You really need to play Mecha Ritz

[Special World]

Is there a way to download the soundtrack and also other songs from soundcloud? Really diggin it.

[Special World]

this last boss never ends <:O

[CStarFlare]

Yeah, someone above mentioned that it gets bad if you get hit a lot and lose a lot of your firepower and that is certainly true. I'm not sure if she's invulnerable to bombs or not - without a life bar it's hard to tell. Can anyone confirm whether you can bomb her with/during bombs, or does she throw up a TLB shield?

[Squire Grooktook]

You'll get used to her, and with a high starting rank, you'll probably not have a lot of lives to drop below the lame zone.

Also she's definitely not protected from bombs. Dunno if they damage her, but bombing and shooting her is totally valid to kill at any rate.

[Special World]

Love this game, but I am totally *not* okay with how massive the clear bonus is. This score was like 7x any of my previous scores.

[Shepardus]

The clear bonus is a multiplier (based on maximum rank achieved and total time taken) applied to your total score, so scoring in the rest of the game is still important. In normal I typically get a multiplier of 7, so 7x sounds about right (still haven't cleared hard...). But yes, a score without a clear is basically worthless. If you've scored well up to the last stage, though, you should clear without much trouble since surviving well is important for scoring.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah the end-game/tlb multiplier is there to add a tiny bit of tension to a game that otherwise lets you clear it whenever you want. Gotta beat the game or your score is bad. I think it's a good design choice given the nature of the games adaptive difficulty.

As noted, it's a multiplier that's applied to your entire score so it's not a case of stages becoming meaningless: what you do during the rest of the game is what gets multiplied.

[Legendary Hoamaru]

Just played a credit and I enjoyed it. I love the way they handle rank in this, good way to slowly learn the game without tons of restarting.

One of the bosses had an attack the reminded me of a Ginga Force boss (Went to bottom of screen, fires two balls up left and right side). The music is really damn catchy too.

[MathU]

I'm really having a difficult time discerning whether or not starting Rank actually has any impact on your score in Normal mode. Ran through the first stage a bunch of times on both 0 Rank and 99 Rank and could not seem to get a consistently higher score in one or the other.

I also can't seem to tell if item carriers are randomly distributed or not. There are a number that seem pretty set and they usually come before or after bosses, but for stage 1 at least it seems like I randomly get a couple more or a couple less each playthrough.

[Squire Grooktook]

I'm really having a difficult time discerning whether or not starting Rank actually has any impact on your score in Normal mode. Ran through the first stage a bunch of times on both 0 Rank and 99 Rank and could not seem to get a consistently higher score in one or the other.

I believe rank actually acts as a multiplier attached to your score. Perhaps the lack of difference is coming from boss/mid-boss kill times?

I also can't seem to tell if item carriers are randomly distributed or not. There are a number that seem pretty set and they usually come before or after bosses, but for stage 1 at least it seems like I randomly get a couple more or a couple less each playthrough.

I believe the extra item carriers are influenced by how fast you kill enemy waves.

[Shepardus]

Rank mainly affects the end of stage bonus - your current rank at that point is multiplied with a base value determined from your remaining lives, bombs, and shields. It'll also make the stage go by faster which helps with the end of game multiplier. The only real difference in scoring during the stage itself is just from the increase in shot power making it easier to get time bonuses from bosses/midbosses.

And yes, item carriers are influenced by how quickly you clear waves. High rank for high shot power may help with that.

[MathU]

I think I see it now. It seems the reason why the item carrier distribution sometimes appears random is because some of the enemy destruction triggers for spawning the item carriers have extremely tiny windows when the game is scrolling fast at high Rank. The fact that you can do this much more consistently at a lower Rank level may account for the similar scores between minimum and maximum starting Rank that I'm seeing at the end of stage 1.

For example, there are two item carriers at the very beginning of the first stage. One of them is triggered by destroying the very first wave of four enemies that pops up and the other is triggered by destroying the second and third wave quickly. It's easy to get the first item carrier starting at 99 Rank but it is really quite difficult to get the second one depending on your ship. Even when you know exactly what needs to be destroyed it can be difficult to do it in time at high Rank. There's also another item carrier shortly after those two that spawns sometime in between that first set of ground turrets but I can't seem to figure out its trigger.

This is making me wonder if some ships are hopelessly inferior for scoring because their slower movement prevents them from navigating to a wave fast enough to destroy it in time for an item carrier spawn.

[Squire Grooktook]

This is making me wonder if some ships are hopelessly inferior for scoring because their slower movement prevents them from navigating to a wave fast enough to destroy it in time for an item carrier spawn.

