shmups.system11.org

Took a quick dip into this game on the PC Cozmic collection, and was rather surprised how easyish the game was on the easy setting. Did 1CC on my first try, all that time playing DariusBurst must have helped me here too. I only died once to Risk Storage, I don't know can that combination even happen on normal difficulty and it was rather unfair: He shot those following grey things and then instead of trying to shoot you with those big plasma balls he started shooting those pillars pieces which shoot up and down. Kinda impossible to dodge both at the same and I was out of bombs. Oh well, only one death, I'm really happy for a first try anyhow!

I do want to try a real run on Normal, I'd believe that has much more of a kick in it too. Easy was some great practice to see more difficult parts in the game too.

Anyhow, what I wanted to ask is that if I start doing other routes, is there specific difficult stages (Or bosses) I should avoid for survival? I know the upmost and especially lowermost routes are somewhat of challenge routes, but I'd think there are some more difficult stages in the fray on middle too. I'm not also sure should I pick D or H after B for survival route towards Risk Storage. Any tips?

Are you gonna be using autofire? That will make a huge difference as to what stages will be hard or easy, especially if you play for survival only.

My general advice would be to look for the route you find fun or interesting rather than the easiest one. In the end you'll get more out if it and possibly play the game longer. Whatever route you choose will have difficulty spikes here or there, but there are plenty of bombs to even those out if you don't care about the end of game bomb bonus.



ABDHLQV is pretty widely accepted as the beginner route. After B you can't pick H, it's either D or E. If you wanted to play the high scoring route that also results in higher rank if you destroy all the boss parts, especially those on King Fossil, it would be ACEHLQV.

I guess no one starting playing Darius Gaiden nowadays on console ans asking for the easiest route will begin without autofire
I play DG a couple of weeks and want to place some of my experiences here. Like most people, I've started with the easiest route (ABDHLQV) because its always nice to reach some early goals. There is not much to say about this route. Most stages are some of the or the easiest stages you can play. But the best part is, that you dont need many recources (lives, bombs) to fight the final boss Risk Storage if your base shot is on a ok level (wide wafe shot and above), wich helps alot.

ABEINSY:
Was it Prickly Angler who said, that this course is even easier? for me it was not but I tried this one because of his advice and its a good rout for someone who cleared ABDHLQV and wants the next challenge. I think its harder because 1) if you havent collected all red powerups, Electric Fan is a much harder boss than Folding Fan. E alone is a bit harder compared to D, I guess. 2) H is the a little bit easier stage. Both have some of the harder bosses and I am not quite sure which one is more fast to adapt to as a beginner 0) L/N are more or less even 3) Q/S In S there are 2 spots with very much going on. I mostly have to use at least one bomb. The narrow parts with the indestructible blocks in Q are a bit tricky to but also a bit saver to learn. 4) The last stage is a bit odd. Both are on the easier side. Y is even a bit easier, I guess but the boss of Y is way harder and if you dont want to use many bombs its a kinda hard to learn one.

But its for sure a great course for a second 1cc ^^

ACFJOUZ
This was my third attempt and its more of a middle-hard route. Stage C is way harder than B. After this one it gets a bit relaxing but O one of the harder stage overall with the second strongest not final boss if you dont count Stage M after Crusty Hammer; Fatty Glutton. U is again a more manageable stage and if you learn some important tricks, Z is not that hard as a last stage (but clearly harder compared to V and Y). The Boss here is on the easier side and not so hard to learn. Easier than the boss of Y, at least for me.

ABEIMSX
Really wanted to try out the I-am-the-whole-stage-boss Titanic Lance. Really fun to play and an epic Design. Was a but hard to learn because you cannot be sure when a body part is destroyed if you are not approaching hin on the same rank and the same weapon as in your trainign safe state. Most other stages are a bit easier as in ACFJOUZ but the last stage X is way harder and the boss was kinda hard as well with her many homing lasers and her jump attack. overall a medium difficulty run for my taste as well.

My two next attempts will be ABDGLQW or ACFJOUV'. But Storm Causer must be destroyed with a lot of bombs ^^
If I achieve this I will have to learn Crusty Hammer and Great Thing or ABDHLQV with the slow autofire

If you stick to white balls, you can cheese out Titanic Lance with 30hz auto and make him extremely easy even at high rank. Learning to avoid the red powerups you don’t want and plan which to pick up is key on any route. Sometimes best to play it safe, for example pause from shooting and just let the asteroids that produce medals at the beginning of Zone M fly past.

You still have to be fairly aggressive on the last phase to kill him before he even starts firing. Little tip there: when you're destroying his tentacles section by section with your back shot, switch to normal fire. Auto fucks with the tracking of your little mini ships that fire green crescent shots. Since you're firing behind you the main shot speed doesn't matter, and you'll get more damage with the better tracking of default shot speed.



