RefleX [PC]

[Darkslime]

Siter Skain - RefleX
This is a story of the fight of the resistance
military forces and the earth military forces.

As Enhasa left a while back, I figured I'd start the new topic for RefleX high scores. This is one of my favorite shmups ever, so it would be awesome to see some action going on!

No rules, since there's no actual options to choose from. 1CC preferred, but put up whatever you can get, just to get things started. If you do continue, please state the number of times you did so. If and when there happen to be lots of scores, this rule will be stricken and only 1CC runs will be allowed. For now, continued runs will be ranked below non-continued runs regardless of score.

Now that we have an international version out for download (thanks Nyu Media!) this game is much easier to get a hold of. The current version of the game is 1.02, so please be sure to update if you're still on the older Japanese version. The patch can be obtained from the official site. There don't appear to be any significant changes in this version, so the high score table will remain the same.

For those unfamiliar with scoring in RefleX: reflecting bullets into lots of enemies gives you a multiplier. That's essentially the only scoring mechanism. Remember to kill bosses using reflected bullets, and have fun! Also, if you want more help or advice, please use the discussion thread linked below.

Links:

• SITER SKAIN's official RefleX website
  Nyu Media's official RefleX website
  Forum discussion thread

Scoreboard

Code: Select all

Rank           NAME -      SCORE - STAGE - CONTINUES
-----------------------------------------------------
1.          Redgren - 17,181,152 -   ALL - 0
2.              LtC - 12,442,928 -   ALL - 0
3.          Raydere - 11,901,826 -   ALL - 0
4.        Darkslime -  9,321,670 -   ALL - 0
5.          Aleksei -  9,498,630 -   ALL - 2
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

[BIL]

White Canvas is currently carrying RefleX for 1,575 yen. I believe there is a way to do international shipping, but the site is Japanese, so you'll have to look up a walkthrough. I can't seem to find this game anywhere else though.

Just adding to this, in case it helps anyone outside Japan acquire this excellent game: I got RefleX brand-new from Tokyo Shmups for $25 USD - rancor's a great guy to deal with. He mentioned last week in his trading forum thread that he's only got a couple copies left, so someone might want to jump on that.

[Aleksei]

RefleX- High score of 6,639,404

how the hell do you get close to 12 mil>?

[Darkslime]

You need to find the places where you could score quite a few more points by not firing at all, and just relying on reflected bullets to do the work for you. Try running a few stages without firing at all and see what happens. :3

Also, is that a game-clear highscore?

[Aleksei]

that is a game clear highscore, but with two continues....
so letting ships go by if i can't get them with a relfected beam will get me higher scores than if i hit them with my fire? or is it that i have to time it so that the chain never breaks after a beam hits something?

[Aleksei]

its also not the updated version that i'm playing, idk if that has any influence on the scoring system.

[Darkslime]

Not quite; you need to kill everything, but killing a bunch of things with reflected bullets will give you a high modifier(that's what all the x8 and x16 things are); killing things with your normal shot in quick succession after that will keep that modifier there. There's a part in the first level, before the midboss, where this is apparent - you can get up to x256 multiplier on some of the enemies if you know where to look.

When I said not firing at all, I more meant so that you can more easily see where you're getting these multipliers from and where you should concentrate on getting them.

I don't think the updated version has any differences in the scoring system, though.

[LtC]

What does the patch do?

[Darkslime]

It gets rid of the whole system where your number of continues go down if you 1cc the game, and fixes a couple of bugs(an ending bug). It does, however, say that the difficulty "in one part" has been "adjusted", but there's no explanation as to what. He also doesn't mention that part in the blog entry related to the patch's release. So, until we can figure out what's different, we'll run with this for now. There's no influence on the scoring system, in any case.

[gs68]

Still quite new to this game, just got the international version (based on 1.02).

gs68 - 2,060,124 - 3

[Darkslime]

Cool! I will go update the top post to specify version 1.02 now.

EDIT -- Yes, I am still monitoring this thread! I have a subscription set up, so even if it doesn't look like I've logged in in a long time, please don't hesitate to post a score - it'll show up in my email.

[gs68]

gs68 - 6,958,428 - 5

Enropi pls.

[Regdren]

Regdren - 17,181,152

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jmaAFZJF9k

Final score is at 39:32.

Pretty happy with how this went, but there are lots of places I can improve too. I'll add annotations to the video soonish.

[Darkslime]

Very nice! I love how the score just shoots up by like 5 million when you kill the final boss, haha.

[Regdren]

Technically just 4 million. =p

The bigger accomplishment is in stage 5, where there's a chance to get about 2 million from one enemy if you can get a X64 on him. I was afraid I'd mess that part up and have to redo the run.

[gs68]

It's 4 mil if you reflect-kill him (using the photon blaster attack--reflect shots, then release the shield button before they hit anything), 1 million otherwise. The photon blaster method will allow you to kill him before he even starts his annoying purple-and-missile final phase.

[Regdren]

The thread isn't too active so I figured maybe I could talk a little about what I'm doing to improve my score, and how the scoring system works in general.

As the OP says, you get a multiplier by killing enemies with reflected shots. The multiplier increases with repeated reflect kills as follows:

*4, *4, *4, *8, *8, *16, *32, *64

Once you gain a multiplier, you start a timer. When it expires, so does your multiplier. Killing an enemy, either by reflect shot or normal shot, refreshes the timer. Missiles do not count towards the timer.

When you shoot an enemy down yourself during a multiplier chain, you gain a multiplier of the next bonus in the chain divided by two. So *2, *2, *4, *4, *8, *16, *32. Non-reflect kills refresh the timer but do not move the chain to the next multiplier; you need reflect kills for that.

The overall goal is to start a multiplier with reflect shots and then keep the chain going through normal kills when needed. Reflecting non-homing shots for kills can be tricky so it's sometimes a judgement call whether to safely keep the chain going or risk it for a better multiplier. You must also be careful in some places not to kill enemies too quickly, or else you will run out of ways to keep the chain going and drop it when you could have kept it going into the next wave of enemies.

Your normal shot has 6 separate damaging parts, and damage is not equal for every component. This and the wide nature of the shot makes precise shooting difficult. I've personally double-killed two adjacent enemies when I wanted to kill one, then the other to keep the chain going longer. Sometimes getting close to an enemy to minimize the spread is helpful.

There are a few places I've found where charging towards a durable enemy helps me to kill it in time to keep the chain going. Of course, that means you need to mind your position for the previous enemies so you have room to move forward.

It is possible to kill Scutum with a *32 multiplier by weakening its satellites to near-death, then reflecting a volley of homing shots just as Scutum releases them again in its second attack cycle. If you've weakened everything properly, the homing shots will kill all of the satellites right as they appear, then finish off the boss for the bonus.

I'm still working on my new playthrough. A score of 21 mil is my goal, and there's a good chance I can go higher than that. Unless one of you beats me to it of course; I'd be happy to see other people compete with me for a high score.

[gs68]

Finally, it happens.

Raydere - 11,901,826 - ALL