THE BASICS
Here I will list several things you'll have to take into account if you are new to this game or Psikyo games in general, and most of what's listed here works for games such as Dragon Blaze and Strikers 1945, too.
+ BULLET SPEED
Probably the main obstacle to people new to Psikyo games. A lot of players try to play them as they play a bullet hell and then think they are unfair since that philosophy won't work here. Bullets are just too fast and numerous and the hitbox too big for you to dance through them as you can do in a typical danmaku.
But, contrary to popular belief, the solution isn't to memorize every single pattern in the game but to take an aggressive approach. You need to be near the center of the screen or beyond most of the time, so you can destroy dangerous enemies on reaction before they manage to do much, ideally before they even get to shoot. If your enemy can't shoot, there aren't any bullets to dodge. Dodging should always be your B plan. Always think of how can you kill problem enemies first, and only use dodging if quick killing is impossible.
The game encourages this style of play by giving extra firepower at point blank range (see the "familiar riding" technique below) or powerful short range charged attacks that can take out most enemies in a hit or two (and, not surprisingly, the characters with those charged attacks are the ones with the highest scoring potential). Powering down instead of outright dying when you bump into an enemy helps, too.
Stop hugging the left edge of the screen and don't wait for your enemies to shoot and then see what you can do. Take the initiative before they can actually do anything. You'll see how things get a lot more reasonable with that mindset.
+ ENEMY TYPES AND PRIORITIES
Now, after reading the last point, you may think that you need to destroy EVERYTHING on sight as soon as you can so you can be safe at all times. Most of the time, though, this is impossible, so you need to prioritize your kills taking into account how dangerous the enemy you are facing is.
With this goal in mind, you can classify enemies into three big groups:
1. Small enemies: the "popcorn" enemies are the least dangerous ones, as long as you don't leave a lot of them alive on screen at the same time. These enemies tend to fire slow patterns that are easily dodged on their own, but become extremely dangerous if they are paired with larger enemies or if groups of them fire at the same time.
2. Medium enemies: these tend to fire few but very fast bullets and can take several normal shots.
3. Large enemies: tend to fire very fast, static patterns and have a lot of health. Their patterns usually are easy to avoid with a tap and have lots of safespots, but their main purpose isn't to be hard to avoid by themselves but to limit your movement options and make dodging other enemy bullets (usually aimed ones from popcorn enemies) a lot harder.
As you can guess, your priority should be large enemies, then medium ones, then the small fry. If you let large enemies live for too long they will either kill you with their super fast patterns or cripple your movement while the small fry grows in number and fills the screen with bullets (which in turn make it harder to kill the large enemy, and things get out of hand really fast).
Another reason to kill large enemies fast, besides the danger they pose, is that they give a lot of points and tend to be replaced by new large enemies. Killing them in succession will give you a lot of extra points.
+ PANORAMIC VISION VS. FOCUSED VISION
A common advice for danmaku players is to try to have a panoramic vision of the screen so you can spot paths in the mazes of bullets. While this also applies to an extent here with slower bullet formations, it's counterproductive against fast bullets. Against them, it's better to focus on the bullet and follow it with your eyes so you can clearly see its trajectory.
In real life, if you look at a highway you'll see cars passing by as a blur. But if you focus on one of them and follow it with your eyes, you'll see it clearly until it goes away. The same principle applies for Sengoku Blade!
+ DODGING METHODS AND TIPS
- Tapping: the one you will use most of the time. Since most bullets in this game are aimed at you, the best and easiest answer usually is tapping up or down as soon as you see your enemy shoots.
Suicide bullets (except the ones released by "potheads") are also aimed, so tapping still applies. Get accustomed to doing a tap immediately after each shot button press. This way you will automatically avoid the suicide bullet and you will be able to focus on enemy placement instead.
Avoid shooting when your enemy is too close and time your kills paying attention to regular patterns to avoid getting trapped or being forced to leave safe spots at the wrong time. Sometimes it's better to just stop shooting to make a crowded section easier.
- Streaming: a variation of the above useful against high concentrations of popcorns (such as 1-5, 2-5, second loop air stage). Stand still until your enemies shoot and then do small taps up or down and keep going in the same direction until the wave ends.