Storm Causer can also be quick killed with auto. (Sorry if you're playing no auto and this isn't helpful). The strat is to line up to point blank him right away. He will do three tail swipes with a wind gust that pushes you back. The connective spine of his tail can't hurt you but the fin can. While point blanking, you need to press and hold right at the exact moment the wind gust starts. Too early and you'll face plant into his mouth. Too late and you'll get blown into the extended tail fin. If you start late, just hold down to avoid getting crushed by the fin. Pull this off three times quickly and he will never fire a bullet.

This assumes you don't power up your shot to max and maintain white spheres. Without, you will have to fight him legit and it is possibly the hardest boss fight in the game, and the least rewarding for points. Most other bosses have a strong scoring incentive to not speed kill, but not Storm Causer. Big part of the reason why the scoring potential of this route is by far the lowest in the game (at least with autofire)

Probably the two most likely spots to pick up an unwanted medal on the Storm Causer route are the last two stages right before each midboss, especially if you want to capture them.

They like to troll you in this game and have an unwanted red powerup interfere with capturing or quick killing some midbosses.

Zone U: Right before you dive underwater and face the midboss there is a sort of flying fish type enemy that jumps up and arcs back down into the water. Just don't shoot this last wave and let the red power up carrying fish go.

The advanced strategy if you want all points and the capture is to shoot the first part of the wave, pause momentarily with the correct timing then shoot the last fish on their way down right before they disappear. This way the red powerup spawns far enough to the left so you can deal with the midboss correctly without picking it up. Not too hard, but rewards just a small wave bonus and risks fucking up your whole run. You will see even advanced players simply ignore this wave.

Zone V': There's a section before the midboss where two red item carriers will fly in from the left side quickly. It's tough, but ideally you want to destroy them with back missiles as far to the left as possible, so their power ups don't linger on screen. It takes some trial and error to find a good position. I've had the best luck switching to normal shot here because your back missile placement is more evenly spaced than with auto.

But yeah, general rule of thumb, if you produce unwanted red items on the left hand side of the screen you'll be good. Producing them on the right, not so much.

Probably the biggest difference between ACFJOUZ and ACFJOUV' is that you'll be fine against Curious Chandelier with max shot power. Against Storm Causer, if you're not an advanced player who knows all of his patterns, powering all the way up is a death sentence.

I don't know so much of the different damage levels of the main shot. The safe state I uses to train Lance was witz the little blue energy balls this should be the reason why I had to face more enemy attacks on hin and my stategies didnt worked anymore.

I also testes the strategies on storm causer you talked about some weeks ago but I didn't know that I will do less damage If I have a more advanced weapon. good to know, that the weapon version with the balls are alsways(?) stonger. Is it one or two medals before max power up?

I Play with auto by the way but use normal fire in the moments were not so much is going on. The trick with your little ships was also very useful. Didn't know that.

Here are my runs if someone is interested:
ABDHLQV:
https://youtu.be/UOpyrSPVck4
ABEINSY:
https://youtu.be/abfdW1_p-tk
ACFJOUZ:
https://youtu.be/56iCnhyZtA8
ABEIMSX:
https://youtu.be/psCHrQDa5qc

Yeah when it comes to point blank damage, a shot level with the white spheres will always be most powerful. I've died and ended up with green wave plus white and done the speed kill on Storm Causer no problem. The only disadvantage of the white shots is that they don't penetrate through enemies or scenery.

With the large orange wave + white shot it's just one more level to max out.

I don't have the means to upload my replays, but if you have the Switch version you can watch my Zone Z and Zone V' runs via the leaderboards. Both are 2nd place. On Z, I power all the way up after the Octopus midboss capture. On V' you can see how I safely skip powerups to stay below max to do the Storm Causer speed kill though.

The first place scores are all by Mokkun on Switch who is the best Darius Gaiden player. His runs are very useful to watch, but he plays really aggressively and maxes out shot early so he can get more 5000 bonuses from the extra medals. This makes getting the captures and beating some final bosses way harder, so not recommended for beginners. This means you won't see from his replays how to smartly avoid powering up.

Currently I'm working on ACEHMSY with a goal of breaking 13 million. I can no miss the route, but sorting out all the scoring stuff, milking and rank boosting is gonna take me quite a while.

Many thanks for the hints. I've jesterday cleared ABDGLQW and used a bit of the new klowledge
In the last third of W, I had only one bomb left in stock and knew that there will be another red medal before the boss. So I suicided as a shield item was on the screen, took the shield and faced the boss with shield, three bombs and the big green wave with the white balls. My first indended suicide in a STG. Feels great! XD

So the Boss fight went fine despite I forgot about the last bomb I had in stock so I was killed by the huge spread attack of Coronatus, which coold have been easily prevented. Very sad

https://youtu.be/fHgTiOXGvK8

After that, I managed the planned hard routes
ABDGKPZ'
https://youtu.be/Q3hFxyK-RUs
and ACFJOUV'
https://youtu.be/qeJWhPbIv6M

For ABDGKPZ' I learned some of Crusty Hamers attacks but I found it te be too hard to dodge his little blue lasers so I used 2 bombs on hin. The last one was really not necessary but my position was to bad to dodge the lasers. On 12:40 I learned, that the bomb doesn't give you invinciblity on the first frame
Great Thing was as expected very hard and I used many resorces on hin. In Z' I had a very silly death colliding an a wall.

