Trophy Thoughts

[dertswa687o]

First off, holy crap I had no idea this was being rereleased.

 

I completed this game on 360 and it was easily my best completion. The game is a Cave shmup so you know it's no joke. They removed a lot of the miscellaneous trophies and left us with just the stuff for beating the game and also being incredibly good at it. The two really tough trophies are seeing the true ending in shin mode (previously Slash Mode) and 300M points in the original arcade game (previously Origin Mode). The true ending requires no deaths for the first 6 stages and as you would expect this requires a ton of practice and memorization of the stages. Thankfully the scoring requirement of 800M is "trivial" in comparison as it's quite easy to score in Slash Mode. On the other hand, scoring 300M in Origin Mode is extremely difficult and demands full exploitation of the scoring system. And even if you understand it, sometimes you just don't score enough.

 

The zetsu mode (previously Climax Mode) was in the original game but wasn't required for any achievements so I never actually played it. I have no idea how hard it is to score 600M. The other thing to note is that they removed the 3rd hardest trophy for beating the game without summoning your phantom. It also required you to 1CC so in some ways it was almost harder than achieving the true ending.

[Vergil]

Im looking forward to it, never played it. There is a physical release on play asia. But im waiting if SLG will release it too. For the trophies i have no idea lol but looks interesting. 

 

@HamSandwichOnRye

[FrozenLionheart]

4 hours ago, Vergil said:

Im looking forward to it, never played it. There is a physical release on play asia. But im waiting if SLG will release it too. For the trophies i have no idea lol but looks interesting. 

 

@HamSandwichOnRye

 

After the wait for deathsmiles (and then an added wait for them to re-dispatch the LE because it was sent back to them before even leaving the country ?) I will not be double dipping on this, I have the JP LE on order, now just to wait and pray DonDonPachi Resurrection (and hopefully won't be another year wait between releases if we do) gets a re-release and if it does that I may cave on double dipping.

 

Anyway I never got to play this before (partially why I won't double dip as not got the same attachment to it as Deathsmiles) so I am looking forward to playing this, its nice to have shoot-em up's in general making more of a resurgence again still a fantastic genre of games to have.

Edited December 15, 2022 by FrozenLionheart
Because I'm a fool and thought LRG did a switch release of this ?

[EmperorZetta]

Shouldn't be too tough for someone with a good amount of shmup experience, since the 1cc trophies don't have difficulty requirements. 

[HamSandwichOnRye]

@Vergil Looking forward to this also. I’m gonna wait till my physical copy arrives from PlayAsia. I don’t wanna double buy again like Deathsmiles. This game will by no means be a breeze, but the scoring system is far less complex than Deathsmiles. 
 

A lot of people have far exceeded the scoring requirements necessary for Platinum. See below: 

https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=45652

 

In addition, there are some good replays out there on Nico and YouTube. Plus there is a lot of written resources with scoring strategies through STG websites available.

 

Excited to start practicing in the near future. See you all at the Platinum finish line. ?

[Nelson_]

Nice, hope they port Mushihimesama Futari too ?

Edited January 19, 2023 by Nelson_

[FreshFromThaDeli]

I'm not interested in this game but I saw this pop up on HotUKdeals so thought I'll share here. 

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C473RPGT?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=pepperugc03-21&ascsubtag=2523233554

[HamSandwichOnRye]

Finally wrapped this one up today. Thanks to @dertswa687o for the guide and tips. After platinuming both Deathsmiles and Akai Katana I can say in confidence that I personally believe Deathsmiles is harder. For the arcade mode trophy of 300 mil in Akai Katana I finished the clear with 1 live potentially leaving a good 30 million points on the table in opportunity end game bonuses. I think if I were to continue practicing I could clear 340-350 mil without too much issue. This took around 160 hours meanwhile Deathsmiles took 220. Having a defensive mode in Akai Katana makes the game alot safer in the sense of survivability and scoring is much much simpler. I would say this game is more of a 9/10 or a low 10/10 as stated in the guide depending on shooter experience. Deathsmiles on the other hand clearing 300 million in Arcade is pretty brutal. I was running out of ideas of where to scrap more points together to put me above 300. Not to mention “Merry Chistmas and Over 6 Billion?!” proved quite challenging in DS2 as well. Here’s a video demonstration of my final run in Arcade on here is anyone is curious: 

I played the Physical version trophy list of this game (AS). I’d be curious to hear someone else’s thoughts on this versus Deathsmiles in terms difficulty or vice versa. Now let’s hope we get blessed with Mushihimesama next! 

Edited January 15 by HamSandwichOnRye

[ruexnimbus]

Akai Katana Shin (AKS) was very heavy on scoring in each of the 3 modes. Tackling the 800M and 9999 Combo trophies was a good introduction but frankly the 3-1cc trophies plus True Honor were the most frightening to me. It was at this point I came across Deathsmiles and decided to practice there a bit to pick up a few skills. I ended up playing through all of Deathsmiles and returning to AKS. After surviving Merry Christmas! and Deathsmiles Virtuoso I felt much more confident in achieving True Honor.

I was able to wrap up the 3-1cc trophies while attempting the score trophies for Zetsu. You will pretty much need to clear the game to reach those scores, anyways. While working on the 600M Zetsu trophy I came to the conclusion I needed to reach the final stages in rank 3 to get the scores necessary. It's all about numbers and rank 3 was the only way to get enough bullets on the screen. I came to the same conclusion for Origin mode; I needed to reach the end in rank 3 and then clear the game to achieve 300M.
 

In comparison to Deathsmiles, I think Deathsmiles is the harder game but both games share a lot of the same mechanics. They are good to play together. Similar to AKS, I concluded that I needed to trigger Death Lvl 3 in Hades Castle to achieve the 300M trophy. However, this process is much more hellish in Deathsmiles. Essentially for 300M in Deathsmiles-I you needed to do Virtuoso while scoring and for the 6B?! trophy in Deathsmile-II you needed to do Merry Christmas! while scoring. Deathsmiles was also very heavy on scoring however there was a big difference where it depended on how you kill each monster to determine what scoring items came out. At the very end for 300M in Hades Castle at Death Lvl 3, there are so many bullets coming at you that all you can do is absorb them, power up and then absorb more and just hope to survive long enough to reach 300M.

Thank you to @dertswa687o and @HamSandwichOnRye for sharing your knowledge. I don't think I could have succeeded without it.

To anyone reading this and wants to take on this challenge, I believe in you! I'm really not a SHMUP superstar; I never heard of this game or CAVE until a couple months before I bought it. If you read the guides, study the replays, practice, practice and PRACTICE you too can score that platinum!

Edited April 1 by ruexnimbus
Redundant sentence.

[HamSandwichOnRye]

@ruexnimbus Congratulations!!!