GD: Karous

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Kiken
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GD: Karous

Post by Kiken »

Here are the locations of all five hidden MileStone logos:

Stage 1 Location
This is close to the end of the stage... right before Karous rises up into the clouds. You must use Shot.

Stage 2 Location
This is right at the end of the level. You must use Shot.

Stage 3 Location
This is shortly after the battle with the midboss. The DFS is sorta covering things up.. but the building with the 3 blue towers is the target. You must use Sword.

Stage 4 Location
This is right near the beginning of the level (maybe two screen-lengths into the stage). The far right side in the middle of the railroad tracks is the location. You must use Shield.

Stage 5 Location
This is right near the beginning of the stage. As Karous passes up over the city onto a ledge, there are a series of columns lining both sides of the screen. On the left side, to the left of the second column is the hit location. You must use Shield.


The logos are accessible in both Normal and Hard mode.

After reading through the manual, it states that there are two requirements for fighting the TLB:
1. Finding the hidden logos
2. Defeating the stage 5 boss (he can't time out)
You may continue and still get to the TLB.

Each weapon maxes out at level 100.
First weapon upgrade occurs at level 20.
Second weapon upgrade occurs at level 50.


I figured that I'd add some general notes on scoring:

1. Be aggressive! Point-blank as much as possible.

2. Do not rely on Shot, it's pretty weak. Focus on using Sword which is much stronger.

3. Kill enemy formations as fast as possible. The more you kill, the more appear on-screen. Pushing the bonus enemies in the later levels can actually cause the stage to lengthen.

4. Do not be afraid of using Shield. Do not risk dodging what you can easily block and receive points for.
Last edited by Kiken on Fri Apr 13, 2007 11:12 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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Kiken
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Post by Kiken »

I believe I have found the two missing MileStone logos:

Stage 4:

Near the beginning of the level (only a couple of screens in) there's a railroad bridge. On the far right side of the bridge, in the center is the hit-location for the logo... however, I have not been able to get it to appear.

Stage 5:

Again, near the beginning of the level as soon as you fly up to the second tier overlooking the city, there'll be a road on the left side of the screen. Near the start of this road is the hit location for the logo... but once again, I haven't been able to make it appear.
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Kiel
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Post by Kiel »

Cool, I'll see if I can get anything when I get home from work tonight.
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Post by louisg »

If you are using both the sword and the shot at the same time, does the sword power up as quickly as if you were only using it? Or, is there a finite number of exp. points which get divided between the two?
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Kiken
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Post by Kiken »

louisg wrote:If you are using both the sword and the shot at the same time, does the sword power up as quickly as if you were only using it? Or, is there a finite number of exp. points which get divided between the two?
Using two weapons simulatenously splits the experience between the two. If you want to power-up a specific weapon quickly, just use it without any others.
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Post by Kiel »

I saw where the one in the 4th satge is but I havent been able to get it.

Any recomendations for the 4th level mid boss and boss? The mid boss in this level is the worst enemy in the game, I always get hit at least one either from the laser formation (i get hit with the regular shots if not from the laser) or the pattern where the shots spiral around the screen. and I just have to time out the boss...
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Post by Kiken »

Kiel wrote:I saw where the one in the 4th satge is but I havent been able to get it.

Any recomendations for the 4th level mid boss and boss? The mid boss in this level is the worst enemy in the game, I always get hit at least one either from the laser formation (i get hit with the regular shots if not from the laser) or the pattern where the shots spiral around the screen. and I just have to time out the boss...
Ok, here's how I handle the stage 4 mid-boss:

Before she appears I move to about an inch shy of the top of the screen and start swinging my sword. As she appears, I start to move backwards little by little as the first weak spread is fired. This normally means I get in a solid quarter of her bar taken off. I move toward the bottom of the screen and stop attacking (raising my shield). The next attack is a spray from both of her wings. I move straight up through the attack which normally creates a ton of those little ray shields. I'll get in a couple more licks with the sword as I begin to pull back to about mid-screen. The next attack is the swinging arm lasers. I stay up (this is the major trick.. get above the lasers), and move straight into her face using sword and DFS to get rid of the few stray shots she fires while swinging back and forth. As the DFS wears off I start backing up and put up my shield. The next attack is the super wave spread from the underside of the mech. I point-blank this with shield. Next I back up a bit and move to the right (about 3/4s the way over). She'll fire that really hectic Ketsui-Stage-5-Boss pattern (the two little mines that fly around and shoot spiral formations). If you're in the right place, the right mine should fly right around you... just watch out for the straight shots from the left mine. Now the pattern repeats. She shouldn't get much further than this if you're really laying into her with sword.

Remember, there is no miss with enemy contact... don't be afraid to get all up in an enemy/boss' grill.
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Post by louisg »

This is kind of a lame Milestone newbie question, but..why is it worth it to power up the shield? I can't seem to find a use for it.
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Post by Kiken »

Ok, I figured out how to get the stage 4 logo to appear. You have to use Shield.

