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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.
So I got Espgaluda II yesterday and I’ve been playing the crap out of it. I finally have a copy (as opposed to a setup at a con or a candycab), thus giving me time to learn its scoring systems.
When I learn scoring systems that seem fascinating to me, I try not to read strategy guides too much, instead only using them to give myself some direction as to how to tackle playing for score, then I dive into the game and experiment to see which strategies will milk me the highest scores. This is what I know (or at least think I know) thus far:
Xbox 360:
- Killing enemies in Kakusei Shikai mode cancels their bullets and produces gold from the bullets.
- In Zesshikai mode, enemies release more bullets, and will release suicide bullets upon death.
- When killing an enemy in Zesshikai, suicide bullets of other enemies will cancel out. Also point-milking ensues.
- In Kakusei Shikai Over, enemy bullets turn red and go faster, and killing enemies releases small amounts of gold.
Black Label:
- Killing an enemy in normal mode cancels its bullets and turns them to gold.
- In Kakusei Shikai, killing an enemy releases suicide bullets.
- When killing an enemy in normal mode, suicide bullets of other enemes cancel out, also hueg numbers.
I’ll post my (mostly) self-done analyses of Arrange and Omake later. For now I wanna focus on 360 and BL.
I should probably focus on surviving as well; it would be good to actually see stages 4, 5, and 6 instead of losing 3 lives in 10 seconds trying to crank out 15 million points in that time interval.
This month is shaping up to be a month of shooting games for me. I’m hopefully getting Espgaluda II sometime this week (tomorrow preferably), and at the end of the month I’m looking at snatching up Sin and Punishment: Sky Successor (okay, so that’s a rail shooter and not an stg) and Deathsmiles.
I got to try DS and Esp2 at Fanime, a week and a half ago, though me playing Esp2 on any serious level dates back to Sakura-Con two months ago. I tried vanilla Esp2, then went on to try other modes like Arrange and Black Label. Esp2 Black Label is even more hilarious than Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label; any enemy killed will now cancel bullets, and killing enemies in Kakusei/Awakening mode will cause them to explode into more bullets (that can be canceled out as well). I also really want to obtain the iPhone port despite getting the 360 port anyway; I tried that at Fanime too on my friend’s iPad and it beats the snot out of Ketsui Death Label as far as a portable Cave game goes. Sadly, I don’t intend to get an iPhone any time in the coming years, and I’m a bit strapped for cash to be getting an iPad (which would be a little un-portable anyway) or a new iPod Touch; my current one is a first-gen 8 GB model. Since it’s almost maxed out, perhaps that could be an excuse to get a new one.
Also at Fanime, I stopped by Aksys’s booth to play DeathSmiles, which I had already preordered. It shows that Cave can definitely do horizontal just as well as vertical, and that I should probably try Progear no Arashi sometime. I haven’t played such a fantastic sidescroller since Gradius Gaiden; bidirectional firing, colorful graphics, freedom to choose how hard or easy you want the game to be and what stages to pick, and a scoring system with a good learning curve (I couldn’t break the default high score) contribute to my anticipation of getting my own copy. Unfortuantely, on the 3rd day of Fanime (of 4), the stick for it was removed because apparently people were messing around with the stick. As someone who refuses to taint the beauty of Cave shooters with a stock 360 pad, that meant no DeathSmiles at all for me for the remainder of the con.
And now, I wait. Hopefully I come home from the arcade tomorrow to a package from Play-Asia with my name on it. And if that happens…I just might be up until 6 AM. I love having summer vacation this early.
Slowly getting better at Imperishable Night [Normal]–specifically, the Forbidden Magic Team (Marisa/Alice). For a while I put off on using this team due to them getting Reimu for the stage 4 boss, who for the longest time gave me way more trouble than Boss!Marisa. Otherwise, I would be exclusively using Magic Team; straight shot + high speed suits me better than wide and homing shot + moderate speed.
I finally got around to taming Boss!Reimu, thanks to focus mode hiding the yin-yang shots, learning how to deal with Reimu when she’s in fly-off-of-one-side-of-the-screen-at-high-speed mode, and learning that on the “Duplex” spell cards that I can go across the bullet portals (for a lack of better term) safely.
The Stage 5 boss, Reisen, still gives me trouble. I often bomb spam when the bullets go back from being red, out of fear that I’m on top of a bullet and I’ll have lost as many as 3 bombs.
Overall, the Boundary and Magic Teams are the only ones worth using; the other two are too gimmicky for me. I don’t use Youmu/Yuyuko because I’m baffled by the idea of having a wider shot in focus mode, and I don’t use Sakuya/Remilia due to Remilia’s difficult sentry gun-like focus attack.
Looking for excuses to spend more time with my Seimitsu-modded FSTE, I decided to pick back up some Kenta Cho(u) games.
I’ve mainly been playing Parsec47, as well as its antithesis rRootage. Whereas rRootage is boss-oriented and about careful slow movements, Parsec47 is about waves of enemies and zipping around like a Scout on five cans of Bonk!, especially in Extreme difficulty where everything–bullets, point items, and you–move around at very high speeds. I do like that you rack up craploads of points in P47 rather fast; compare to NOIZ2SA where it takes longer to accumulate items and it’s all too easy to slingshot items through the top of the screen, forcing me to build back up my multiplier.
