[Xbox 360] オトメディウスG+X=W実績百パ~!

2013 was a bleak year for the 360 when it came to interesting Japanese-made exclusives. With MAGES/5pb jumping ship by making PS3/Vita ports of their newer games and Cave going a bit mellow (the last few releases were merely compilations and remakes of their established shooter hits), times like these called for the proverbial barrel-bottom scraping.

Contrary to the context however, what you find at the bottom isn't necessarily bad.

I was able to single out a couple of shoot-em-up franchises that seemed worth my while: Cave's Deathsmiles and Konami's Otomedius series. While I'm no stranger to the genre (My childhood was spent trying in vain to clear Gradius, Star Soldier and Summer Carnival '92 Recca), I'm not too spectacular at it either. These titles were chosen for the appealing character designs, and of course, for being the most accommodating towards non-shooter fanatics like myself.

The main focus at the moment though is Otomedius G (Gorgeous) and X (Excellent), both of which hit the big 100% in this month alone.

Excellent was done first. Two time-consuming achievements (Top Angel Class and Shooting Ace) were unlocked in tandem by doing several cycle repetitions (roughly 60 runs if I remember correctly) of Stage 1 on easy, configured via Offline Mutliplay mode done solo. Not having to scrounge for Power Capsules to get a force field granted constant peace of mind even as the latter cycles became gradually taxing.

The biggest drag was the "Weapon Card Complete" one. The latter cycle fetch quests were tolerable since you can jump straight to the desired stage with a solo run on Multiplay; the annoying part was having to raise Hyper Anoa to Cherubim Class just to power up her pitiful "upgrades": Back Beam, Up Laser and Down Laser (The latter two even have separate collectible Weapon Cards... in my opinion, it would have made sense if they weren't mutually exclusive... if the cards were already collected, Hyper Anoa should benefit from them as well).

Next was Gorgeous. Since it was an arcade port with a separate remake mode as opposed to Excellent which is a standalone console-exclusive game, naturally the elements were a bit more crude. Case in point are the collections: Weapon Cards can only be used by the character who obtains them; you either need to make individual shop purchases using points from Gorgeous Mode or earn them as random drops from the results screen in Arcade Mode.

The Achievement that took the most time here is the "Cards Complete" one, which entailed getting all Weapon Cards and completing the 50-piece Illustration Puzzle set for one character. While the Weapons were gained smoothly, completing the puzzle was a pain since it depended on the aforementioned result draw in Arcade Mode. As the piece count drew closer to 50, the drops became uncommon to rare, and for three hours I dealt with frequently getting practically useless +1000spt Bonus Cards. It reached a point that I had to resort to throwing games just to get to the result screen ASAP.

I'm thankful that there's no Top Angel Class one for this game since the rank only increases in Arcade Mode and is limited to 3 screens per session... it would have been a painstaking grind otherwise.

At present I'm still alternating between the two games for full completion beyond the Achievements (Increasing Angel Rank for personal favorites Erul and Madoka as well as completing their respective Weapon Card sets in G). I may not be able to pull off the counter-stops and insane scores that the more proficient players do in the downloadable replays, but watching them was helpful in the sense that they made me enjoy shooters more. Years ago I dismissed the platform as being too stressful, but accessible titles like these, reliable resources and a widening perspective that comes with age made me see things differently.