ACFJOUV' worked quite well with the weapon trick. Managed to come to Storm Causer with the right weapon and achieved the intended speed kill.

Decidet after that to go for a "regular autofire"-run on ABDHLQV, but Prickly Angler was much easier for me than Neon Light Illusion in "H", even if the stage "G" is much harder. So I changed to ABDGLQV. "Q" and especially "V" are much harder when playing without the fast autofire and it was kinda tricky to not dieing in the fals moments where you dont get the shield and the red powerup afterwards before facing Risk Storage. He is as well much trickier without the fast autofire... But Iam really glad, that I have completed the game "the hones way" (?) ^^

https://youtu.be/V6WPYXJvCcc

To get a tiny bit higher on the leaderboards, I did this route again with autofire to get a bit better score (of~8,9 mil)

I am not sure if I now drop this game or try a non autofire run on ABDGKPZ'.

Here's a useful page from the 1994 Gamest Mook for Darius Gaiden:



This shows the theoretical highest scoring potential for stages with autofire for all the highest scoring routes.

Notes:
- There are three numbers for each stage. The top left one is the stage score. The top right one is the boss score. The bottom one is the accumulated score progression for the run

- These are base scores without silver medals included.

- It's a bit confusing where they put the decimal points. On Zone A where it says 34.7 that means 347,000 pts.

- Because this guide book came out in 1994, some of the score totals have since been pushed higher. For example, Zone M stands out. Here aggressive rank boosting and milking strategies can produce a much higher score than what's shown. However for most stages these totals are still accurate.

Hi guys ! Sorry, I’ve been away for a while but I’ve finally decided to answer this discussion after a year of procrastination. I’ve kept following this thread all along, though I had not much to say about advanced scoring tricks against Deadly Crescent, Neon Light Illusion, etc (I'm not there yet), I was also focused on other games and wanted to leave Gaiden aside for a while. I’ve been playing the game here and there (including on the Saturn version) and there's been some progress : I've recently done a no-miss no-bomb on the Odious Trident route and improved on other sections. I still want to keep pushing this game in the long term, I'm now to a point where I feel I could destroy more boss parts and increase the rank without resorting to bomb.

@ Rastan78



Doesn’t seem like the panels were working, what you see on-screen doesn’t correspond to the players’s imputs as you can see them mash the autofire button and bomb (at 25:47), yet the autofire was showned working fine and no bomb is heard. My conclusion is that they were watching somebody else play, and that he/she was using an autofire circuit. The players are seen mashing, so definetely no auto cheating there . Goes to show mashing was considered natural for some (unlike Gaiden many games didn't have autofires included by default). Interesting movie, did not understand much but it was trippy



I can confirm that the sprite limit is much higher on the Saturn version, you don’t have to worry much about timing out your bombing right in zone J: https://youtu.be/sX3BuO18w-Q?t=540

I've also noticed that a big walker coming from behind in zone Z may not appear at times, I think this might have to do with the sprite limit, as I've had it not appear on high and low rank.

 

Did you find anything ? I don’t think I recall ever seeing something like that.



Interesting since the attract mode shows more spawns. Darius games attract modes like to showcase stuff that isn't in the game haha

Also regarding Golden Ogre's laser I just did a credit on the Saturn version and it did not appear, very curious as I'm sure I had seen it there. Will investigate on this;

Thanks a lot for all the insights and congrats for your score boosts ! I'm not to the point where I could no-miss no-bomb most final bosses (still haven't nmnb Curious Chandelier in the AC version...) but if I reach the point where I can do advance scoring with or without autofire I'll put the tips you have shared into practice

@ Angry Hina



I found it to be the easier course when I started playing the game on my Saturn (without the rapidfire code), but that version has much less rank and since ABEINSY has a lot of ranky bosses it’s comparatively much harder on arcade. H boss is really hard without 30hz, and ABDHLQV has les advantagous shield distribution than ABEINSY overall, so I still think ABEINSY is easier for a basic 1CC (a route ending in V is by far the easiest for no-miss, and no-bomb though) without autofire, as you avoid all difficult bosses and plattform stages, have better shield distribution, and don’t have to go through the trouble of learning zone G or Neon Light Illusion H. It's just my opinion though, people will find some routes/bosses easier, and others harder.

Also GG for your clears


@ MathU :

I had some questions :

- Is it reasonnable to aim for the last capture at high rank without mashing at all ? On the easier routes I’m at a point where I feel like I could increase the rank by scoring more on bosses but I was wondering how far could I push it (I don’t have a set-up that allows me to mash much).

- I noticed that for Odious Trident you are at maximum power-up for the main shot, is it necessary for blowing up all its parts ?

- I have a hard time getting 100% consistent in getting the two red p-ups in F safely, do you have any tips for that ? I've noticed you don't grab them very often.

Concerning your ACFJOUV scoring run (congrats again for that massive performance !) :

- Is there any reason why you did not pick up the second grey medal in the first stage ?

