ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

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Schrodinger's cat
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by Schrodinger's cat »

A few observations/questions I have about blue gems:

I've been playing a ton of Maniac, but I'm still a little confused about maximizing your points when you absorb blue aura gems during major scoring opportunities. When cashing in at the very end of the stage 2 boss (with 8xxx-9xxx counter) for example, if you stay in the center of the screen to absorb the blue gems that spawn, you actually get way less points than if you were to sit at the bottom of the screen and slowly work your way up. It's a huge 10-20 million point difference.

Initially I thought that it didn't really matter as long as you absorbed all of the gems somehow, but apparently it does. Since it takes a longer time for all of the gems to be absorbed when you're at the bottom of the screen, do you score more because your counter decreases more slowly than being higher up on the screen (and inside the mass of gems you generate)?

In other situations, staying too close to the bottom of the screen causes some blue gems to not be absorbed, resulting in loss of points. So is the key to as scoring high as possible to stay as low as you can without missing any of the gems that are generated? This has confused me for a long time.

Does this also apply to BL Maniac and God Modes?
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finisherr
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by finisherr »

I have a scoring question on Original. When you get to a boss, do you have to have hit it with the appropriate shot all the way through as the counter decreases or do you have to just kill the boss (or right before the boss changes phases and releases gems) with the appropriate shot ?
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

finisherr wrote:I have a scoring question on Original. When you get to a boss, do you have to have hit it with the appropriate shot all the way through as the counter decreases or do you have to just kill the boss (or right before the boss changes phases and releases gems) with the appropriate shot ?
You just have to finish the enemy off with the appropriate shot type in order to get large gems. You seem to get the same number of large gems even if you damage the enemy with the wrong shot type before killing them, so all that matters is whether or not you finish them off with the right one (and get in close for the green aura collect bonus). Same applies to bosses; you only need to pay attention to when their health nears one of the marks on the health bar as that's when they release gems and you have to finish that phase with the right shot type.
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finisherr
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by finisherr »

Well, that makes things a bit easier.
Asure
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by Asure »

I've now watched and played this on Maniac to death.
To maximize the gem counter, which goes up to 9999, you need to perform some tactical tricks. These aren't very obvious from the first post, as i was killing enemies with the A shot but not getting the max amount of gems. (You need to HOLD the A shot and laser them.) I would suggest a re-write of the Maniac part to clarify some things.

[3.2.1] SCORING
Scoring is based on one multiplier, which is termed the overall counter]. This counter is only triggered by killing enemies with the A shot held down (laser) when the chaining bar is at zero. Each gem absorbed at this time has a blue-aura, and the value of the multiplier is added to the value of each of these gems, which increases your score once you absorb them.

Unclear to me.. there is only one visible counter on the screen, other gems are counted at the end of the stage. Is the end-of-stage counter only counting blue aura gems?

[3.2.1.1]THE OVERALL COUNTER: This would be the stage counter, not the overall counter then..?
This is the counter in the upper left of the screen. It serves as a multiplier added to the value of the blue gems you obtain. It maxes out at 9999 and is reset to 0 at the start of each level. Gold and green-aura gems increase this counter, while blue-aura gems decrease it. Each time you die, your counter decreases by 1/3 (e.g. if you have 900 gems, after 1 death you will have 600). When you bomb this counter also decreases over the duration of the bomb (on average 10-15%??).

You increase this counter by killing enemies by tapping the A shot, or using C autofire. The color of the chaining bar (see below) determines how much and what type of gems you get.

[3.2.2.2]THE CHAINING BAR:
This appears under the overall counter and increases from blue to red. As long as you chain enemies with the C shot, it will increase. In addition, it increases to red as long as you hold your C shot on a large enemy (like a sub-boss or boss). This bar decreases rapidly to zero as you hold the A shot. Kill an enemy with the A shot held down when the chaining bar is red and you’ll get double the gems. Kill an enemy with the A shot held down when this bar is empty and you’ll spawn blue-aura gems (see below). Basically, the scoring system and gameplay flow are based upon using the C shot when the chaining bar is between zero and MAX, and using A to laser when it is at either zero or MAX.

Purple bar 0-50%: Small gems (Can be 0-5 gems, depending on the percentage. The red dragon enemies at at the end of stage 1 give 1 gem for example.)
Blue bar 50-80%: More small gems (About 8 times for bigger enemies.)
Red Bar: 80-100%: Big gems* (Possible 200% bonus if you laser enemies with A.)

You should optimize your patterns and use A shot (laser) to kill larger enemies when the chaining bar is in the RED 80-100%. This will increase the large gem yield by about 200%. Ensure that you kill a bunch of smaller enemies to get the bar into red with shot C, then laser away at larger enemies that fly into your path.
In addition to this, the bar will decrease much slower back to blue when you hold down A shot to laser away.[/i]

[3.2.3]GEMS
Whenever you kill an enemy, all the bullets on the screen from that enemy are changed into gems, NOT TRUE, this only happens on General Cancel triggering enemies and in addition some gems are spawned from the enemy itself. In order to get large gold gems, you can kill enemies with the C button when the chaining bar is red (any time the chaining bar isn't red you will get small gems). Kill them with the A shot when the bar is red is preferred and you get double (or more??) the large gems, which can quite literally fill the entire screen with large gems, if the enemy triggers a general cancel!
-----

If a novice reads the original text, he will end up at the end of stage 1 with 6000-7000 gems on the stage counter.
With the adapted text he should already be at 9999 for the second ground dragon :)
I could suggest to replace A and C with 'laser' and 'shot' in the whole guide, but that would be nitpicking.
General Cancel like the ground dragons' heads on stage 1 and ice pillars on stage 2 might be better explained as 'cashing points' .. etc.

