Karous カラス - Hard Mode - ALL + TLB - 3.406.138.710pts - Lvl 264

Описание: New Karous PB!

As part of the Score Art Online event, I had to practice and prepare for a live Karous run. This game can be pretty easy to clear if you abuse the shield and play defensively (Especially in Easy Mode hahahaha    • Karous Easy AFK% no-shot no-sword no-DFS n...   ), but trying to score is another story!


Since you always get very close to enemies and barely have any post-DFS iframes (if any!), I tend to very often lose lives in dumb ways over the course of the game and then fail at the TLB's laser pattern or something along those lines. Death of a thousand cuts. So that's why practice was essential.


While my scoring potential usually gives me barely above 3bil, in this run, I was lucky enough to have encountered the bullet converter item (key to insane scores but completely RNG) not just once, but twice! Once against boss 3 form 2, and then on the last boss. In both cases I was kinda experimenting with the sword swings instead of my usual shot + DFS setup against them. And it worked.


So how does the bullet converter trick work? Well, you slash items and hope one of them turns into this yellow inverted triangle (yeah it's completely random), and then you pick it up when the screen is chock full of bullets to transform them all into other point items. You can slash those and hope one of them turns into another bullet converter, and so on and so forth.


The most random part is having the first item to spawn since you may not have lots of them to juggle. Getting hit on purpose to generate some items which you can then swing is a possibility, though in my case I really wanted to go for 1CC safety first and the trick as a side thing.


When the bullet converter frenzy is going on, the difficulty doesn't end there. Not only do you have to keep juggling the items and collecting the converters, you also have to be careful not to overload the game with items and potentially make it freeze lol.


I am not sure exactly how the emulators behave in that case too. I have frozen Demul with the same trick in Radirgy once (    • Radirgy Freeze   ), but I haven't frozen Karous on Flycast yet. Ohh also, another tricky thing on emus : a lot less slowdown! If you check out GOTYO or eiden's replays done on PCB, the bullet converter sequences will slow the game down to a crawl...but I have to do that same shit at 100% speed lmao.


Thankfully, those bullet converter tricks can be pretty lucrative in points, exp, and life ups. That last part especially was really handy because I was taking a few hits. And even after getting a full refill on boss 3 I still was close to game overing at the end hahahaha.


Oh yeah, speaking of the end, I went for a new technique on the TLB (at least new for me) : the safespot! During the last phase with the lasers, you can position yourself on top of the boss brain, and if you deflect bullets above and below, you should be good to go! No need to move anymore, and the boss health will slowly deplete thanks to the shield, and victory is yours in true Karous no-movement spirit hahaha. Usually you take a hit and after the hit, the bullets start also being reflected downwards. It's possible to do it without losing a life but it feels extremely unreliable, so maybe don't attempt it on your last life.


And in the end I got a nice 3.4bil. Had I killed Boss 3 instead of timing it out (which is very hard because of no slowdown) and if I remembered to kill the red side pods on last boss (which are worth a good amount of points given the big end multiplier, but I was sadly too worried about a timeout to remember about them), I could have gotten 3.5bil? Maybe another time. I still haven't used the trick on boss 2 which seems to be one of the most lucrative spots after all!



Played on Flycast, recorded with OBS Studio