically just Maniac mode with 6 starting options, real-time weapon change, auto-freaking-bomb, and the TLB. Futari‘s isn’t much better: now you have to deal with a somewhat annoying tag-team mechanic (“Reco-chan, ikou yo!”) and some really boring strategies. Oh and there’s STILL autobomb.

Espgaluda II‘s arrange is somewhat interesting and seems to promise actual replay value rather than a bore-fest. My own analysis so far:

You start with 5 lives instead of 3. This is offset by the lack of autobomb and the extend requirements that are difficult to get unless you take advantage of a certain mechanic.

In normal mode, bullets come in two colors and can be canceled out, not unlike in Ikaruga. Except unlike in onechainruga, you don’t cancel bullets by running into them with the correct color on; instead you shoot them; 1P focus and 2P rapid cancel red bullets, and 1P rapid and 2P focus cancel blue bullets. Most regular mooks’ bullets will convert into gems, but with bosses, they seem to give out less gems until eventually the gems stop. To prevent constant shot switching to keep the screen free of bullets, there’s a little gem penalty every time you start to fire one of your shot types.

Kakusei Shikai is mostly same as before: bullets slow down and can only be cancelled by shooting the enemies that fired them. Kakusei Zesshikai is also similar. The main difference lies in the slower gem decrease rate and that bullets turn glowing purple (as opposed to plain purple) to show that no, you can’t shot-cancel them.

Now Kakusei Shikai Over is where things get interesting. In this mode, gold is used up and bullets turn glowing red and can be canceled out by either shot type. Shooting bullets will yield gold and, as you collect more gold, the value of each gold gets bigger until you get the max-value gold that has green crystals. This completely changes Kakusei Shikai Over from a high-risk mode into a mode not unlike Futari Arrange’s Fever mode. On burning up all gold, mode switches back to normal automatically.

Every time you 1CC Arrange, you “level up” your character. 1CC’ing on the 1P side levels up normal mode bullets and 1CC’ing on the 2P side levels up kakusei mode bullets. The idea behind leveling up is so you can summon more bullets and thus get more point opportunities. This sort of level grinding is similar to GHOST Squad‘s (the carded and Wii versions, not the horrible 4-level version or the Apology Evolution version), only instead of 16 levels, each level goes to 99. So to be able to use the highest level, 99*99, you have to clear the game 188 times with one character; thankfully I almost exclusively use Ageha so I don’t have to worry about leveling up other characters.

I’ve already ALL’d the game once with 1P Ageha, so I’m at level 1 right now. Looking to play this mode every now and then, but not so much that I spoil 360 mode. Having gone from Tetris TGM3 clones to TGM2 and Futari BL Maniac to Futari 1.5 Maniac, I know that staying exclusively in Esp2 Arrange and BL modes is a very bad idea.

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