A clear of the Arcade Plus mode without using continues and with high scoring.
Time to upload a proper replay this time.
Esprade was made by Cave and came out in arcades in 1998 and was later ported to PS4 and Switch a month ago by M2.
Esprade is the newest entry in M2's line of Shot Trigger releases, where they port a shmup with the utmost care and love. These go far and beyond from just being a simple port, they add tons and tons of extra stuff and make sure everything is perfect to the smallest detail. They even give you save states for practice. It's incredible and M2 really set the gold standard for ports.
Previous Shot Trigger releases were Battle Garegga, Mahou Daisakusen, Dangun Feveron and Ketsui.
The only problem was that they were PS4 only. I eventually caved in and bought a PS4 just for these. :V
Esprade was Cave's third game, released after Dodonpachi. It was different from their previous releases in that you control a human instead of a ship. You also have a secondary shot and bombs work a lot differently.
Something unique about it as well is the different stage routes. Stage 1 is fixed per character but stage 2 and 3 you can freely choose between. The later the stage, the harder it will be.
Esprade was one of the biggest influences for Touhou. You can definitely tell from the pattern design and overall feel of the game. The patterns are a lot more RNG based and there are very few actual popcorn enemies in the game. Ms. Garra's wings were also a big inspiration for Shinki's wings in Touhou 5.
Irori is the weakest character in the game, but she's really good for scoring. Yusuke is way too powerful and J-B's and Alice's wide shots keep damaging enemies you don't want to damage.
The way bombs work is a bit peculiar. The longer you hold the bomb button down, the stronger the bomb will be, but it will also consume more bomb meter. To recharge your meter you need to collect a certain number of point items, 200 at first. When you reach 200 and don't have a full bomb meter, the 200 counter will start decreasing back to zero and enemies will drop bomb fragments during it. Afterwards the amount of point items required increases. It goes from 200 to 300 to 400 to 500 etc.
The four biggest sources of score in this game are:
- Your powershot has 16 parts to it at full power. How many of those are active on an enemy before you kill it with main shot determines the multiplier for the enemy value with the max being x16.
- Destroying an enemy cancels all bullets on top of their sprite and turns them into point items. These also turn x16 if you destroy the enemy with a x16 powershot.
- Hitting enemies with your powershot gives score which adds up a lot over the course of the game. You can milk things by only hitting them with a tiny part of the powershot.
- The end-game bonus is really huge and is calculated as follows:
1) 500k per heart container;
2) 1m per remaining heart;
3) 3k per gold item;
4) 250 per unit of your barrier gauge (a full gauge is worth 1m).
Destroying an enemy with a multiplier activates a chain timer a bit like Ketsui. You extend the timer by collecting point items.
When at full point items and guard barrier, enemies release more point items.
Player 2 has a bug where killing enemies with the bomb extends the chain timer. You can see this a lot in stage 5B.
Arcade Plus is a new mode added in for the M2 port. It's very similar to normal Arcade mode but there are some big differences:
- New art for all the characters.
- New voices for all the characters and there is also more of it.
- A new TLB.
- Powershot milking on bosses is changed and drastically decreased.
- Boss timers are a whole lot shorter so you can milk even less.
- New Alice Master shottype.
The way powershot milking works in Arcade Plus is that you only get score from it on bosses if the powershot hits two or more targets. So the boss's main body and a boss part for example.
For this run I also have the arranged music playing and I turned on the visible hitbox.
There is actually a different arrange of the boss music for every single boss in the game, which is nuts.
Ms. Garra's final is very random, but there is one trick to it. You can tell how long she's going to fire by how far she moves away from her initial position.
The third phase also has a trick to it where you can scroll-out bullet spawn points to make sure the walls don't get fired too much.
Biggest mistake this run was getting the bomb refill way too late in stage 5B. Should have gotten more score items during the first two bombs. The one death also cost a million.
The overly excessive milking and bad hitbox were my two big complaints about this game. But this mode and this port fixes both of those things.
Might add captions to this later if I don't get a better run.
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/ jaimersstg