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[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The kanji means they are currently selected into a team.

The stars show how many times the robo has been combined with same type (bottom right button in team menu).

You won't pass the game if you always wait to fuse before ever upgrading.

Fusing same type raises the base (max) a robo can get to, but also drops the power to 1 (the drop is why people try to wait until the stars are maxed before sinking resources into it).

N robos quickly become worthless for anything other than selling for money. The way to upgrade is with the special EXP robos you get from the daily challenges. If you are using N robos you are wasting your time (unless you are really early in the game).

You will end up having to come up with different combos of robo colors. Mostly just use all one color (the suggested gem it shows you) but sometimes you have to play a boss level test run first and see which color enemies each stage within it uses, then use a 2-color custom team and stick with the right gem color per stage. There are some boss stages where I found using your best robo in each color worked best for overall damage, but that was very rare. There were even times where ignoring the colors were best and just using my all black team did the best damage because they were so much more powerful than my other teams at the time. You have to experiment.

The way to get those special robos is more complicated now after updates. If you just buy robos in a gacha machine it's random. The way to "buy" them to be more sure is you have to use huge amounts of "BP" attacks on them when you see them clinging to a ship in a treasure hunt. The normal 10 BP you get on each stage won't be remotely enough to release them. You will need to purchase more with real money (or you might have enough gift tickets to get lucky once).

I've beaten all the current stages, that's why I quit playing it, and they still haven't added more.

[cave hermit]

No offense Muchi Muchi Spork, but I really don't get the hype over this game: I watched a bunch of your gameplay videos after reading your recommendations, and all I see in terms of gameplay is moving your ship on the x axis to dodge very slow moving bullets, collecting gems, and from time to time using a bunch of super deformed characters to deal heavy damage to stronger enemies. Is there something I'm missing here?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

There isn't really any hype over the game. Me, Cagar and like 2-3 other people here like it.

Whenever someone talks about a Cave gameplay/scoring system as for why it's fun or not, it rarely has any meaning to me. In other words, if someone described one to me I hadn't played, with the exception of maybe Ibara Kuro it wouldn't tell me if I was going to have fun playing it or not. You just have to try it out. It is more complicated than your explanation but it's not complicated for a Cave system. It's simply fun.

Also I'm not so sure the bullets should be as slow as they are in my videos. I'm on 4S and I think it's "optimized for the 5" as most apps are these days. So I'm not sure if all that slowdown in my videos is intentional. They are also way far in the game after I'd powered my teams up for months and months. I've heard people talk about how challenging it is starting from the beginning. Anyway, it's free and I have a tutorial showing how to install it so, that is that.

[cave hermit]

I actually don't understand this whole team and robo thing: so you level them up, they randomly drop or you buy them, you fuse them, and then they all team up to burst attack bosses? What's the deal with them?

I don't see any score, so I'm assuming this is survival only? Are you fighting against a timer? I really don't see any challenge in actually dodging bullets, and given all the talk about leveling robos, I'm guessing you're supposed to deal enough damage before some timer runs out?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The way to learn all these little things about it is to read the threads and then play it for an hour.

Robos randomly drop out of treasure hunts, end stage bonuses, completing missions, buying, etc. You power them up and later replace them with robos that have higher potential. Some robos have abilities to use BP as indicated by a color circle on their card as I've explained in the past. Some are cutters, shot power up, healers, and poppers (change all bullets to gems or stars). You get 10 BP for each fight and some robos might require between 2-5 BP per attack.

An RPG attack happens when you fill your stars up. You score by saving up gems before the RPG attacks. Based on points you get between 1-3 trophies per stage. Score is also determined by how powerful your robos are - the more powerful they are the more damage they will do in an RPG attack and the more points you get (imagine it like gems x robo power = score).

If you take too long bosses will have a timer and then descend on you, then it gets really challenging. There is also your gas tank which can't run out or you die, and getting hit gives it a hit.

Anyway, I don't want to write a book on the game.

[slateman]

MMS, thanks for the tips. This game is no DDP, nor is it a standard RPG, but it's a fun mix of the two that, I agree, has to played to enjoy. However, at first it took me a while and I almost dropped out entirely (if I didn't make that DDP site, I may have given up entirely.)

I had some more questions, but just not too much time to play. I have issues with running out of fuel on some levels. I figure it's a problem w/ my team that's the issue.

Every so often I'll get a Treasure Hunt w/ a boss who has CRAZY hit points. I had one who was a rainbow boss (treasure hunt) who had 99k. Not a chance I was beating him.

I also find if I get hit even once I'm totally screwed. I'll almost never have enough fuel to finish.

And...how does attack mode work? I get you have to charge up stars. Do you need a certain number of gems to unleash each character? By this I mean sometimes I initiate attack mode but only a few characters are highlighted to attack. I don't really understand.

And for score, I *don't want stars*? Save gems without collecting stars (b/c stars initiate attack mode which use up all your gems)?

When choosing a partner, I try to go for a similar color, high level, etc...but mainly fuel dictates it all.

I've found I try to power up a pair of characters for each color, so that for any color enemy I'll have a team of two of that color and other guys of high level. Sound reasonable?

