RQ Soukyugurentai: Accessing the Second Loop (is there one?)

[EmperorIng]

One thing that has puzzled me about Soukyugurentai is its ranking screen it lists the stages as 1-1, 1-2, 1-6 etc. This would imply a second loop (2-1, 2-4, etc.). However, I can't find any replays that include the second loop (both western and Japanese replays seem to end after the stage 6 bosses).

When I was rewatching a Bullet Heaven review of Souky, Serraxor mentioned in the special options menu you can set whether the game starts or ends on loop 2.

Does anyone know if the ST-V game was a 2-loop game by default, or if there is some requirement to start the second loop? Or was the second loop option thrown in as a bonus, not-default setting for the arcade and/or Saturn port? I would love some more clarification!

[Jeneki]

I've never seen any information or videos of a second loop.

I have a STV cartridge for this game so I can take a closer look at options later tonight. *edit* No new info to add after looking at the settings first hand.

But for now, the STV manual is here: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYS ... aizing.pdf

The setup screen doesn't have any options for a second loop.

There is a setting you can turn on called "additional mode", which states "special functions associated with button input status at the beginning of the game". *edit* after experimenting with this I don't see anything game related here.

You can, however, set the rank to max on stage 1. I've done this before and it gives some interesting results, for example there are attacks the stage 1 boss will use on max rank that you never see playing the game on default settings.

[EmperorIng]

Thanks for responding! I had given up hope

I wonder if the additional mode is not another name for the attract mode or tutorial, showing "special functions" before the start of the game (ie lockon, bomb, etc.). I do know an arranged mode was made for the Playstation port, but I am not sure if they would have had something cooking up on the STV itself.

That's a really interesting point about rank! I had sometimes dabbled with later stages at high rank to simulate 1cc practice, but I hadn't tried the early ones. It makes me wonder if the rank settings are analogous to loop difficulties, going back to my opening point that the second loop was a bonus difficulty mode for people who had the port. I wonder why they would bother listing the high-score screen on the stv as stages 1-x.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I don't personally know anything about the game, but I did dig this up: viewtopic.php?p=490287#p490287

no, it doesn't loop by default

it's just a strange quirk that you can make the game loop even if it doesn't by default; dimahoo, twinbee yahhoo, and sexy parodius also have this

It looks like the default might be that it's a 1 loop game, with options to add a second loop to the game. I know there's a few Konami games like that where the Japanese/Asia region is a single loop game or a 2 loop game, but the North America version either has a second loop or is set to default to loop infinitely. It could be the same kind of situation.

This thread here suggests it's in an extra menu that needs to be unlocked by playing the game for a certain length of time: viewtopic.php?p=801612#p801612

[Despatche]

Probably an optional second loop that is outside of the game's normal design. Raizing did this a few times. Garegga, Great Mahou, etc.

Konami also did it a bunch of times for some reason. Some alternate versions of certain Konami games actually have a different loop setting as default, like G.I. Joe and certain belt scrollers.