Pocky & Rocky Reshrined - Hard, No Death Clear + All Secrets (Ikazuchi - 6,417,180 pts)

Описание: Turn on captions for some extra commentary.

Decided to do another run because a lot of cool new tech got found.

The biggest discoveries being shop manipulation and item duping.
The shops usually give you a random reward, but what you get is actually determined by the last digit of your coin count.
For 50 coin shops you want a 3 or an 8 to get the shield.
For 100 coin shops you want a 4 or a 9 to get the extend.
300 coin shops always give a guaranteed extend.
Might be a cool little nod to the original arcade Kiki Kaikai where extends spawn if your last three score digits end in zero.

For Item duping you need to understand how the game registers picking up items first.
You pick up an item by either touching them directly OR touching them with the deflect hurtbox. In order for the dupe to happen both situations need to happen at the same time.
You need to be right under the item and be in a reflect frames when it falls on you. Run forward as soon as the chest breaks and then reflect. You'll get the same item twice.

In a nutshell scoring in this game is:
Not getting hit and not bombing (30k for excess health items and bombs, 50k for excess shields)
Getting all the secret chests and shops.
Shop manipulation to get all extends and shields.
Item duping to get double the value of items.
Milking. You lose score from the time bonus but you only lose 200 points per second so milking is still worth more.

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined came out about a month ago on Japanese PS4 and Switch, with the Western release coming later in June.
Continuing the trend of modern sequels to random old games, Reshrined is a sequel to the 1992 SNES Pocky & Rocky.
This time actually made by the original developers; Natsume. Lately they've been making remakes/sequels to their old IP's in the style of the originals, which is pretty cool.
Before this they did Wild Guns Reloaded and The Ninja Warriors Once Again.

The original title of the series is Kiki Kaikai, which started as an arcade title in 1986 and got several ports and sequels, including one on the GBA. When the games were brought overseas they were renamed to Pocky & Rocky.
Kiki Kaikai is set in a somewhat land of fantasy, inhabited by humans and youkai, and Sayo-chan, the miko of the Shrine and the main character of the series, is often tasked with resolving supernatural "incidents".
As you can probably tell Kikai Kaikai was one of the major inspirations for Touhou, especially if you know the PC-98 games.

The game has a Story mode and a Free mode.
Story mode features all the story (obviously) and has preset characters for you to use during stages. Certain abilities are also locked until stage 3.
Free mode lets you choose between one of the five playable characters to play the entire game with, with all abilities unlocked from the start.

Hard mode is the hardest difficulty in the game. Enemies are more aggressive and shoot more, and some enemies now shoot revenge bullets. Though it's not that much more difficult than Normal.
The most significant change is that you lose power after getting hit and you can't pick it back up again unlike Normal. There is sort of a Gradius syndrome going on if you get hit too many times in a row, it's really hard to survive at low power and it's usually a downwards spiral when it happens.

Game manual: https://imgur.com/a/SeMGZjC
The movement speed in this game is really slow, so it's not really about dodging and more about making good use of the slide, reflect and shield.
Every character has different shots for blue, green and red powerups, but red is usually the strongest. It does the most damage and this game mostly has tanky enemies instead of popcorn, so raw power is just overall more usefull.
Powerups work kinda weirdly in this. You need to keep picking up powerups of the same color to increase their strength, if you keep switching you'll not power up anything. Different color powerups are their for a liability and can be actively more dangerous than the enemies if you accidentally switch to a shit shot. The hardest attack on the stage 2 boss is when it drops a bunch of powerups on you.
The reflect is really good. Its range is pretty huge and reflect most bullets. It also does decent contact damage and pushes you away from enemies so they don't ram into you when they're moving towards you.
The dash is mostly for movement since it doesn't give you i-frames.

The game is great fun and has absolutely gorgeous pixel art. Definitely recommended.

00:00 - Intro
00:11 - Stage 1: The Haunted Shrine
04:06 - Stage 2: Enchanted Forest
13:20 - Stage 3: An Ancient Land
20:05 - Stage 4: The Underworld
27:37 - Stage 5: Cursed Airship
36:49 - Stage 6: The Burning City
38:59 - Stage 7: Battle with Black Mantle
49:20 - Stage 8: The Final Battle
51:09 - Ending & Credits

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