Anyway, if you're still wondering how to get stuff done, watch this video.
The player has 500+ gems before his first powerup on stage 1. This is done by C shotting the enemies and the pillar, then quickly lasering the floating rock mass and a few enemies that walk behind it. It has a lot of good counter-filling tricks, stage 2 start for example, pillar milking, boss milking etc.

Special thanks to Yosai for selling me this game ;)
I'm enjoying maniac more than original at this moment :)
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endoKarb
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by endoKarb »

Been playing Original a bit. A few things I noticed:
[3.1.1] SCORING
Scoring is based on two multipliers: the overall counter and the stage counter. It is unclear how they are combined together, though it is clear that both influence the scoring.
As far as I can tell the overall counter doesn't affect the value of gems at all. There might be an increse in value if you push it over 70k but other than that it doesn't seem to matter.
On the other hand the stage counter directly modifies the value of each gem you collect. Getting it to 9999 as fast as possible seems to be crucial for scoring.
[3.1.3] RANK
Bullets gradually increase in speed, in effect increasing the game's rank, as the overall counter increases. When you reach 70,000 on the overall counter, you max out the rank in the game.
I don't think the speed of bullets increse gradually with the Overall Counter. There's a significant speed up at 70k gems but that should be it.
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SMC
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by SMC »

Correct on both counts

Even the STGW commentary is based on this misinformation which is completely trivial to prove wrong as of 2009, since the training mode lets you set either of the values to whatever you want.

The overall counter doesn't affect gem values, however it does seem to act as a multiplier for Larsa's form destruction bonuses:
1st form bonus with 0 counter: 1,206,000
1st form bonus with ~36400 counter: 4,851,200
1st form bonus with over 90000 counter: 10,751,760

Having an overall counter of 70000 also adds a per frame score increase of 1111, which is multiplied every extra 5000 counter gained after 70000:

75000: 1111 x 3 = 3333
80000: 1111 x 6 = 6666
85000: 1111 x 10 = 11110
90000: 1111 x 15 = 16665
95000: 1111 x 21 = 23331
Last edited by SMC on Sun Jun 12, 2016 4:17 am, edited 3 times in total.
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endoKarb
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by endoKarb »

Thanks for detailed write-up. Do you also happen to know how the Icicles in Stage 2 work in detail?

My hypoteses for now:

- They spawn faster and faster if you don't kill them.
- Hitting the Icicle itself has no particular effect.
- There's a hard limit how many jellyfishes can be on screen at a time. (shared by all icicles if more than one? probably)

Which means that you would want to wait until the Jellies hit the limit, start killing them so that more can spawn, then destroy the Icicle while the screen is full of Jellies.

I've been trying to figure out how to milk them optimally, but I can't seem to get as many points from them as the top replays on the leaderboard. :|
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SMC
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by SMC »

Yeah I think the jellyfish just stop spawning after a certain amount of time.
My guess is they'll continue to spawn up until a limit is reached, at which point you have to shoot some of them before they start coming out again.

The main thing seems to be having a green counter when you get to them so you can autocollect green jems from the jellyfish which requires careful routing.
It looks like they also weaken the icicle when it first appears so there's no downtime between milking jellyfish and killing it while the spawn rate is still at its peak.

What's strange is that in 1.5 Ultra the icicles are invulnerable until they've completely scrolled onto the screen, which isn't the case at all in any other mode of the game.
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endoKarb
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by endoKarb »

Ok, just got 51.7 mil by the end of stage 2 in Novice Original, which is higher than WR by about 1.8 mil.

Killing as many Jellyfish as you can with the green shot before the icicle hits the time limit is the key. The group of three icicles works slightly differently because there's not enough time to wait for the time limit.
Damaging the icicle doesn't seem to be necessary, it probably just helps with timing the kill.
SMC wrote:What's strange is that in 1.5 Ultra the icicles are invulnerable until they've completely scrolled onto the screen, which isn't the case at all in any other mode of the game.
CAVE probably thought that Stage 2 would be too easy for survival otherwise.
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christianbelchior
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Re: ST: Mushihime-sama Futari ver 1.5

Post by christianbelchior »

EOJ wrote:Scoring is based on two multipliers: the overall counter and the stage counter. It is unclear how they are combined together, though it is clear that both influence the scoring.
Hell, I figured it out!

Code: Select all

item score = overall counter + stage counter
In stage 1, it's

Code: Select all

item score = overall counter * 2
...but only if the stage counter isn't maxed out
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