I noticed in the hints that Shigi marks a point on the map with a star. The star is colored in accordance with your attacks (the stage four star was orange). The stage 3 star is green (so you are required to use sword to locate it). Now if only she'll leave a hint for stage 5 so that I can see what weapon needs to be used.
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Post by Kiken »

louisg wrote:This is kind of a lame Milestone newbie question, but..why is it worth it to power up the shield? I can't seem to find a use for it.
The monolithic stealth bot enemies can only be killed with Shield. Not to mention, when shield hits level 50, it releases entire series of arching beams. This is really helpful against many of the later bosses.
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Post by Kiken »

I finally managed to trigger the fifth logo and got to fight the TLB.. whose second form is total cheese (tons of solid lasers that fire in sweeping formations).

If you snag all five logos and kill the stage 5 boss, white feathers will fall down the screen (like at the title screen) and it will fade to black. It will then come back up with the TLB (who is worth over a billion pts himself). I credit fed to learn his patterns.. it's going to take some practice to get past him on a single credit.
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Post by Kiel »

Way to go man, I still gotta work on the last boss.
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Post by Kiken »

Some rather interesting Karous vids were just linked from Danmakugata:

Stage 1
Stage 2

The guy uses Shield almost exclusively in stage 1.. as a result, he gets the weapon past level 50 by the boss fight. Stage 2 he spends working on sword during the level and then focuses on shot for the boss.

I'm really interested to see what he does in stage 3. As is... I normally pull around 30 million in stage 1 and around 160 million in stage 2 (since I spend the boss fight leveling up shield, the fight lasts much longer and I can milk more points out of the boss).
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Post by gavin19 »

I tried this method out of curiousity and managed to get level 60 by the end of Stage 1. But, I only managed 25 million, whereas the video shows he gets 35 million.
Anyway, the shield being powered up so much seemed to ruin a lot of the milking aspects of the bosses, and I ended up with an almost identical score/level as if I had done a 'standard' run.
It did make things a lot easier in the later levels though, by which time I had levels 97/83/40 for shield/sword/shot. The shield was just decimating everything in it's path.
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Post by Kiken »

He released video of stage 3.

And yes, G19, I agree. Leveling up Shield too quickly actually seems detrimental to a degree.
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Post by Kiken »

Same guy from before, with stage 4 and stage 5.

This guy really isn't very aggresive. I'm still wondering what he does at the TLB though (not shown in the stage 5 replay).
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Post by gavin19 »

Yes, any sort of TLB replay would be good. I have gotten to him without losing a single life a couple of times and always with at least 3, but still no luck. I always get a good chunk (25%) of his life off immediately by point blanking, but from then on in it's a combination of chipping away slowly with the shot and getting sliced to bits by those damn lasers. Help please.

EDIT : Its ok, I just noticed his (otomokanemitsu(?)) replay of the TLB on youtube where he takes out all the cannons first and then sacrifices a few lives point-blanking the main figure to death.

Just out of curiousity Kiken, is that how you tackle him too?
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Post by Kiken »

g19 wrote:Yes, any sort of TLB replay would be good. I have gotten to him without losing a single life a couple of times and always with at least 3, but still no luck. I always get a good chunk (25%) of his life off immediately by point blanking, but from then on in it's a combination of chipping away slowly with the shot and getting sliced to bits by those damn lasers. Help please.
Ok.. here's how you handle the TLB... don't point-blank him!

Stay back and take out all of the little red whack-a-mole things first. Then use shot to take out the head, shoulders and chest plate of the boss (sending it into its second form). Obviously you should have a DFS saved up at this point. Now point-blank the boss with sword. Once the DFS subsides, move into the upper-right or upper-left of the screen and dodge the shots from the head (I normally stop firing and try to absorb as much crap into my shield as possible). At this location you'll be out of range of the lasers. Save up another DFS and attack the head again. Repeat.

The guy I've been linking to has posted his TLB vid. Not bad.. he ends with 2.3 billion.

I have recorded a complete run (scoring slightly higher than my top score over in the high-score thread) and will post it to Super-Play in a couple of days.
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Post by Herr Schatten »

Kiken wrote:I have recorded a complete run (scoring slightly higher than my top score over in the high-score thread) and will post it to Super-Play in a couple of days.
Great. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

I'm still struggling with the bosses of stages 4 and 5. It always throws me off that I'm supposed to destroy certain parts of the bosses first to be even able to reduce their health and I haven't developed a good strategy yet.
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Post by gavin19 »

Thanks Kiken. I attempted a couple more runs and managed to take the TLB to 10% health, but as I only had 2 lives going into the battle that's as far as I made it. I know I can do this though, I just need one good clean run.
If I ever lose a life it's always trying to get those shield-activated logos in stages 4/5. Anyway, thanks for the advice and I look forward to watching your replay soon.

Herr Schatten, for stages 4+5 bosses I simply plagiarised Kiken's strategies as seen in his vids posted here and on youtube :oops: I was always happy enough to just time-out those two, but as you need to kill the stage 5 boss to access the TLB I 'borrowed' his approach.

