Game:

Sanvein (2000)

Duration: 23:41

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6

I've already cleared Sanvein's three routes last year, but I knew that I would eventually want to come back to it some day to improve my scoring. Well, that day is now.

And what a jump! While my previous PB was in the 50k and I knew there was lots of room for improvement, I did not realize there was potential to go all the way up to 90k.

The way the scoring works in this game is rather straightforward : nothing gives score except boss kills. And those give [current timer * power level] points (if power level is 0, the formula considers it is 1). You want to be fast and never taking any hit to get a high timer, and you want to clear all the floors that surround a boss to boost your multiplier on it. There can be some optimization puzzles at times as to what floors to aim for first, but most maps are relatively linear anyways.

The route I picked, Inner Wards, is the one I think has the highest scoring potential with all these Power 5/6 bosses, so I went at it and started doing runs again. It is also a relatively easy one for pure survival (at least compared to what I went through for other routes) so that's neat.

Still, the fact that any hit that you take is a permanent point loss on subsequent bosses makes it tricky to get a pretty high score. It is especially bad early on since the 90 second time loss will be reflected in the boss kills for the entire rest of the game, while a late-game hit will impact the scoring potential of less fights.

Thankfully once you have some setups for the enemy formations in the stages, there aren't that many hard spots if you can be consistent with your kills. But the ones that are hard can be stressful and chaotic. Power level 3 boss in Stratums, the iv level floor in Outer Wards, some iii and iv level floors in Mine, as well as the dreaded flying boss and triple replicating boss in The Core. All of those are the choke points, and while most are thankfully relatively late in the game, I can't afford to take too many hits either.

As I played more and more, my scoring improved from the ~50k I had in my survival clear to the 70k range, and seeing me being close to 75k, I aimed to get at least 80. Little did I know I'd even blow past it all the way to 93k!

In this run, I think I did not take any hit all the way to the end of Mine...where I surprisingly took a hit on the Mine boss. A bit annoying. But the score was already pretty good. The flying boss in The Core was a bit of a mixed bag, I took an unfortunate hit and the fight was a bit drawn out...but not as badly as it can get whenever I fail the speedkill strats. The replicating boss is actually a nightmare as it can last 3 seconds or 3 centuries if I don't nail the simultaneous kill, even with power level 2. In this run...it was thankfully 3 seconds. Unless you are lucky and gorilla through it, you have to weaken each part and then kill them all before any of the surviving ones starts spawning replacement boss parts.

Since I only took 2 hits and kept up a brisk kill pacing through the game, my timer was so high that I was already at 80k after beating said replicating boss. But destroying the center boss in The Core brought me to a whopping 87k. I did not expect to get that high, and with only the final boss remaining, suddenly 90k looked doable. I played it relatively safe but still took one hit. That didn't prevent me from getting a very cool 93k score!

I guess there is still some scoring potential as a no-damage run with similar (or better) speedkills could possibly bring it up to at least 95k. Is 100k possible??? I don't know yet. Maybe something for my future self, but I can't say for sure.

Man, what a crazy game. Success rules. It's so funny how I absolutely can't play overhead shmups with no angle lock on shots (like Kiki Kaikai) and yet this game is a blast despite that and the looser controls. It doesn't have super tight patterns to weave through and is mostly about speedkilling enemies in small arenas before they even get aggressive, so it all fits in the end!

Played on Duckstation, recorded with OBS Studio
#shmup #STG

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