shmups.system11.org

I have been studying SPE's run on this video -

https://youtu.be/78IcHIoLVrY?t=641

Hopefully the link will work out correctly but, if it doesn't, scroll to about 10:40 in and watch how many of those crowns he can create whilst powered up. How is he doing this? When I'm playing I never get as many as he is.

Also, how come sometimes during power up mode the enemies will just drop plain crowns and other times it will be the orange pumpkins that split when they hit the ground?

Someone else more familiar with the game will be able to clarify, but the game has a memorization aspect where hitting enemies while tapping or holding the shot button produces large or small items depending on the enemy. In general, smaller weaker enemies drop big items when you tap shot, and larger enemies drop big items when you hold shot.

In the video it locks like he is quickly using the lock-on shot (hold both shot buttons) after positioning the familiar inside enemies. He is not holding the lockshot down as it drains Power-Up quite quickly, but perhaps the lock shot drops even larger items than normal when scoring kills on some enemies? I am not particularly good at Deathsmiles, but someone else can clarify here.

Thanks for the reply!

I know about the strategy of killing certain enemies with certain types of shots, but this guy seems to be getting huge amounts of loot for the number of enemies.

The orange extra-large crowns mainly appear during Fever Mode, which is when your item value counter (the +XXXX value that appears whenever you pick up an item) reaches 10,000. From what I understand, you can begin building up your value counter before activating powerup, and when your powerup ends, your value counter is reset to 0, so figuring out when and where to power up to make sure you're in Fever Mode during very profitable sections is a big part of routing.

In MBL, Fever Mode instead occurs when your overall counter reaches 100,000, and stays there permanently except when you die or during boss fights.

Yeah, like CloudyMusic said, you want the "+" number up to 10,000 as fast as possible. The number starts increasing the moment you hit 1000 on the big counter, but it builds much faster when you enable the A+B mode where the counter counts down, so you want to do that whenever you have a long stretch ahead with a lot of enemies to milk.

There are a few ways to do this, already covered in the guides available around here.
The biggest pointers I think are:

1. Shoot enemies with the correct shot for the biggest medal types. I think some enemies change the ideal shot when you are in this mode.
2. Let as many big medals hit the ground as possible, until they split into skulls. Bigger medals result in more skulls eventually. This might sound counter-intuitive, but the "+" number increases based on the number of items you pick up, not their type/value. During normal gameplay you don't want them to hit the ground, and want the big medals.
3. The big counter that counts down, will do so much faster while a shot button is held (and even faster when both are held), so try to not shoot except from when you need it. For example, take out popcorn enemies in small tap-bursts, etc. For the larger enemies that typically reward you for holding shot, you want to make sure you only do this while you actually damage them (or even better, only while they die).
4. Most enemies that take multiple shots will release a constant stream of skulls while your familiar is damaging them. So especially for the huge ones that are able to stay alive for a while, you might want to avoid damaging them with your main shot, while the familiar does the work. For example with Rosa, hold down shot shortly to fire off the red obs you can direct with the joystick, and then let go, and reap the rewards while not even shooting the enemy!

Thanks guys, I think I'm getting the hang of it. Sometimes the finer details aren't so clear from watching these replays.