EDIT : Unrelated to anything in particular, but in my final run in Hard mode last night, I somehow triggered an extend in stage 1 from the very first 'power-up ship' ie. the ones with the '?' on the front of them. I didn't do anything different then I normally would though, just thought I'd mention it :)
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Post by antares »

OK, I just play Karous for a few days now and have a few questions:
Is there any scoresystem other than kill as much enemies as possible and milk the bosses?
I always tried to hit the "blue triangles" with sword to make them bigger as this increases the score but in the videos on youtube and the superplay from Kiken no one seems to care about these. Are they not worth collecting?
And what about those other triangles which change color from blue to green to orange when you hit them. What are they exactly for?
gavin19 wrote:EDIT : Unrelated to anything in particular, but in my final run in Hard mode last night, I somehow triggered an extend in stage 1 from the very first 'power-up ship' ie. the ones with the '?' on the front of them. I didn't do anything different then I normally would though, just thought I'd mention it :)
This has happened to me at the beginning of stage 2 at the very first power up ship. Does anyone know something more about this? I can't imagine this happens just random.

Thanks
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Post by clp »

this game is all about aggression and learning to build the shield sword and shot your aiming to have all three of similar numbers by the end of game, bare in mind when your shield is on you power up quicker so for example killing 6 enemies with shield will power you up 1 level but with shield on itl power up 3 levels , try to use the shield as much as poss and like i say try to develop a system of sharing the sword and shot .
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Post by Kiken »

antares wrote:OK, I just play Karous for a few days now and have a few questions:
Is there any scoresystem other than kill as much enemies as possible and milk the bosses?
I always tried to hit the "blue triangles" with sword to make them bigger as this increases the score but in the videos on youtube and the superplay from Kiken no one seems to care about these. Are they not worth collecting?
And what about those other triangles which change color from blue to green to orange when you hit them. What are they exactly for?
Here are the various bonus icons explained:

Blue Triangle (comes in small, medium and large): Bonus Points
Hexagon (comes in Blue, Orange and Green): Additional experience for the corresponding coloured weapon
Orange Pentagon: Shield (keeps the shield active during attacks for a limited time)
Orange Triangle: Change (converts all on-screen bullets into bonus icons)
Pink Rhombus (well, it's really a square, comes in small and large): Additional life (grants somewhere between 10 and 25% more health)
Pink Square (with the heart in the middle): Extend (grants an additional 33% of health)
Red Irregular Circle: DFS Recharge
Red Square: Speed Up
Blue Square: Speed Down
Weapon Square (comes in Blue, Orange and Green): Grants one full experience level to the corresponding coloured weapon


Now, since none of us are maxing the weapon levels, it can only lead me to think that Item Juggling is probably requisite on at least one of the bosses (most likely the second). Item Juggling involves keeping a handful of bonus items on screen by whacking them with your sword (hence juggling) and when a boss launches a bullet heavy attack, you snag a Change icon to turn all of the bullets into bonus items. You can then repeat this constantly since you'll have loads of bonus items on screen. You'll be able to keep many of them juggled with your sword, but you'll also be grabbing several of them (as they'll be littering the screen).

Now, the guy on the Radirgy DVD does this during the stage 2 boss. I've been able to start it, but haven't been able to replicate the 20+ million he pulls from doing that. I've tried doing it in Karous, but it's really difficult to get started since the Change icons have a much lower appearance rate than they do in Radirgy.
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Post by nimitz »

quick question:

Whats the difference between changing the difficulty in the option menu and the different game modes when you start a game?
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Post by Kiken »

Current WR: 田沢残念!! - 3.793.458.260

I'm going to assume this was done in Hard Mode.
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Post by clp »

Kiken wrote:Current WR: 田沢残念!! - 3.793.458.260

I'm going to assume this was done in Hard Mode.
wow what a score , id say definitely hard mode , i actually tryed harder to break 2 bill in norm than 3 bill in hard , seeing this record might make me start playing again .
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Post by kengou »

Is there any scoresystem other than kill as much enemies as possible and milk the bosses?
I'd like to see this question answered as well. I understand leveling the weapons and everything, and that's all fun, but what exactly IS the central scoring system in this game?
"I think Ikaruga is pretty tough. It is like a modern version of Galaga that some Japanese company made."
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Post by Kollision »

kengou wrote:I'd like to see this question answered as well. I understand leveling the weapons and everything, and that's all fun, but what exactly IS the central scoring system in this game?
I'm playing this at the moment and I noticed the blue items are multiplied by your total EXP.
So the more EXP you have on all weapons and the more enemies and blue items you take the higher you score, I guess...

Still need to get through stage 4 though. :mrgreen:
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Re: GD: Karous

Post by Cee »

That's correct Kollision and if you sword hit a blue icon it will turn big and of greater value, Doing this especially when you are juggling a bunch of them will trigger random generation of various items to. The rarest and most valuable of these being the yellow triangle that turns every bullet on screen into a blue icon.
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Re: GD: Karous

Post by Kollision »

Cee wrote:The rarest and most valuable of these being the yellow triangle that turns every bullet on screen into a blue icon.
I got it once! :)

And I just beat the game killing the 5th boss and with all logos collected, but I was denied the TLB. :?

I suspect it's because I timed out the first boss. :oops:
Perhaps you can't let any of them time out, so it's not just the 5th.
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