trap15 wrote:You don't like the way the Garegga/Batrider/Bakraid handle rank? What about Gradius series? Darius? I'm interested to hear about your opinion, actually. What would be a good rank system, and why; as well as what makes a bad one and why?
I'm awful at the Gradius games (I've never made it past the mothership rush at the end of the Moai stage of the first game), and shouldn't really have an opinion, but the rank system of Gradius 1 and 2 actually seems good.
I haven't played arcade Darius- I'm only familiar with the kinda bad SNES Darius games- so I can't comment on that one.
The Garegga-style "use rank as a tool to beat the player over the head to force score-play in order to have the extends to suicide to keep going" is an interesting idea, but it seems that there should be a more intuitive way to force a player to play for score in order to survive. Also, I
really hate medal chaining (nothing pisses me off more than dying, watching my shrapnel hit an enemy on the right side of the screen, and watching it drop a medal I can't catch...), and since scoring is so intimately tied to rank management, that puts a damper on things for me.
In my opinion, rank is best used as a tool like it is in Strider or Black Tiger, to keep a game with a "power loss on death" system to keep from spiraling out of control one way or the other (no rank, and if the player does too well early, he basically puts the game in "god mode" OR you suffer from an even worse version of Gradius syndrome where dying once and losing your power-ups is the same as losing all of your lives [to be fair to Gradius, recovery actually seems very possible in at least the first game; I'm using the term "Gradius syndrome" just so everyone immediately knows what I mean. Gradius 1's rank system actually seems to do this job well]). In Strider, for instance, the rank seems to be based almost entirely on the power-ups you currently have, with a slight rank reduction if you're on your last life. The benefit of the power-ups usually outweighs the rank increase (although certainly not always- see the bombs in stage 2, or the first Amazon section in stage 4), but only barely- meaning, a player has incentive to grab them, but it's not entirely crippling if they die once.
Games with checkpoints have some pretty obvious advantages here, since they start the player in a "stable" state after death, as opposed to non-checkpoint games, where a player is just dropped onto the left side of the screen no matter what is going on and about 2 seconds behind as far as killing things goes. Unlike a lot of people here, I actually like checkpoints for a lot of reasons- for the above, but also because it makes memorizing tricky sections in "normal play" without "dedicated"/savestate practice easier, and because it ensures that a credit lasts a few minutes even for a complete beginner, which helps a game get its hooks in. I'm surprised that there aren't any vertical manic/bullet hell games that use them (or, at least, that I don't know of any).
DOJBL *almost* gets this right. Obviously, rank needs to be a lot higher while in hyper (Deathsmiles doesn't do this, and it tends to get kinda boring while in hyper, at least if not in Death Mode, since it leaves you much too strong for the game), and to reduce again when out of hyper, for the reasons explained above. However, the huge hyper-rank increases when popping more than one hyper at once seem to be out-of-place, especially if you assume that the player is going to save hypers sometimes to use at tricky spots (one death in DOJBL can throw hyper-timing enough that you end up with two hypers in a spot where you'd normally want to use one, and dodging the item as it slowly flutters down actually isn't easy; the hitbox on the things is damn big, and it seems like missing one actually jacks your hyper-gauge sky high, so you'll probably get another shortly after).
Dragon Blaze's rank system half-works (reducing HP after death or power down makes sense, because it makes it easier to kill things when at lower power), and half doesn't (reducing bullet speed frequently makes Dragon Blaze
harder, since it's frequently really important to be at a certain spot when a certain enemy appears, and it's nice if previously shot bullets are willing to get off the screen quickly to facilitate this; adding power-up carriers during boss fights is an awful idea, since not only does that mean trying to dodge popcorn shots during a boss fight [which means that a rank drop made the game significantly harder], but since they come down on the edge of the screen, you frequently won't even get to kill them and grab the power up from them).
