BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Thank you for enlightening me, I had not heard of any of that before. Seems unfortunate that captured helper kills don't count towards score necessitating a workaround of sorts to maximize scoring. Did the devs ever say if it a design oversight or a deliberate choice?
It is odd to have a major score incentive to capture captains, but then you can't utilize them to kill things if you want the best score. Not sure if they meant it to be that way, but I wouldn't be surprised. The Darius series has other trollish or counterintuitive mechanics like fully powering up will actually make you less powerful.
I do think it's more interesting this way. At least on a few captains, like Zone A, your routing has to be much more nuanced than if it didn't matter who shot down enemies. Of course G Darius has a better, more fleshed out version of this system since fighting with captures is a major gameplay focus throughout.
The odd shot leveling system also adds a bit of strategy. Pro players can go for early max power and get a good number of red powerups at 5k max bonus. The tradeoff is increased rank, the last two captures will be way harder, and certain final boss fights will be much longer and more difficult. One thing that's easier at max is that throughout the second half of the game you don't have to dodge red powerups.
So if there were a patched rom that made captain's kills count for score and made the final powerup level actually the strongest, the game could be considered to be "fixed" or at least make more sense in terms of conventional game balance. Although I think that would remove two of the elements that can help differentiate player's scores at higher levels.