When there are a lot of popcorns on screen, you should NEVER move in one direction to avoid something and then immediately go back to your original position. You'll maybe avoid the first shot, but if a second enemy shot at the same position you'll most likely eat it since it will be aimed to your previous location. It's better to keep going until you destroy that wave of enemies before you try to go back. This simple advice will save you a lot of swearing and effort, especially in the second loop.
At certain spots (such as the second half of 1-5 and 2-5) you may run out of space for streaming against large groups of popcorns. You can maximize your tap space by doing a "C" motion, starting near the center of the screen of the upper or lower edges of the screen, then tapping back to the left, and then moving to the center of the opposite upper or lower border.
This has two benefits: giving you more room to tap dodge and making initial bullets go out of the screen instead of being there when you are tapping on the left.
- Maximize speed: Against groups of fast shooters (mainly in the second loop), when you dodge a fast pattern try to move straight (up, down, left, right) instead of diagonally. Most of the time moving diagonally won't get you out of the way fast enough. Also avoid friction against the edges of the screen, you'll move even slower.
- Preemptive dodging:
In a game with mostly fast aimed shots such as this one, it's wise to do "anticipation dodges" instead of just dodging on reaction. If you are on a spot with lots of popcorn enemies, it's good to stay on the move doing tap dodges even when when you are not reacting to an enemy shot.
This way, if they actually happen to shoot you'll "automatically" dodge a lot of their bullets with no reaction involved, so you can use all your focus on tough patterns / enemy positioning / coin grabbing instead.
SCORING
+ GOLD COINS
Coins work similarly to Striker's gold bars, in that you can get different values depending on your timing. The main difference in this game is that instead of being static, coins go up fast after you discover one, stop at a peak for a short while and then start to fall quickly. If they fall off the screen you lose the coin, so you need to plan how you kill coin-carrying enemies to maximize points. You have a maximum of four chances to pick the coin at max value before it falls off the screen.
You can also get coins for walking (or hovering, only at stage 5 in both loops) over certain points of the stage.
To get the highest possible value, you need to grab the coins as they are fully facing the screen. Possible values are:
2000
(you have 7 frames to catch a coin at this value)
1000
500
200
+ COIN GRABBING METHODS
Getting a single coin at its highest value is straightforward enough. But what do you do if there are several coin carrying enemies on screen, or if a single enemy releases lots of coins? If you free style things and go without a strategy for each particular situation you'll miss a lot of points from dropped / low value coins. Here's some advice for some of those situations.
- Single ground hidden coins
The best way to grab these at max value is to walk over them to make them appear and then quickly press up. You'll catch it at 2,000 as soon as it comes out if you do it right.
- Multiple ground hidden coins
These generally come in groups of three. A good way to quickly get all of them at 2.000 is to walk over all of them, then grab the leftmost one at 2.000 and keep going to the right. You always get the same value than for the first coin this way, so if you got the first one at 2.000, then you'll always get the other two at max value too.
Obviously the downside of this method is that this applies for all values, so if your first coin was worth 200, the rest will also be 200.
Alternatively, you can combine this method with the previous one; walk over all three coins, grab the third with the single hidden coin method and then grab the remaining two this way.
- Hands
They release 7 coins in three rows. The first two have 2, and the rightmost one 3. The trick is to grab each of those rows separately. Using a similar technique to the multiple ground coins, grab the first in a row and then move vertically in a straight line to grab the rest.
Get the first row starting from above, then the remaining two from below.
It bears mentioning that you won't be able to grab all of them if you don't use a rank control strategy on the stage beforehand. Try to kill the hands with 2 or less power up levels so you replace lanterns with item carriers while you go and get the coins. The lanterns will most likely point blank you while you are collecting coins or cover too much of the screen with their bullets, which will end up making survival extremely hard without a bomb.
- Potheads
A nice method to get coins at max value with Katana and Ayin in upper stage 6 is to use the invincibility when you start the level to "ride" the upper pothead and kill him while you are fully overlapping it. You'll get the coin as soon as the enemy dies, always at 2,000.
- Bulls
There are a few methods you can use for bulls.
1. Grab the lower center coin, then the upper one. Finally, grab the left coin and continue straight from there to automatically get the right coin at max value.
2. A variation of the above that might make things easier. Kill the bull and immediately move to the center of the resulting explosion. If you do this correctly, you will always grab the lower coin at max value. Grab the rest with the previous strategy.