- I noticed you missed some ennemy waves on stage 1&2, was that intentionnal ? Is it due to rank ?

- Also noticed that while you were controlling the captains you shot sparsely, was that so that the captains destroyed less ennemies ?

Something else that might interest you : I found a consistent strat to no-miss no-bomb Crusty Hammer T without having to wait for its attacks to cycle. The strat is pretty simple : just point-blank the **** out of the boss, you have to do it fast enough otherwise the boss will launch an impossible pattern. You need to point-blank so close (you have some room to do that since the boss’s left part of the head doesn’t have an active hitbox) that the missiles don’t arc and then hit the boss’s back : when they go very high on the screen before going down, missiles take a lot of time to hit the boss, preventing new missiles to be fired due to the shot limit, so it’s very important they don’t travel anywhere. When the boss uses its claw I just dodge like usual, and try to nail as many hits as I can but it’s not critical if I don’t, as It’s really during moments when the boss sits there and does nothing that you need to point blank for this strat to work: https://youtu.be/YIZxrDnFjuw?t=965

Might not work at high rank, also made me notice that some bosses hitbox are much smaller than they look, and that you can exploit that to certain extends for doing significant dammage.

Hey Prickly Angler! Figured you would come around again sooner or later. Appreciated the PMs in the meantime. I'll just make some rambling points about DG and try to respond to some of the stuff you mentioned.

- If you are interested in destroying all boss parts of Odious Trident here are some useful screenshots:





You can see the hitboxes by accessing a hidden menu in Darius Gaiden Extra. Press 1P side plus 2P side C button at the same time. You can also turn on invincibility and play with various settings. Thanks to BareKnuckleRoo for discovering that trick.

Yeah max power is good for fighting him and picking off the hidden boss parts, unless you just want to quick kill then stay with orange and white shot. Same goes for Curious Chandelier. With OT be really careful about when you send him into 2nd or 3rd phase and avoid shooting off his lower remote cannons until you know how to time their destruction safely.

- About stage one spawns, if you go non default and crank the rank up in training mode you can go all the way up to 9. In normal gameplay you will only ever see 6 though on defaults. So stage one just did its own thing with the spawns.

I guess they went with a higher difficulty setting or rank on the attract mode to make the game look more intense at first glance?

- Another note about 44486, it's possible for your bomb input to drop here. Especially with the super tricky single bomb method which usually has your ship sprite disappearing. I had thought it was just me, or human error, but I saw a discussion on Twitter among Japanese players about this. Mokkun's solution was to have bomb set to autofire. You can comfirm this by seeing his replays on Switch and looking at the inputs. Mashing the bomb input would also help. Even if it's a rare occurrence it's not something you want ruining a good scoring run.

- About the stage scoring differences still prominent at high level play, I don't think anything unusual is happening. It's probably mostly kills stolen by midbosses. Some are quite easy to control and some aren't and whose getting the kill gets ambiguous. Even the stage 1 midboss for example requires extremely precise routing if you want to get the max stage score of 230,800. (not including silver medals) That requires not letting the midboss' flamethrower destroy even a single zako, but it is possible.

-From an earlier conversation:




So I was able to clear this up by looking at the Gamest Mook with this interview and doing some amateur translation with a little help. Where the translation says "shot continuously" Kurabayashi actually used the word "rensha" which 100% means rapidfire in Japanese. You can see this word printed on autofire buttons on Japanese cabs.

Also a little context, they're doing an interview for the strategy guide that came out in 1994 that all serious arcade players would read. This interview had to be done right as the game came out so it would be unlikely he would misremember any major function of the rank system.

So yeah you have the main programmer saying good luck raising the rank to get higher scores. Here's how you raise rank: first on the list, use autofire.

Also that he says there are between 256 and 16 real rank divisions makes a lot of sense. 256 ÷ 16 = 16 When you look more at the actual changes that take place you'll find big ones do tend to come at intervals of 16 such as the increases in enemy spawns.

Of course M2 set the rank meter to max at 255. A minor discrepancy there, but in practical terms there's not much in it.

Completely by accident, not sure I deserve the credit, but I'm glad it's helped with figuring out more stuff about the game.



Your stuff is always an interesting read, thank you for this.

Thanks a lot for the OT stuff, I had noticed that this boss had some parts to destroy that weren't highlighted due to you guys, and that those parts still exploded after blowing them up. I take plasma here because it's very annoying to avoid it when the two "turnpikes" ennemies come and decompose each other. I'm not at point where it'd be reasonnable to milk OT for points as I still have a bit of trouble with the boss, it would probably be more interesting for me to milk Prickly Angler and Deadly Crescent, and see how far I can push those in terms of rank so that last captain/boss are managable. As I've said I have a good margin I think, but I prefer to leave OT for later.

About 44486 I haven't dug into it seriously since I have to keep rank low for third captain (which isn't easy with single large green wave and no auto), and that means that I don't get maximum Prickly Angler larvas spawn. Also if I go to O I need the bombs for Fatty Glutton so I do 44486 without ever shooting, as I don't want to risk not getting the bomb due to sprite limit.