Sorry for rudimentary questions but I kinda like this game. I like seeing the familiar faces (even though I never seem to get any good characters!.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

If you are running out of fuel and it's not from being hit, your 2 options are to power up your characters before returning to the level by playing the daily specials to get the EXP robos to use for powerups so you can defeat enemies quicker or to use a recharge/refuel battery. You can get batteries either by buying them with real money or by beating the top level (hardest) daily special level challenge (but only when it is the bonus for the day - it tells you when it is when you first choose the level, it will be either a battery or an R EXP robo). Batteries also pop out when you beat some missions and when you beat some end stage bosses.

When you see the impossible rainbow etc. guys in a treasure hunt, that is actually a situation where you have the option to buy (with real money) the prize. You have to buy tons of BP refills at 100 yen each and unleash hell (prepay and have those real-money-purchase oval gems in stock waiting).

Getting hit once will sometimes end you, yes. It's not so easy as some people think.

You need a certain amount of gems to do any worthwhile damage. I think the minimum to send special attacks you are talking about in RPG mode is maybe 20, but the more the better, and the more powerful and type of robo, the different and more powerful RPG attacks there are that get unleashed.

Yes a lot of the time you want to avoid stars so you can save up gems before entering RPG mode (to avoid most of them you need to keep your finger off the screen, this is how Cave gets in their element of "discomfort for the player = reward"). That isn't always the case. For example, say the enemy only has barely any hit points left and you are about to run out of gas. You need an RPG attack as quickly as possible in that case, and it doesn't matter if you have no gems if any RPG attack will finish him off and let you pass the level, so you'd just get as many stars as quickly as possible in this case.

Some healer characters (pink circle on card) have the ability to give you fuel back during a battle at the cost of some BP. Some random robos also have special abilities that automatically add small amount of fuel back to your stock during each boss/miniboss defeat. You can only read about these little details if you can read Japanese, but I can't read a bit and still cleared every level.

Color question - no not really, you need to aim to have teams all of one color and have them all working toward being maxed out, if you want to make it through the game. Even when you do that you will end up eating up some characters that you spent a lot of time powering up when you get robos later released that have higher potential.

The main thing that makes this game different from Cave's others and classic shooters is the powerup system. There is no longer a "anybody sit right down and have an even playing field" element. You invest tons of time building up teams (playing the daily special levels each day you play the game) or else you have no chance in hell. It isn't necessarily a good thing, or at least it wouldn't be for an arcade game, but in an ios game, it works to help add replay value and keep you interested.

[Vetus]

Soooo...did they made an english release for Donpaccin? The japanese Android seems to be removed from Google Play. Also two other questions about it:
1) Can you play it offline or you must be online?
2) Since it's F2P, could someone please send me the apk file via pm?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

It's doing the same stuff on ios, when I load it up it gives a Japanese message then goes to a blank page in the iTunes store (even when logged into my Japan account) and that's it, broken, won't play, and can't find it in the store anymore. And no there was no English release and it won't play without a connection to the server. Maybe it's gone for good and they didn't feel it was worth making the new levels and keeping the server running, seems odd, but I don't know why else it would disappear. If it was just being updated for more levels or whatever then there would be no reason to remove it first. I guess most of the world missed out on this one. At least I got to clear all the levels...

[Cagar]

It's doing the same stuff on ios, when I load it up it gives a Japanese message then goes to a blank page in the iTunes store (even when logged into my Japan account) and that's it, broken, won't play, and can't find it in the store anymore. And no there was no English release and it won't play without a connection to the server. Maybe it's gone for good and they didn't feel it was worth making the new levels and keeping the server running, seems odd, but I don't know why else it would disappear. If it was just being updated for more levels or whatever then there would be no reason to remove it first. I guess most of the world missed out on this one. At least I got to clear all the levels...

Yeah, I remember seeing a message with plain black background in the news section just a while ago when I played it. Maybe it was an announcement that the game is going to be closed?

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Maybe it stopped being profitable. I'm not sure how much it costs to run the server or the amount of work time it took for the updates like special bonus levels and high level gacha stuff to be created. Sad but like I said a long time ago, you either play it now or you miss out forever. That's how it always was with the temp special levels etc. I imagine a lot of people will be pissed though who dropped wads of cash on the expensive purchases. Lots of time investment building up teams too. Weird and sad. It was one of the best ios games no doubt.

[guigui]

Ouch. I planned to try it out, once I could get the apk installer file, which is kind of hard to find as Vetus pointed out.

[Vetus]

Maybe it stopped being profitable. I'm not sure how much it costs to run the server or the amount of work time it took for the updates like special bonus levels and high level gacha stuff to be created. Sad but like I said a long time ago, you either play it now or you miss out forever. That's how it always was with the temp special levels etc. I imagine a lot of people will be pissed though who dropped wads of cash on the expensive purchases. Lots of time investment building up teams too. Weird and sad. It was one of the best ios games no doubt.

And that's why paid, offline games are much better than F2P online games. Or they could at least make an offline, paid version after removing the F2P version. Maybe in a different reality where Cave don't give their games to shady korean developers who don't know how to make a proper smartphone game.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

They would have to redesign a lot of the game to make an offline version and I'm sure they figured if it was no longer profitable online then that wouldn't be worth the money investment for offline either. I'd like say that it would be if they also gave it an English option but it probably still wouldn't be. It seems like there are only a few hundred hardcore Cave fans outside of Japan. You can make the best games in the world and still go broke (Cave) and you can make the worst software in the world and be the most profitable (Apple). This is the world we live in.