Game:

Chaos Field (2004)

Duration: 24:26

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13

Quite likely my coolest shmup accomplishment so far, even surpassing my recent Dangun clear or the Shiki 1 Steam record from last year : A Chaos Field score run with Ifumi that actually beats the Arcade World record, done with strats that I had to come up with all by myself due to a complete lack of high-level Ifumi replays to copy monkey lmao

[Note : Since the GC version has a wrong 10x base value for 3-1 boss kill, the score here was recalculated to have the proper value, comparable with Arcade scores. 416 099 310 - (34 370 000 * 0.9) = 385 166 310. Hopefully that's the only scoring inaccuracy in that version of the game]

I started to seriously play this game for score only last year and got the clear not very long ago too, somewhere in late 2021. After showcasing it for Shmup Slam 5 alonsgide Chinopolis, I just kept labbing and labbing strats on my own to get higher scores because it was just so stimulating and fun to come up with even better tricks, plus I have always been really curious how the hell Ifumi had a WR that was so much higher than Hal's, and this was the perfect opportunity to finally find out. While Hal has some near-WR superplay videos out there to show how it's done, there is absolutely nothing worthwhile with Ifumi to my knowledge. Even the Fxxk of Da World run isn't that useful. We at least know the WR score and have some info from Arcadia scans, but specific strats and replays? Nope

All the scoring experimentation was rewarded as my score potential kept climbing and climbing. That's the addictive thing with scoring in this game : the plethora of scoring tools and how the game encourages you to use them all creatively makes you look for even more score boosts all the time lol. And at some point, my score potential somehow got near the arcade WR...and even beyond. I never expected to get such a high score going in, instead the scoring strats just kept naturally being refined over and over until they somehow reached that point. It must have been around June 2022 that I realized that when doing my calculations. And this game made me whip out the calculator a lot lmao https://i.imgur.com/36Vquuh.png

The most restart-hellish part of the high level scoring in the game is not losing a single life all the way to Stage 5 (in order to sacrifice said lives on it to extend a huge combo), while still doing possibly dangerous scoring tricks everywhere, and this held me back a lot since tons of runs ended up in reset hell or dead man walking scenarios when facing 5-3 without the resources to keep the big combo going. I actually had to scale back scoring a lil' bit in stages 1 and 2 in my latest runs to ensure some more consistency with slightly safer strats, and that's when I got more runs that actually went somewhere

And even then, when you're in stage 5 you still can't die at the wrong time. Resource management can be pretty tight in this stage because 5-1 has plenty of gauge recharge but you don't want to abuse it too much since that would cut on the lucrative chain building by killing the boss earlier, yet 5-2 and 5-3 don't have much gauge recharge to be had aside from SDs so a balance is needed in the route. I had multiple runs fail there despite not having lost any lives before 5-1, and this one could have also joined that graveyard, but in the end I managed to handle it

A funny story is that the day before getting this run, I actually got another 385mil candidate run that died right at the very end : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQLpSLNwKjA Two more seconds and it could have been in the bag, but my impatience totally killed me lmao. It was more funny than anything else, a bit frustrating for sure but I knew I basically had it and could do it again. And so I did by getting this run the next day

After having played the game so much, this high score surprisingly feels just like the logical evolution of my runs in the game. Of course it was cool and satisfying, but in some ways I also felt like it was long overdue since I had the actual strats for much longer lmao. I wish I was more visibly excited about it but it's hard to fully realize I guess haha. Man, what a journey that was! In some ways I'm kinda glad there wasn't any info for this character so I could explore on my own and get inventive lol. The varied amount of resources and ways to score makes it very intellectually stimulating to try and optimize one's strats, so finally knowing how to beat the WR score was probably an even bigger reward than actually beating it lmao

I'm not sure if I'll push the game even more, but 400mil feels so close lol. It would likely entail lots of reset hell though. Well, even outside of that, there's also Original mode or scoring with Hal (or Jinn...) in case I want to keep exploring the game

Shmups Wiki page : https://shmups.wiki/library/Chaos_Field
Annotations document : https://drive.google.com/file/d/193CThfEMC_tHQ90O3RdaBKcuHNTXlmxO/view

Played on Dolphin (US GC ver.), recorded on OBS Studio

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