[AC] 怒首領蜂 ~ Dodonpachi - 2-ALL Clear 638 Million (C-L)

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New PB in Dodonpachi. Easily the hardest thing I've ever done, this took about 2 years of on and off playing. Very little mistakes, the only two big mistakes were breaking the chain at the end of 1-6 and missing one bee.

Dodonpachi came out in arcades in 1997 and is the second game developed by Cave. Dodonpachi is the game that popularized the bullet hell shmup genre and is a very important game historically. Even though it was Cave's first attempt at a true bullet hell, they really did a very good job. The game is excellent.

There are three ships you can choose from in this game: Type A, B and C.
Type A is the fast and forward-focus type, C is the slow but wide type and B is useless.
Besides your ship you also choose whether you want to power up your shot or your laser.
For a 2-ALL clear C-L is definitely the best shottype in the game. The wide shot is good for stages and the laser is good for bosses. C-S is better for stages but the 2nd loop bosses become a huge problem duo to a lack of laser power. Since scoring in this game also involves a great deal of survival, having a good survival ship definitely helps for scoring as well.

A unique thing about the laser in the Dodonpachi series is that you have a laser aura around you. This does damage and effectively protects you from popcorn that try to ram you from the sides. This also means you do more damage if you pointblank.

The scoring consists of three major factors:
- Enemy chaining.
The meter in the top-left indicates the time remaining to kill the next enemy before the combo runs out. Killing things with shot gives more meter than laser. Lasering enemies with a lot of HP keeps the chain meter fixed at a very low point. Moving your laser into a popcorn after a big enemy is key.

- Maximum bomb bonus.
No-bomb and no-miss bonus. This is a bonus that gives you score per frame during stage sections. You activate if by picking up surplus bomb items. The multiplier keeps increasing the more bomb items you pick up. It resets completely if you die, but if you bomb and then pick up another bomb you only lose -1 to your current max. This mechanic basically means you have to no-miss and no-bomb to the 2-6 boss for the full bonus, which is worth about 265,33 million.
Here's a graph of the total score increase: https://pastebin.com/rjTuvguL

- Bees.
Every stage has 13 hidden bee items. You uncover these with your laser and each bee picked up increases in value over the previous one. Picking up all bees in a stage increases the values of the bees in the next stage. Dying resets the bee chain for the stage.

Other scoring methods:
- Bullet cancels. This is mostly seen at the stage 3 cancel ships and the wings on big bee.
- No-miss bonus per stage. These go into the millions for the 2nd loop.
- Boss hits. Later bosses give more score per hit.
- 10 million for every remaining life at the end of the game.
- There's one scoring bomb on the 2-6 boss when his health turns red. Doing this gives you a ton of extra boss hits.
- Blooming flowers by hovering over certain spots.

In order to get to the 2nd loop you need to meet any of the following requirements:
- 2-miss or less.
- Chain a certain number of hits (not boss hits), this is different for every ship.
Type A: 270 hits
Type B: 300 hits
Type C: 330 hits
- Get 50 million or more score at the end of the 1st loop.
- Collect all bees in four of the six stages.

2nd loop differences:
- Overall difficulty is much, much higher.
- Popcorn helicopters fire 2-way aimed away shots.
- The chaining is much more lenient. The chain meter drains much slower and killing any enemy with shot completely fills the meter.
- Dying makes you lose only one power level unlike the 1st loop.
- At the end of the loop you fight the True Last Boss, Hibachi.

I used the player 2 side for this run. Player 2 has a couple of differences:
- The 2-3 midboss is much, much easier. All of the fast bullets are removed for some unknown reason. Makes it much less luckshit.
- Hibachi's final has zero slowdown, making it much, much harder.
- Small stars get carried over between stages but you lose all of them if you die. This gives you like an extra 2 or 3 million if you no-miss to 2-7.
Basically Player 2 makes it easier to get the full maximum bomb bonus in exchange of making Hibachi a bit harder.

Rank is this game is really weird and it feels almost broken. Rank doesn't seem to be determined by how well or how bad you're playing, it just seems random. There are certain parts in the game that are just randomly easier or harder between credits for no reason. One example is the speed of Hibachi's final. Per credit it can be really fast or really slow or anything in between (though it's always lightning fast as Player 2).

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