9bil threshold in Shiki 3 : Demolished!
During the lead-up to Shmup Slam 4 a few months ago, I made some good progress on this game, and my PB scores were in the 8.6/8.8bil range. I knew the 9bil weren't too far away and there were some scoring opportunities I didn't capitalize on yet. So it was possible for sure!
Back then, I had to stick to safer strats in the late-game though, because I couldn't ensure proper consistency and needed some extra lives at the cost of extra HTMs. After Slam, I was a bit too busy keepin' the Shiki 1 momentum going until that #1 Steam rank was mine, and I also enjoyed messing around with some games discovered through blind Kumites or personal discovery.
But I knew I would eventually come back to the game and practice those new strats to get past 9bil. So what are those strats exactly?
The first one is using 2 HTMs on 4-1 boss (phase 1 and 3) rather than only 1, though in this case the movement in phase 1 trapped me and I lost a life for some reason?? Bruhh
Afterwards are the very scary strats : while I usually only SD'ed at the end of bosses with the reassurance that the post-boss bonus will give an extend back or at least put me very close to one, now I am also taking a page out of the superplayers' book and SDing at the very beginning of 4-2 in order to get one more HTM and being able to be at max coins multiplier for almost this entire stage, since it's a bit long and needs plenty of HTMs. This is dangerous because not only it puts me back to 1 life, but the full charge is also lost and I have to make sure to charge the spin properly. I can not fuck up for this! Thankfully, after some practice I managed to improve my consistency a bit and I also know how to keep the spin going. One pattern (before the dark gray enemies from the right) is still very scary and I lost a life to it (thank goodness I managed to get an extend after the first SD), but the rest is doable. This section of the game is very lucrative, so you could get back the two lives by the time you face Kagachi as I did. This also makes Kagachi more manageable since you can afford to take some unintentional hits during the fight and regain some HTMs instead of SD at the end
The final risk-taking maneuver is at the end of 5-1 boss where you SD the lives in order to get HTMs to score the short 5-2 enemy portions. This jacks up the tension because not only is there no post-boss bonus from 5-1 to 5-2 that could give you another extend back, but there's also not that many points to be gotten from the enemies in 5-2, at least not enough to get a life back quickly unless you're luckily close to the next threshold like I was. And if you're far away from the next extend, you don't have room for error for this rather difficult and lengthy multi-phase final boss
I actually did another run of the game a day before this one, and managed to get 9bil during the 5-1 boss. Since that's an extend threshold, that meant I SDed it and genuinely only had one life to do the whole 5-2. I unfortunately died at the last phase, at the end of the last actually difficult pattern. The clear was within reach. But the tension was too high! This time around, I got 9bil only during the 5-2 fight itself so it gave me a safety life for this final gauntlet. It may not have been actually required since I 1-lifed 5-2, but perhaps it eased my nerves and helped me do much more controlled movements during the final phase after the four disc spawners are destroyed
The game over run was at 9.224b, this one was at 9.182b around the same spot with only the boss kill + coins and post-boss bonuses remaining. I expected to get maybe 100 or 200 more mil out of the post-boss bonus. Nope, I got a whopping 350 mil! (Yeah I haven't looked up how those bonuses are calculated lmao)
9.5bil feels pretty big to me! Back when I was in the 7/8 bil range, I thought it would be almost beyond my skills to get 9bil, so that was a score I aimed for but without expecting to get it any time soon. However, adopting new strats and flirting with the chance of Game Over a lot more in the endgame boosted my scoring potential much more than I expected!
Now I wonder if I can even get 10bil and maybe beat third_strike's 10.09 bil score which is the nonJP record? (WR is 11.5b) Those last 500 mil are probably gonna be the toughest ones to get, though I did fuck up thrice in the run (4-1 gray planes, 4-1 boss phase 1, and 4-2 criss-cross pattern) so perhaps there's a chance to get to that level with some more effort?
Alternatively, I'd also like to explore the scoring with other characters, maybe now is a good time to learn how to more seriously play as someone else too. But there's also other games to play and explore! So much to do, not enough time and drive for them all. What a struggle.
Anyways, this game is pretty cool! And I'm glad to have beaten this score I wanted for a relatively long time.
Played on Dolphin (Wii US version), recorded with OBS Studio
#式神の城3 #shmup #STG
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