About the autofire thing it only proves that top jp players already used it to abuse the games to the fullest, and that they had to care for their costumers (that's how things work in Japan), tell them how rank worked, etc, not that they endorsed from a poietic stance (hence why would they have it mess tracking shots ? captain captures ? make it that you don't see half of boss patterns and that the game becomes piss easy to clear ? also why wouldn't it be there by default ?). You can still try to find more arguments but I'm not convinced yet...



Why did they do that ? That means rank in AC version is higher than on M2 version ?

No we are just talking about the number they chose to represent max value on the graph itself. It could come down to whether you consider the bottom value 0 or 1. So you end up with 0-255 or 1-256.



I'd say he's a boss where a lot of consistency will come in time with practice. He's very focused on memorizing and positioning correctly ahead of each attack. Execution isn't as hard as it first looks once you fall into a stable pattern, including having him change phases at the time of your choice.

He goes into 2nd phase really quickly so I like to hold off on that until I at least destroy the bottom fin. When he still has the bottom fin its easier for some of his 2nd phase patterns to corner you.



I had a feeling you might say that lol

@Prickly Angler, thought you might find this comment I came across from a Japanese player interesting.

-It shows that yes, there were Japanese players doing no miss no bomb runs without autofire circuits in the day. Too bad we don't know the scores.

-Very aggressive rank control not taking the shot past green/white wave and not going for hyper arm shield (gold) almost the entire game. I could imagine this would allow for easier midboss captures. Of course that means dodging many, many red and blue powerups which is a bit of a feat and requires precise routing sometimes to avoid them. And of course not getting hit so that you can afford to drop all the blue medals without dying. Maybe this is what the most optimized nonauto high score play would look like on some routes?

Actually I know very little about OT's phases, though I think I have seen most of its attacks. I'm just somehow consistent at speedkilling it. My next objective will probably be to reach 11M in V zone, as I think it's a nice milestone that I should have done a while ago. I’m gonna take ABDGKPV as P has a lot of points and I don’t feel like going for Deadly Crescent milk yet.



Lol. As I've said I do think they took autofire into consideration seing attract mode and that commentary regarding increasing fire frequency, just that they probably didn't balance it as they would have wanted, and didn't primarly designed the game around it. Regarding game balance here's the quotes I promised you from CC book, copied those some time ago but forgot to share them :

Akira Kubarayashi : we wanted to balance the game so that bosses could be defeated without the bombs , but it could be something to use in emergencies. But without the bombs the mantis shrimp is really tough. »

Hisakazu Kato :Oh yeah, that damn mantis shrimp ! (laughs)

Kubarayashi : my biggest regret is that we only had one month to adjust play balance. Some complain that a few of the bosses are a bit too hard to beat (laughs). And there’s also Storm Causer (common fangtooth). It was the last thing we made so I couldn’t do everything I wanted to.



Thanks a lot, very interesting. My guess is that the scores must have been very high considering how fast previous Darius games had been scored, probably close to MatU's runs, maybe more, maybe less. I do not understand what the player means by "condition of the arcade". btw To be honest, and even though I reckon that rank control in non-auto play is a very serious thing, I think pushing rank control that far is a bit too much : it's probably best to take whatever power-ups you need, even though for some very hard bosses I can def imagine not killing ennemies, not taking shields, not taking grey medals, not taking every shield, etc would definetely increase the odds of no-miss no-bombing them. I think optimized non-auto routes would still destroy some body parts and limit rank control, but not to the point that you wouldn't be able to no-miss no-bomb the final boss. Mashing might help a bit but as MathU and I have stated before not nearly as much as good rocket optimization.

In general with OT shooting him in the chin just under his mouth will continue to give boss part bonuses and make him appear more battle damaged up to the point where his eye is broken. If youre shooting at his chin long enough (try getting point blank with tour upper missiles) the pectoral fin will also get damaged enough to break. Shooting above the mouth at the red jewel on his head will contribute only to reducing his main HP level. You can almost think of it like he has one pool of HP that doesn't damage him but contributes to more points and one pool of HP that only kills him.

The rest of the boss parts are pretty self explanatory. Top and bottom fins which are easy to get, two spots in the tail that you can damage when he splits in half (even with autofire you need to get 2 cycles to finish both), and the two detachable cannons under his belly. Avoid killing those unless you know what you're doing as it can trigger a basically impossible pattern.

To destroy the belly cannons safely you need to be very selective about how much damage you deal to them throughout the battle so that you can quickly take them both out together at the correct time before finishing off the boss. The M2 gadgets are helpful here, but they show the HP of the 2 cannons as one pool of HP. So even with the gadgets its possible to mess up and prematurely kill one cannon. You want to get them down to around 100 HP jointly before finishing them off, but you can't be certain if it's 50/50 or one cannon has 95 and the other 5.

Edit: Here's what the pattern you get for prematurely destroying the rear most cannon under OT's belly looks like at high rank. You don't want that. Yeah this video proves it's technically not impossible to dodge, but you will never ever pull this off in a real run:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm39694331

This takes about 3 minutes and you will end up getting the cubes showing up around the time you finish the cannons off. A lot of that is due to waiting for the cycles you need to occur to damage certain parts safely.