Survival in P47 seems to be about, in addition to finding gaps in patterns, moving sideways as well as resisting the urge to pick up that cluster of point items in order to tap-dodge through a wave. Unfortunately, my brain, being the piece of shit that it is, likes to do what is the least sensible tactic in any given game situation, whether it be prioritizing score over survival, trying to melee Pyros in Team Fortress 2, and barging into a goal zone defended by 6 players by myself in S4.
Back to rRootage. I’ve mainly been playing IKA, GW, and PSY modes, and am currently stranded on the eighth tier of stages on each of these modes. In the past I almost exclusively played PSY mode because I liked the graze shield mechanic (except when the shield meter builds up during mercy invincivility causing me to waste it), but I’ve also warmed up to IKA and GW modes. GW’s reflect attack, like that of Giga Wing and Mars Matrix, turns dense bullet clouds into opportunities to take several thousand HP off the boss; as a balance, the main shot is weaker. IKA mode, like Ikaruga, is an exercise in tuning one’s eyes to distinguish what bullets are currently absorbable and what bullets mean instant explody death. Thankfully, unlike Ikaruga, I don’t have to chain enemies to get an optimal score.
Which reminds me: Radiant Silvergun, like its spiritual successor, has that annoying “shoot 3 enemies of the same color” chaining mechanic. So why do I want RSG so much?
Yesterday, I randomly had an itching to go play Super Mario Land. I was not able to play yesterday because VBA was being a bitch, so I switched over to BGB today–less functionality, but hey, it actually runs, and at 60 FPS to boot!
Having mainly played SMB, SML’s physics threw me in for a bit of a loop. Mario is more sensitive to button presses, jumping feels a bit faster, mushrooms are harder to catch, and superballs in open-air stages are useless unless I jump first. On the plus side, thanks to the extra stages you get for taking upper exits and clearing the 3rd stage of each world, you get a lot of extends (though it wasn’t enough to get me through the whole game).
Points of fail include:
- All: There was a time when my dad and I knew where all the secret elevators that would take you above the ceiling were. Well, that time is no more. Also, stupid cut-and-paste segments.
- 2-3: Hey, this thing moves faster moving backwards than in any other direction!
- 3-1: Stupid rocks, and stupid Christmas lights spikes
- 3-2: Stupid tricky jumping sections involving stalacites of doom and spiders
- 4-1: Stupid jiang shi-like enemies that respawn after being “killed”
- 4-2: Stupid moving platform segments where I fall to my doom because of the finiky controls
I plan to make a comeback this weekend and 1CC this shit.
also why oh why does windows not reset the screensaver timer on controller input
So after a few months’ hiatus, I’ve been getting back into DJMAX Trilogy, which isn’t really the revival of DJMAX Online so much as it is a PC port of DJMAX Portable. Go go recursive ports.
As before I use 6 key. 4 key feels too simple for me, 5 key is stupid (there’s 2 keys for it like DJMP, hence my mini-rant about this game being a recursive port), and 7 key with autocorrect is too idiotic to learn, and I have yet to unlock 8 key (which will probably be slightly less bogus than 7K). It’s certainly less stressful playing on a keyboard with six fingers than with my thumbs.
I’d bother with Fever if it weren’t for the silly way it was implemented in Trilogy; it now drains over notes rather than time, which means it’s easier to keep a fever chain going on easier sections instead of the other way around. While I like that this system encourages accuracy, it does it in a rather harsh way; get to a cluster of notes that you can’t 100% handle and you’ll lose your fever chain. Thus, I care not for score or the score-based grading system; I am a percent player.
I really hope that if Pentavision makes yet another DJMAX game, that they remove autocorrect or at least make it optional. If its implementation is over copyright crap, that’s a pretty stupid reason to implement it; making the game register a press of any key as correct as long as a note is hit doesn’t change the fact that it still looks a lot like Beatmania. Also, I’ve seen countless newbies and professional reviewers get thrown off by this feature when they got DJMAX Fever, thinking that now they don’t need to hit the right buttons. Way to be, Pentavision. I bet DJMAX Technika 2, if there ever is one, is gonna have this feature too.
[PARAGRAPH REMOVED.]
YouTube shmup superplays have got me thinking: are bullet hell shooters that much harder than shooters that don’t throw out 100,000,000 bullets? I’ve crossed four out of six stages on DoDonPachi, all of Touhou Komakyou: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on Normal, 3 1/2 stages out of 5 of Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5 Maniac, and five stages out of six on Giga Wing. To compare, I can’t even clear the second stages of Raiden or Truxton II–you’d think that they’d be easier since they’re “ordinary” shooters, but you’d be dead wrong. Older games tend to rely on aimed “sniper” shots to kill you instead. Whereas bullet-dense shooters are about analyzing patterns and finding gaps in them, older shooters are about being alert at all times; blink and you’re very likely to get hit out of nowhere.
And with that said, I’ll probably get in a round of Raiden right now. (I’d try its sequel except that it’s impossible to “emoo”late.) Maybe it’s just me not getting enough practice in.
EDIT: Barely made it to stage 1-3. Now, in a ypical 6-stage “danmaku” shooter, stage 3 wouldn’t be too bad, but here, I’m already on edge when I get halfway through stage 1-2. It certainly doesn’t help that the player ship has a delayed-detonation bomb, as opposed to the instant-invincibility bombs of newer games.
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