Route: ACEHLQV
Player: MathU (that's-a me!)
Score: 12,044,100
I have seen only a couple single-credit clears of Darius Gaiden ever that don't feature autofire. You really are missing out on much of the depth--part of the thrill that the game was originally designed around--when you use autofire in Darius Gaiden. At the very least, the game certainly was NOT designed around the insane fire rate accessed as a cheat in the SEGA Saturn port. This scoring run demonstrates how to deal with everything on the route ACEHLQV without bombing and how to milk bosses safely without cheating with autofire.
Darius Gaiden has a simple adaptive difficulty system (or "rank") which makes the game harder as you destroy boss body parts. It also gradually increases with time during a game, but this rate is very minor compared to blowing up boss body parts. As the rank increases, bosses and minibosses have more health, bosses fire larger and faster bullets, enemies in general fire more bullets, and enemies appear in larger waves. You may have heard the myth before that shot power level also affects the rank, but this is simply not true. There is a reason to want to regulate your shot power though: it makes capturing minibosses easier. White bullets do more damage than the green, penetrating ones, which also happen to go straight through control orbs and damage the minibosses' bodies. This makes a huge difference for the minibosses of stages 6 and 7.
Why does all this rank stuff matter? When you're playing for score, minibosses are important because they're worth 200,000 points apiece when captured. Boss body parts are worth 30,000 points apiece. When the rank is too high, miniboss control orbs have too much health compared to their bodies, and it becomes impossible to dislodge it without killing them. It turns out that you can get far more points by skipping trying to capture the miniboss in the final stage and instead destroying as many boss body parts as you can without increasing the rank so much that the stage 6 miniboss is un-captureable. There are not enough boss body parts for it to be worth skipping the stage 6 miniboss, however.
As a final scoring secret, Neon Light Illusion's tentacles give more points when you destroy them closer to the body. The very bottom tentacle, in particular, goes from a paltry 100 points if you destroy it at the tip to a whopping 204,800 points if you destroy it at its very base. The top tentacle is worth 102,400 points at its base, but it is much trickier to destroy correctly. Together, that's an equivalent of SIX maximum-value gray point medals! As the tentacles do not count as normal rank-increasing body parts and are non-optional targets, it is very important to get as many points as you can from them.
In this run I have destroyed almost as many boss body parts as possible without increasing the rank so much that the stage 6 miniboss is too difficult to capture consistently. After that, I milk the final two bosses for all their worth, destroying as many body parts as possible.
I unfortunately missed one of Risk Storage's ribs (the final two are ridiculously difficult to destroy though, so I never bother with them), which is a lost 30,000 points, and didn't destroy Neon Light Illusion's top tentacle at its base (76,800 lost points). I also had simply abysmal gray medal luck in this game (one maximum-value medal in the whole run). Should I find the motivation to do this again, I plan on getting a much higher score (at least an extra 250,000 points, 350,000-ish if I get lucky).
EDIT: Once again I have had another substantial scoring revelation. Expect a better video to replace this eventually.
Recorded in MAMEUI 0.141u2 using the ROMset found in the PC version of Taito Legends 2.
Darius Gaiden © 1994 Taito
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Darius II ACEIMSY Nomissby ReplayBurners343 views
Great run, and thanks for the detailed info - I had no idea rank was tied to boss parts! Why all the dislikes, I wonder?
nebanks80 4 months ago