-Thanks for the quotes. I found some other stuff via an old archived website that Kurabayashi made. It has some interesting stuff about the ideas behind the boss designs and what species of animal they're inspired by including pictures. The various forms of Prickly Angler are surprisingly accurate to the real species.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071231102 ... boss.shtml

There's an old BBS with messages, but nothing too important. He did talk about autofire again more or less pointing out the obvious. Strategies are different, you can kill bosses quickly with the right positioning. He said it seems like a hard game to clear without auto and made some type of comparison to Gun Frontier? I could be wrong. Not really easy to make out too much more via Google translate and too tedious to look through the archived pages.

He mentioned working on proofreading the Gamest strategy book, complaining about all the typos. It seems like he meant the web site to be sort of an addendum to the Gamest guide bc he didn't feel like it gave enough info about the bosses.

-Good luck on the V route 11M. The scoring potential might be a little lower than ACEHLQV but you also don't have to worry about the rank increase bug (or I wonder if maybe it was really intentional?) from King Fossil. ACE is really high scoring if you take all the boss parts, but the rank increase is also huge.

And yes getting all boss parts on Deadly Crescent is tough. So much easier to just not trigger his extending neck attack. This game loves to troll you with booby traps for destroying certain boss parts.

I'm hitting 11M scores on Zone Y now, but the tricks needed to go further are a bit intimidating. All boss parts on Odious and Deadly Crescent (I can do DC I just haven't been risking it yet) and the big one will be milking Titanic Lance respawning turret section at high rank.

I used to think the reason that pro players go to extreme lengths to rank boost and time out every area before TL was to increase the durability of the turret section. But I think the durability doesn't actually change. It's more about the rate that the turrets respawn at. The section will time out automatically, so it's a race to destroy as many turrets (30k each!!) In the time allowed while still destroying the base section at the last possible moment. And you need to avoid having white spheres in your shot level bc they will destroy the section prematurely.

I share your thoughts on autofire. That they made some attempt to balance the game around auto, but it didn't completely work out with the time given. For example being able to use auto only when necessary you can do cheesy survival clears without much rank increase (possibly even lower rank than without auto). I wonder if Garrega's system where touching an autofire button will permanently lock you to that rate and cause you to suffer the rank increase for the rest of the run was a response to that design problem?

Here's a little more Darius autofire lore/history via the Japanese @wiki strategy guides:

Regarding Darius Gaiden:


So according to this wiki you had a somewhat official strategy guide suggesting arcades do install autofire at the time of release. Also bearing in mind Kurabayashi said they proofread the Gamest guide. It seems the devs and magazines worked fairly closely. It was actually a well known Gamest editor that supplied Taito with the suggested change list for Darius Extra Version.

But what's maybe more interesting is that back at the time of release of Darius II you had the exact opposite thing happening. There was a Taito staff who suggested arcades should NOT install auto as default on Darius II cabinets or run the game on the easier A difficulty:





So you had the official Taito no auto edict coming down from the highest power. There you go, MathU!

BTW the G-Darius 200 yen instruction refers to the fact that they wanted arcades to run it at that default when it released. The decision backfired bc people didn't want to pay 200 yen to play a Darius game on a single screen cab.

Tbh I think DG without auto is probably much easier than GF with auto, it's really not that hard if you're aiming for just a 1CC with an easy final boss, and if you use your ressources right.



That'd be pointless since that route is only doable if you no-bomb Neon Light Illusion H, and he's really hard without auto. G and P give quite a lot of points so it's not that bad, but ABDGKPV is only optimal if I use only one bomb on Fatty Glutton K, and he is a real bastard. Otherwise I can just do ABDGLQV/ABDHLQV and milk Prickly Angler, Double Dealer and Deadly Crescent a bit.



Maybe ? Hard to know. I personnally like that the game lets you cheese it and do easy survival clears (even without auto), and since the game rewards you for no-missing, increasing rank, milking, etc you can always go for a more advanced approach at your own rythm.



Yeah the japanese scorers use pretty much anything if it means more score (autofire, frame buttons, reset buttons, service menu, etc).



I think the frequency is 10 shots per second in Darius II from what I've seen from Sagaia PCB footage, and that's the default frequency in the Saturn port (which by the way is much more faithfull than Darius Gaiden port). According to this comment the decision to turn autofire off on their early game was a one made by the higher ups that wanted to grab more coins from the customers, and that later on on they allowed devs to implement it on some later games like RayForce or Darius Gaiden. Big thanks to Taito for allowing me to play Darius Gaiden without external cheats or mashing, I really appreciate that

I think that's more or less what Kurabayashi was saying. Someone was complaining they couldn't get anywhere without autofire in DG, and he was saying well its not as bad as Gun Frontier.



