Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label - Strong ALL Clear + Zatsuza

Managed to get the Zatsuza clear this time. In short, Zatsuza is a secret boss that you can't practice that only shows up if you no-miss the whole game.

Just like before, Black Label is pretty different from the normal game. First of all, it's only a 1-loop game and picking the shottype determines the difficulty now. Strong Style is now the expert mode, picking it makes the game start at 2nd loop patterns.

All the old mechanics from 1.5 still apply, but there are a couple of new additions. You can fire both the shot and the laser at the same time now, and doing this raises the new RED meter which represents the rank. The RED meter starts draining if you don't hold shot and laser for a few seconds, so make sure to tap laser occasionally to refresh the timer. Bombs double as hypers in this mode, and filling the hyper meter gives you a new bomb/hyper. You get a lot of hypers now, but to compensate for this, they last a lot shorter and you barely get any invincibility frames upon activation. The cancel power is still way stronger than in 1.5 though, it's like hyper rank doesn't even exist in this. You can also manually cancel the hypers now. If a hyper ends, automatically or manually, the rank will be cut by 50% and start draining, so make sure you also hold shot and laser when a hyper ends to quickly raise rank again.
Bees also work differently. When you first uncover them, they will always be orange instead of green. Orange bees cancel all bullets into small stars and flashing bees cancel all bullets into big stars. Big stars are the main source of score in this game so you want to get as many of these as possible. Green and flashing bees give more hyper gauge the higher your rank is. At max rank they give about 66%. By default there are no autobombs in Black Label. You can choose to enable autobombs, but you will not be able to use bombs as hypers, which is way more detrimental than not having autobombs.

It's pretty impossible to break the chain in black label, so you mostly just want to reach 10k hits as soon as possible for the maximum score multiplier. An important thing to remember is that the score multiplier is only in effect when the rank is in the red. Grabbing a bomb item when you're already at maximum bombs gives you a bomb capacity extend by one. Increasing your bomb capacity is extremely important for the run. Unlike 1.5, it's more beneficial to do the first two stages in the normal Omote route and then switch to Ura from stage 3 onward. You enter Ura by grabbing all bees in the first two stages. You fail the bee collection for a stage if you die in between collecting them.

Speaking of shottypes, B is undoubtedly the best shottype for Black Label. Since the options move in the direction that you move in, they give you a nice coverage when moving left to right during hypers. By doing this while tapping the laser button to keep enemy lasers at bay, you are basically almost invincible. Key word being 'almost' here.

The Zatsuza requirements are the same as the Hibachi requirements, but you can't die at all:
- No-miss the whole game.
- Not more than 2 bombs used before the EX stage.
- Finish off the stage 1 to 5 bosses with maximum RED meter.

The two bombs are pretty much reserved for the stage 5 boss since it's absolutely crazy. You want the last bomb to finish the boss off before it fully ends, because else the bomb will drain the entire RED meter. Doing the cheeze strat for the first phase is a lot harder than it looks, the timings are very precise.

The reason a Zatsuza clear is so much harder than a Hibachi clear is that you need to bring enough resources (at least 3 bombs) into the EX stage to stand a chance. This requires very careful hyper management.

Getting to Zatsuza is far, far harder than actually beating him. Because of the nature of the requirements, you'll always have maximum lives there with 6 bombs/hyper per life. So as long as you don't die with 6 bombs in stock or something, you should be able to fairly easy beat him. I managed to beat him first try, but I didn't take any chances whatsoever.

Zatsuza has safespots that only work on minimum rank, just like Hibachi. However they are much harder to use. The first attack has suicide bullets that get in your way if you're too far away from the boss. The second attack is very unreasonable to safespot with the lasers up there that shoot suicide bullets.

The same low rank exploit is done on the stage 5 laser walls. The enemies there don't shoot up if the rank is minimum for some reason.
One other thing that isn't completely obvious is that if you enter a boss warning screen with a hyper active, you can cancel and reactivate the hyper without losing rank. This is very important on the stage 2 boss.

Buy the game here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/464450

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  / jaimersstg  
  / jaimersstg