Well, the current highest score out there is with the medium speed but side shot equipped green ship (02). A lot of the ships are very unique so it might be difficult to tell how useful some of them are.

[Despatche]

this is the great thing about splitting ships: you no longer have to worry about which ship is better, you can play them all and figure out for yourself.

it's nice to see that the batrider guys are crazy enough to apply this to their own game, even i didn't want to do that!

[MathU]

It's really a shame that a lot of the ships in this rely on you pressing and releasing the shot button in order to combine regular and focused shot elements at once if you want to get the highest damage output. It makes movement inconsistent while you activate and deactivate slow mode, and more than that the precise rhythm with which you need to press and release really makes my hand cramp up after a while! I wonder if it's an oversight that the developer never really intended.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of that. A system in which you do rhythmic inputs to increase damage could be cool, but not like this.

I'd put my money on oversight.

I usually wait to find a window where I don't have to move a ton to do it, then return to my regular movement of choice for whatever pattern comes on.

[Immryr]

I quite like the rhythmic tapping. it's definitely nicer than judgement silverswords, or games where you have to mash shot in general.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Does this Mecha Ritz doujin have tate or is it just regulated to it's current overall visual presentation?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Immryr]

no tate I'm afraid.

[Drake]

There's only no tate in the sense that there's no game option to flip the display. The game resizes properly if you legit have a vertical monitor and/or if you have a monitor/software that flips the display, which is all that's really important.

[LordHypnos]

This is a pretty fun game. Haven't really investigated the different options too much, yet.

[Legendary Hoamaru]

The extra songs in the music test menu, 25 and later... Is there a way to play them during the game or what?

I've been wondering the same thing, but I think you can only use them in training.

If the readme wasn't extracted as gibberish maybe it explains a way there.

BTW slowly been getting addicted to this now. I use type 5.

Yea homing bullets in the higher ranks is a strategy killer lol. It sometimes sucks to get better at this because things just get much harder.

[Lord Satori]

Gibberish? If you don't have the locale set to Japanese, the computer just places in random characters instead, so that's probably what's happening there.

Of course, that'll only help if you can also read Japanese in the first place.

[LordHypnos]

Wow, Apparently I already commented on this, but I totally forgot, and was basically saying nothing, anyway.

While playing this, I kept getting annoyed by how slow starting and how long the game was, but it sounds like these are improved by not sucking / you can change starting rank, i guess. Unfortunately I do suck, so I still haven't cleared after like 12 plays.

Anyway, I do think that some of the boss designs are really creative, and it's pretty borderline a boss rush game, so that's great. I'll definitely play it more at some point.

Also did not realize that there are more than one ship. That's good to know.

[Shepardus]

Gibberish? If you don't have the locale set to Japanese, the computer just places in random characters instead, so that's probably what's happening there.

Of course, that'll only help if you can also read Japanese in the first place.

Yeah the readme's in Shift JIS encoding so you need to set your text editor to interpret it that way. I fed it into Google Translate a while back and put the results here. The result is surprisingly intelligible for a machine translation but it doesn't mention anything about music tracks 25 and up (it lists all of them up to 24 and stops there).

[Drake]

When I have some free time one of these days I'll look into doing a simple binary patch to lock the minimum rank.

I've been looking into it and it seems all the updating of the bottom HUD data passes through the same generic instruction, which is a pain since it's hard to tell when the context is "update lives" or "update time" or whatever, and obviously you can't change that instruction without it affecting the rest of the game. After an hour or so I couldn't figure out a clean way to do this. Rank is at address 0x1201A048, in any case.

[Squire Grooktook]

but it sounds like these are improved by not sucking / you can change starting rank, i guess.

Yeah it "gets started" instantly if you start at a decent rank. You unlock higher ranks (up to 100) the more you play. I recommend downloading my save file with all unlocks. Saves a lot of time and should make things more fun.

[Ikazu-san]

I'll play remake when it comes out.

[Legendary Hoamaru]

Yea some text files have no issues displaying Japanese characters so I guess the encoding is different there. Thanks for the tips.

There is a remake coming?

[Despatche]

The extra songs in the music test menu, 25 and later... Is there a way to play them during the game or what?

Curiously, there is a list of the music tracks, composer, title etc, but it only lists up to track 24.

The result is surprisingly intelligible for a machine translation but it doesn't mention anything about music tracks 25 and up (it lists all of them up to 24 and stops there).

Those are the 24 tracks made for Mecha Ritz. The tracks after that are from the original Dezaemon 2 Mecha, plus a few arranges for that version. Most of the stage and boss themes in Mecha Ritz are arranged from this.

There is a remake coming?

The developer has mentioned some sort of remake a few times. Apparently it's now being called "Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo".