eXceed 2nd - Vampire REX - Exceed 1cc
0The upgraded/remade version of eXceed 2nd, basically what Black Package was to the original Jade Penetrate.
Something something Ikaruga, you have a polarity system you can freely swap between, and you absorb bullets of the same affinity as you while bullets of the other affinity will kill you. Absorbing enough bullets charges your bomb which is the gauge on the left of the screen, and is quite powerful. Since this replaces traditional bombs, you really need to know how to handle a majority of patterns in this game - you can't just skip something dangerous by dropping consecutive bombs on it.
I mean you can, but that in itself requires pattern knowledge to optimise your bullet absorption.
Your shot meanwhile does mediocre damage, until you shotgun it. There's even visual feedback for when you're successfully shotgunning, and it does quite a bit more damage than usual. Since enemies in this game don't do collision damage and instead merely push you back, you can continually ram into them to shotgun and absorb as many bullets from them as possible. Apparently you also deal a bit more damage to bosses if you use the opposite affinity to theirs? But I'm not entirely sure.
No focus or hitbox indicator, but they're not really needed.
Since extends are score-based here, it's good to learn a few speedkill strats for certain boss patterns since those give a lot of score for fast kills.
I actually got another run initially which did a lot better on most of the game, but unfortunately the replay for that desynced. I have the live recording here anyway: • eXceed 2nd - Vampire REX - Exceed 1cc #2 but I also just wanted to quickly do another clear while the routes were still in my head since it's nice to have an actually functional replay file for a run.
Oh and yeah, banger OST again.
I hear the eXceed games from before this are of... questionable quality, including the original eXceed 2nd. In the interest of trying things I'll still check them out but maybe I won't dedicate too much time to them.