I recently got good enough at this guy to be pretty consistent. I can handle him no bomb without auto or with auto at 135 rank or so. Pros do him at more like 170 rank and milk him for 3.5 mins!? Actually I think the fast bullet speed on the first pattern makes him almost scarier in a high rank auto run. Yeah without auto you have to dodge more later on, but that's nothing compared to that ridiculous first pattern. I'm still afraid to go for the bonus of the tentacles destroyed at the innermost joint.

It took me an embarrassing long while bc I don't really play bullet hell games, but you have to sort of unfocus your eyes so you can see the movement of all the bullets at once to predict where openings will occur. Focus too much on your ship or any one specific area and the pattern will look like pure chaos. Sometimes I'll still randomly stare at my ship and just completely loose sight of the openings and freeze up.

When you're dodging the next round where the top tentacle remains, but you've taken off the bottom one, the main trick is to move to the left occasionally and dive back into the bullet spread for a moment. The lower right corner looks almost like a safe spot, but if you hang down there too long you'll get cornered.



I like games that have this approach too. This is where just ranking games difficulty on survival 1CC misses the whole picture. A game like DG is basically as easy or as difficult as the goals you set, and there's always still something left to learn or improve.

BTW here's a pic of comparing DII firing rates to the full auto dip switch up at the top. There's a negligible difference between the spacing of 10 and 12hz, but 12 looks identical.




LOL. Honestly G Darius is the strangest one. I've read you need to mash up to 16 hz to counter certain final boss beams. Can't confirm bc I've never even tried to do those without auto. Yes, that's humanly possible, but only barely, and by freaks of nature.

Yeah NLI H's first pattern is the most dangerous. You should try to find a way to upload your replays so I can see your strats

I notice the difference between 10 and 12hz, and use them in different situations. Maybe it's just a placebo effect ?

Yeah I would like to upload my runs, but don't have the means ATM. I can get shitty 30 second clips from the Switch which could actually have some use for showing specific strategies. If I get to 13M on Zone Y maybe I'll reach out to a good samaritan who could capture my runs from the Switch leaderboards.

Speaking of which check this out:

https://t.co/k8xxTdPgKe

There has been some good completion on the Switch leaderboards for the V' route. After I took second place from the player with 103 in their handle with 11.83, he jumped up to first with and epic 11.91 while Mokkun was sitting at 11.90. So Mokkun goes back at it attempting to get back first place and look how close he came! I don't think I've ever seen such a small differential separating scores in any game.

Funny thing is Mokkun's run was much more optimized. It was the grey medal luck that accounted for 103's score being better as he got about 100k extra by luck. If Mokkun had similar luck you would be looking at a new WR of over 12M which hasn't been achieved yet by any player.

Either way it's making me feel like I have to get back in there and try to hit 11.9 at some point.

Some more random Darius Gaiden trivia/info:

- According to Kurabayashi's long defunct website, the cityscape background you see in Zone A was the original design for the stage. They decided it was too similar to Metal Black stage 1 and didn't seem Darius enough. Guess that explains why it suddenly fades to a BG that looks almost exactly like Zone B from the original Darius before switching back to the cityscape for the boss fight. It's a random juxtaposition that doesnt really make sense, but turned out to be pretty cool anyway. Also the skyscraper the boss destroys with his tail was originally a rectangular planet earth style one like you see in Metal Black and was altered to appear more rounded and alien.

- He also pointed out that Crusty Hammer had 3D animated moves in the style of Golden Ogre. They were forced to omit them due to sprite limitations etc.

- The name Ancient Dozer comes from the fact that horseshoe crabs resemble ancient fossils, and that the boss bulldozes the trees up from the ground. Something that wouldn't be obvious if you only had the Saturn version as the trees from the arcade version are missing during the fight.

- Checking out the hitboxes for Odious Trident I stumbled upon the fact that the flamingos that fly out of the jungle before the boss have a hurtbox. You can't shoot them, but you can bomb them, and they get sucked into the black hole bomb. They award no points. So if you are a sick bastard who likes to hurt animals and doesn't care about score, you can bomb them.

Edit: IMO has a video showing the poor birds being BHB'ed into oblivion. Incidentally it shows how fucking annoying that last little section before the boss is at max rank. So easy to lose a shield hit or two right there when you need them all for the boss fight.

https://youtu.be/OYH3Dsit7J4

It's easy to imagine Yagawa, as an avid Darius Gaiden player, was inspired by this detail for the iconic bombing the flamingos section in Garegga. Pure speculation on my part though. Guess we would never know?

- The attract mode shows a rapidfire rate of 15hz.

Huh. I guess it is sort of reminiscent of Metal Black, though the colour palette is quite different. I always thought the BG change was you entering a building or something.



I'm glad that the discovery of the hitbox option is opening up new insights into wanton animal murdering in shmups.



Bastards, I knew it was high. I'll never feel guilty about using 15 hz auto on this, ever :V

Here's the full quote from Kurabayashi:



I guess we'll never know what that initial stage 1 design looked like? Yeah they do that transition to the inside of a building a couple times, but the other ones make a little more sense. The coolest is probably the beginning of Zone X. You start out in the clouds, see a flying enemy base approach, then shoot down the door and go in to take out the machinery inside. Top notch presentation for 1994.

