iconoclast
Member
The stage 5 boss can still cause me some trouble, but it depends on what patterns they throw out. If they start out with the pattern from the blue girl, you can usually get a complete energy recharge before you've been pushed back enough to enter nenshin. And since there are so many bullets on screen, 256 gold from the bomb pickup is a given. The pink girl's pattern is a lot tougher to deal with for me, and there isn't enough bullets for max gold unless you let it sit for a while.
The pattern after the tank rush decides whether I bomb or not. If the pink girl does her pattern, I bomb it immediately, recharge, and just sit in nenshin until it's about to end. If the blue girl does her pattern, I just dodge it since that's one's pretty easy.
The second phase is the one section that I'll always bomb. If you do enough damage to the girls before the tank comes up, you can just dodge the first few waves and then lay a bomb right on top of them. They'll be left with almost no health, so you can switch over to nenshin and destroy them immediately.
If you enter their final phase with a fullish nenshin bar, you can wait it out until your gold is just about to time out. Once you exit nenshin, their pattern will be ending so you won't have to dodge anything, and there will be a ton of bullets left for you to recharge with. For the pattern after that, I sit right in front of the blue girl in nenshin, since she always fires her pattern last, so you can do some laser damage to her in between the waves. But the main thing to keep an eye on is the little orb that's spawning the bullets near the top of the screen. Once that orb disappears, I believe the two girls will fire one last waves of bullets, and then you can exit nenshin, recharge, and finish them off.
The stage 6 boss usually doesn't cause me much trouble, but I have choked on him a few times.
For his second phase, there are two ways I deal with it: If you want to bomb it, you can just sit in nenshin and wait out the pattern firing from his crystal. This might sound a little odd, but I time this by counting the rotations of the bullets. Once it starts spinning counter-clockwise, I wait until it has done 13~ rotations, exit nenshin, quickly refill my energy, and then bomb him. He won't have much health left, so you can finish him and head into the third phase with enough energy to avoid the initial wave of bullets. The other way I do it if I don't want to use a bomb is to just sit in nenshin and slowly whittle his health down. Once nenshin runs out, just let one of the lasers from his crystal hit you and switch back immediately. You usually have to repeat this two or three times, and it's fairly risky since there are a ton of bullets all over the place that can hit you. You also won't have much energy left once the third phase begins, which can be fatal.
The opening for his third phase can be a little tricky depending on how much energy you have left, but it's a free kill once you've done enough damage to him to get the lasers firing out of the left side of the crystal. Just keep abusing the laser refill after exiting nenshin, as long as you have enough health left.
Here's some craziness that I was not aware of: if you get hit even once during the Stage 6 boss fight, your entire clear/bomb bonus is negated. Something that is really costing me. Oh and if you take even a little bit of laser damage apparently, one of those lives will not count and you will be down 8 mil. I'm ending the game with about 260 mill +/- each time, and if I could just do a little more scoring in the stages and keep about 4 lives up until the end I should be able to clear the 300 mil border. Right now I'm #21 on the leaderboards and thankfully crossed my friend's score which is good cuz he's a dick.
Yeah, honestly I could never figure out how the bomb/lives bonus worked. I played stage 6 in training mode over and over and sometimes I'd finish with 11 million, and other times I'd finish with 46-60 (depending on lives). Eventually I figured out that dying on that stage costs you big time, but I never figured out how much the lives and bombs were worth. So that is some useful info!
I've just started suiciding, and I'm not completely sure it's worth it. I have made it the stage 6 boss a few times with all 5 lives, but the way I look at is this: the timing for the stage 5 and 6 bosses is very strict if you have the default nenshin bar, but the extra you get from having 1 death gives you a lot more breathing room. So if I want to die before reaching them, the best place to do this on would either be stage 5 (so I can have max rank in every stage), or stage 1. So I figured it's best to die in stage 1, because the extra energy will be useful throughout the entire game.
But on the other hand, 369m is the only score I've got with a suicide on the first stage. I've got 6 or 7 other scores from 350-359m without an intential suicide, so maybe it's unnecessary. (Obviously the ideal way is to no miss no bomb the entire game, but that's beyond me.)
I just noticed that speedkilling the midboss could be useful after watching phan's two replays on youtube (430m and 504m I think). I'll have to try to work that in next time I play. As for the stage 2 boss, I tried using nenshin to make those patterns a little safer a few times, but honestly I thought it just made a mess of things and made it harder to deal with. lol
