Walkthroughs

Idiot’s guide to DoDonPachi Resurrection: hints, tips, and strategies

Bullet-hell? Hell no

Idiot’s guide to DoDonPachi Resurrection: hints, tips, and strategies

DoDonPachi Resurrection is a curious game. Unless you're a high-score junkie at heart, your first reaction on sampling its bullet-hell delights is likely to be ‘what the hell is going on?’, followed by, ‘Oh, is that it? This game is too short.’

Wrong. Well, not wrong in a sense – it is quite short if you’re purely trying to complete the five stages it throws at you – but that’s not what DoDonPachi Resurrection is about.

If you’re one of those players who’ve discarded it, baffled by all the S and M, hyper-cannons, and suchlike, this guide should provide you with a bit more incentive to return to the fold.

We’ll talk about each game mode separately, because, while the basic principles of ‘don’t die, shoot baddies’ applies, the key to scoring big varies quite drastically between the two modes.

iPhone Mode: Overview

The key to scoring high on the iPhone mode of the game is to rack up the multiplier by ‘scraping’ bullets, before unleashing the hyper-cannon and slaughtering everything on screen.

To raise the bar towards the ‘M’ side, you’ll want to mainly focus on your ship and try not to blast every enemy as they appear – you’ll need those precious bullets they fire. Feel free to destroy them once you’ve started on the path towards Menace, though.

Menace and the Hyper Cannon

Scraping is performed by moving your ship so that a bullet (or 40) flies through the glowing red sphere surrounding it. This area grows as the bar moves further towards maximum M.

A good tactic if there isn’t that much firepower on-screen is to follow a single bullet’s path – you can often get x100 just by meeting it halfway up the screen and following it down.

Once fully in Menace, keep scraping bullets to raise your multiplier. Once you reach x1000, smack the Hyper Cannon button to start racking up the kills.

If you want to get some big scores, rapidly rotate the Hyper Cannon multiple times – the wasp icon at the bottom should change to green, orange, red – and then watch as a huge beam of awesomeness destroys every mutha’ on the screen.

Activating the Hyper Cannon sends the bar flying back towards S (a fully charged hyper cannon sends it automatically all the way back).

Why do this at all? Well, what’s the point of having a large multiplier when nobody’s dropping any stars to multiply? This is where Slaughter mode comes in

Slaughter and Bombs

Slaughter mode not only boosts your ship’s standard firepower, but also makes every opponent drop lovely delicious stars.

The multiplier drops rapidly when engaged in Slaughter, though, so keep an eye on it and start scraping once it drops too far.

The riskiest moment in the game is when you’re trying to escape Slaughter mode as the margin for error on scraping is tiny, so try and give yourself plenty of time to recover the multiplier and don’t get cocky with the finger-sweeps.

Bombs are both your friend and your worst enemy. Automatically activated when hit, any use of a bomb sends the multiplier back down to x1 immediately – this applies to manual activation, too.

The trick is that manual activation also increases the length of time the bomb’s on screen for, as well as the length of time your ship is invulnerable.

If there’s a particularly horrible boss fight that always manages to hit you, manual activation will both heavily damage the boss, and give you plenty of time to recover.

You’re not going to be challenging the top 100 scores if you manually deploy on iPhone mode, though.

Arcade Mode: Overview

Arcade is a bit different. It’s no longer about balancing, but reacting to the enemies on-screen. Knowing when to deploy the ship’s various weapon systems is key to keeping the hit counter high.

Every kill adds one to the counter, with bullets destroyed in Hyper mode also adding to the tally. Going a second or two without a kill sends the counter into a speedy decline.

To prevent this from happening, switch to laser and keep it on the larger targets to keep the counter ticking in the right direction, and switch to the main cannon during Hyper to keep up the bullet cancelling.

Ship Selection

Type A: Narrow shots, but the concentrated fire makes it easier to carve through the small enemies.

Type B: Wide angle of shot with cannons rotating in the direction of movement. Weak central firing zone

Type C: Widest angle of central fire, an absolute monster when it comes to bullet cancelling

Bomb Style

There are only two buttons in Bomb Mode – Bomb and Laser.

Manually activating the bomb works in the same way as in the iPhone version, and shouldn’t be used except for in extreme circumstances.

Power Style

The hardest game type to master, Power Style gives you no bomb safety nets – just a few lives. You can still pick up the bombs dropped by the penultimate villains in a stage, though – you just can’t manually activate them.

It also offers the choice of switching between Normal (increases hit counter faster, but weaker firepower) and Boost (close to the level of Slaughter in the iPhone mode and boosts the hyper meter faster) modes.

This one's for people who can get through the majority of the game without even sniffing a bomb.

Strong Style

The easiest of the Arcade modes combines the Boost mode of Power Style with the bombs, or ‘extra lives’ as I like to call them. If you just want to kick back and rain destruction on your foes, Strong Style is the one for you.

General Tip for Beginners: Switch to Novice

Yeah, it sounds stupidly obvious, but listen.

Even with the reduced number of potential point outlets (bullets, as they’re called) and lower bonuses at the end of each stage, Novice mode will often garner higher scores than Normal for players who can’t reach the end of the game without dropping a few bombs.

So if you’re having trouble ‘one bombing’ it, dial it down a notch.

Get high scores for Arcade: Close in for bullet cancelling

Just cancelling bullets with the hyper cannon is fine and dandy for surviving, but if you want the higher scores, you’re going to have to put your ship at risk.

Move close into a bullet before it’s cancelled, and a delicious star will leap out. When you have a screen full of bullets, like, say, the final attack of the Stage 3 boss, it can be hard seeing your ship through all the points.

Get huge scores for Arcade: 2nd Loop

You may be forgiven for thinking that the people at the top of the world scoreboards have cheated, seeing how many extra digits they seem to have over your current scores, but this isn’t the case.

If you can complete the game without dropping more than two bombs/one life, you get the chance of continuing to play from the first stage again, unlocking new bosses and potentially doubling your initial score.

It’s ridiculously hard to do, though – especially when trying to thread between the laser batteries on Stage 5 without dying – but it wouldn’t be any fun if you could see all the game has to offer in one go, would it?

Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).