For some reason flamingos will never be safe.

Twilight Rascal? There's just something about those weird and funky Darius boss names.



Well if you play for score at a certain point you have to go for 30hz bc you will never quite reach the top level scores with 15.

Overall 15hz is really useful though. Other than point blanking it works better all around. 30 is actually awkward to use in specific situations and a slower rate or even the default is better.

On routes that require max rank boosting by holding down 30hz all the time, you'll see top players do various shenanigans to avoid creating big gaps in the shot stream.

I play with 4 shot buttons. Default, 15hz, 30hz front and 30hz back and frequently alternate between them all as needed.

That samaritain would get all my regognition ! What's your ranking for each route btw ? Mine are pretty awfull for Gaiden since I don't play the auto meta much, but some scores are alright in other games (even got a few first places).



I’ve always said that the random grey items was probably the best idea you could add to any scoring system, and this proves my point . Feel free not to grab them if you don't want to try your luck, but if you play for lottery and don’t succeed then don’t blame bad luck (you’re also free not to got for score in any Darius game)



Lmao, that is such a nice detail . Does it mean that you’re not (or at least less of) a sick bastard if you slaughter birds or civilians and get rewarded points for doing that ?



Maybe there’s some connection to Gun Frontier yeah.



Can you give some exemples of spots where you think it’s better to use 15 over 30 ? I assume that use don't use reversed 15 because there's no place were you want to use 15 while having a captain captured ?

I think I'm 2nd Zone Z and 3rd for Zone Y and V' on Switch. Saw your Sagaia scores BTW which were very impressive.

And I have learned to love the grey medals in this game. Maybe Stockholm syndrome?



If they give points then sorry, they must be sacrificed. No remorse.



In general, if you are shooting full screen where it's just zako or the sprite limit would mean 30hz can't put more shots on the screen anyway. 15 is still effective with less rank increase. 30 is of course much more powerful up close for bosses and high health enemies.

A specific example where 15hz helps is the Golden Ogre point milk. Especially if you don't keep the three white spheres and level up to the thin yellow laser.

Check out this replay at the Golden Ogre fight.
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm24495400
Every time Mokkun starts shooting he goes to a precise spacing close enough to the right edge, holds 30hz then moves left. That's to set up a safe shot spacing so he won't get tagged during the gaps. 15hz makes this brain dead easy as you can just fire from pretty much anywhere and be ok.

If you're worried about max rank boost you can quickly hold 15 then switch to 30 and the spacing will be maintained.

As far as having 15hz front/ back, in theory it would work, but would be redundant. Only certain midboss attacks can be cancelled and they're alive for a short time. The rest is about manipulating their movement. The final octopus capture for example: you can cancel his shots with the correct autofire odd/even timing, but even with no autofire you can drag him to the bottom of the screen then continue to mash the special input command and he'll disappear completely.

The trick does rely on having synchronized auto. So on a real cab it has to be a circuit that feeds the sync signal into the autofire's chip before going out to the monitor. 30hz fire really only works perfectly if a board runs at true 60hz. For the midboss cancelling the rate has to be locked to the actual refresh of the PCB which is slightly slower than 60.

Forgive my ignorance; what's the difference between the "front" and "back" buttons here? How do you know whether to use one or the other?

When you have captured midbosses you don't want them to kill things in this game bc you don't get any points. Basically the opposite of G Darius where you want to kill everything with captures.

It seems for certain midboss attacks the game only allows you to fire them every other frame. So if you're pressing fire only on the opposite frames the midboss doesn't shoot at all. 30hz auto will sometimes line up to fire only on the correct frames to cancel the shots and sometimes not. Probably due to when the machine was turned on, a credit was started or some other minor factors you can't control. By having one auto that fires on odd frames and the other on even you can consistently have one button that will cancel midboss fire on every single credit without leaving it up to luck.

M2 was cool enough to set this up in the options for Cozmic Collection so you can play on an even footing with arcade players who have this setup on real hardware. That being said it's only going to make a difference for players who are really optimizing. Losing the final enemy wave bonus to the midboss stealing the kill can be impactful, but you're not going to suddenly blow an old score out of the water just with this trick. It's very useful but only effective on certain captures.

1st zone captain: shoots with a flamethrower that can't be canceled. You just have to rely on precise routing to misdirect him from killing stuff.

2nd zone: using 30hz on the wrong frame will still cancel most of his bullets for some reason. 30hz on the correct frame will make him stop firing completely. Easy one.

3rd zone: has two attacks. A straight purple rapid laser and a large yellow sphere with moderate homing properties. 30hz on the correct frame can cancel only the purple laser. The large sphere is powerful and it's difficult to avoid having it steal kills.

5th zone: it snakes around the screen and chases down enemies without firing. You need to rely on using his hadoken style command to manipulate him away from enemies or to lock him down off screen.

6th zone: his powerful machine gun can be completely neutralized with the correct auto button. Easy as pie

7th zone: the octopus' shots can be cancelled completely, but it's also helpful to manipulate him off the screen bc he roams around and has a tendency to hit things with his tentacles.

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?