3. Move a bit to the right of the explosion as soon as you kill the bull. You will grab the right coin at max value this way. Then immediately move back to the left, to grab the lower one too. You can also get the remaining row going from right to left.
- Winged Eye
The most consistent method I've found is grabbing the coins in three steps
1. Pick the lowest coin of the bunch
2. Grab the three coins to the right using the multiple hidden coin method
3. Grab the three remaining coins starting from below
It's pretty safe to do in the water stage, you have a lot of time after you kill the Winged Eye before the boss appears and the popcorn fish are pretty harmless. But on the other stages you won't have enough time to pick them this way since enemies will be bothering you. The next best option I've found is picking them starting from the lowest coin and then moving upwards to get the rest. This is not as consistent as the other method but I've managed to get all the coins at max value a few times, and when you are surrounded by dangerous enemies that give you no breathing room (as in Forest) you just can't allow yourself to stop in a single place for too long.
+ EXTRA ENEMIES
Killing enemies fast not only has the advantage of saving you the pain of dealing with their patterns, it can also greatly increase your score. There are certain spots where killing stuff fast makes extra enemies appear. The main targets are the annoying red samurai-like, cannon wielding enemies. Most of the times they appear, if you kill them fast enough more of them will come out, and they are worth 8,000 a piece and give you a gold coin, too! If you get it at max value, that's 10,000 points for a single enemy, which is a lot in this game. This is one of the reasons why Katana and Ayin (and, to a lesser extent, Miko) are such high scorers: their charge shots can take them down fast enough to make all the extra enemies come out.
While these are the most notable enemies to quick-kill, there are several spots where you need to kill stuff fast to make more enemies appear, such as the mid-boss in the temple stage, the alien-like enemies in the forest stage or the hands in the fifth level. These spots will be described in more detail (eventually) in the stage strategy section.
+ POWER-UP AND BOMB BONUS
You get 4000 points for each power up you get after the fourth, and 10,000 points for each bomb after the sixth. There's no end-game bonus so there's no reason to save bombs after you get the last one.
+ POWERING DOWN ON PURPOSE
There are some spots where doing this is beneficial to your score. Normally, if your power level is below 2 (though there are a few spots that give you extra power ups even at a power level of 2), an item carrier will appear soon so you aren't stuck with a pea shooter (a lesson Nakamura most likely learned after Sengoku Ace
). But if you power down at a fixed spot where a regular item carrier is supposed to come out, you'll get TWO item carriers that will give you one power up each, something which is normally not possible.
This has two obvious advantages:
1. If you do it at 1-1 in Forest you'll end the level fully powered up (you normally get three power ups at 1-1), so you will get an extra 4,000 when you get the power up from the second sub-boss.
2. Extra points from killing the carriers of course.
While this sounds nice and simple enough, you have to keep your power level at 1 until both item carriers fully come into the screen. If you power up with the first item carrier and the second one still isn't on the screen, it won't give you any power ups (it will be green like the rest of the group instead of red). Also, power downs have to be planned and well timed or else you will end up getting less points because enemies got away or you lose precious time that should have been spent shooting at a large enemy.
I'll (eventually) point out the spots where you can power down on purpose in the stage strategy section.
+ RANDOM STAGES
As in most Psikyo games, stage order for the first stages is random. There are four random stages, but you only get to play three of them each loop. The problem is that one of those stages (air) gives a lot less points than the rest. The approximate score limits for each of the random stages are
Forest: ~180,000
Water: ~165,000
Temple: ~155,000
Air: ~120,000
As you can see, getting Temple + Air + Water will greatly hurt your score, while getting Water + Temple + Forest will maximize your scoring potential. Order isn't that important, you just have to avoid the air stage (though I prefer Temple as the second or third stage because you get three extra "potheads" at the start, for 13.500 extra points). So, if you want to get as many points as possible, I recommend either using a savestate at the start of your game to get a good stage selection or playing the PS2 version, which thankfully lets you choose your stage order.
+ BOSSES
Though quick killing is great to get high scores from most of the stage, if you want to maximize your score you should avoid killing bosses too fast and milk them as much as possible. Nearly every boss has some popcorn enemies supporting it, besides item carriers that appear regularly during the fight. So while you can brute force your way through a boss with Aine or Katana, you'll get less points as a result.
