Parodius Da!



Parodius Da! (Japanese: Parodiusu Da! パロディウスだ！) is a shmup developed and published by Konami in 1990. It is the second installment in the Parodius series succeeding the less popular Parodius (Konami 1988) released on the MSX. It is the first of the three arcade games from the series followed by Gokujou Parodius (Konami 1994) and Sexy Parodius (Konami 1996).

Parodius Da! has received several console ports over the years, e.g. for the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn or PlayStation - all of which differ significantly from the arcade original as well as from each other.

Controls
The game offers two different control styles which can be selected at the start of the game: Auto Power-Up (uses one button) and Manual Power-Up (uses three buttons).

When Auto Power-Up is selected, the game will automatically power up the ship when enough capsules are collected. Moreover, Roulette Capsules (see Items below) just count as regular capsules.

Characters
There are four characters to choose from: Vic Viper, Octopus, Twin Bee and Pentarou. While the basic controls are the same, each of the characters have individual strengths and weaknesses due to the different Power Meters. Although preferences may vary, the difficulty ranking for the characters from easiest to hardest may be Twin Bee > Octopus > Vic Viper > Pentarou.

The images below indicate the hitboxes which are exactly the same size for the four characters.

Power Meter
The Power Meter system in Parodius Da! is directly inherited from the Gradius series. When the game begins, the Power Meter starts at position 0, i.e. no box of the Power Meter is highlighted. When the player picks up a red capsule, the Power Meter position is advanced by +1 and the next box in the Power Meter sequence will be highlighted. Upon pressing A, the ship receives the currently highlighted ability. Once an upgrade is activated, the Power Meter jumps back to position 0 again and the sequence starts anew.

When a red capsule is picked up when the Power Meter is at position 7 it will jump back to position 1.

The effects of the seven positions of the Power Meter are as follows.

While Missile can be equipped in conjunction with Double or Laser, only one of the primary weapon (Double or Laser) can be selected at a time. Therefore, the player has to decide when to use Double and when Laser might be the better choice.

Although the Power Meter has certain general properties, all four characters have an individual set of upgrades. The character select screen shows the following overview.



Items
There are two types of items: power capsules and bells. An item will pop up either if the player destroys certain waves of enemies fully or when a red enemy is destroyed.

All regular items except Roulette Capsules appear in the following item cycle. Missing an enemy that holds an item does not advance the item cycle. Once the item cycle has reached the end it starts all over again. Roulette Capsules are fixed and always found inside the same enemies. They have no effect on the regular item cycle.

The bell cycle starts at yellow. Hitting a Yellow Bell five times will make it advance to the next color. Every other color just takes a single hit to make the bell cycle go to the next yellow again. All bells share the same cycle over the course of the entire game. For example, when the player picks up a White Bell, the next bell that appears is a yellow one and hitting it five times will make it switch to green. This cycle is not affected by missing bells or picking them up. Once the bell cycle has reached the end it starts all over again. If an individual bell goes through the full bell cycle twice (or is hit with the equivalent number of shots if the bell cycle extends over 2+ bells simultaneously), it blows up. Destroying a bell in this way has no affect on the score value of the yellow bells.

Despawning Items
When the spritelimit of the game is exceeded while shooting enemies that would otherwise spawn an item (bells and capsules - including roulette capsules), these items can sometimes not spawn. Even when a regular item is despawned in this way, the item cycle will still advance as if it had appeared.

Despawning a yellow bell does not result in a decrease of the present bell value.

Bells regularly despawn during a stage transition (e.g. when a boss fight starts). This will likewise not affect the bell value.

Extra Lives
On default settings, the player is awarded with two extra lives, one at 30,000 and the second at 100,000.

Rank
Parodius Da! has an incredibly unforgiving rank system. Due to the few lives the game grants to the player it is paramount to control it and keep it low as much as possible. Generally speaking, there are two main rank counters at play: the Base Rank and the Frame Rank.

The Base Rank is affected by the following four factors. Minimum and maximum values are given in parentheses.

How the values of these factors are calculated is explained in the following four sections.


 * 1) Minimum Rank

The minimum rank is calculated by the difficulty (as set in the dip switch settings) and the current stage number. Per stage, the Base Rank never falls below this minimum rank number.


 * 1) Power Ups

Depending on the power ups equipped, the following rank increase is added to the Base Rank. If the setup changes, so does the rank increase. Note that an equipped shield affects the rank in two ways. First, the Base Rank directly increases when an active shield is equipped according to the table below (this number will decrease again when the shield is lost). Moreover, an active shield affects the Frame Rank (see below).


 * 1) Bell Stock

The rank increase from the bell stock is calculated in a straightforward manner: for each slot that is filled, the Base Rank is increased by +1. When the bell power is used, the rank will decrease again accordingly. Since only Blue Bells and Red Bells can fill slots of the bell stock, only these can directly affect the Base Rank. Other bells and the effect duration of bell powers only affect the Frame Rank (see below).


 * 1) Frame Rank

The Frame Rank consists of a main counter and an incremental counter. The incremental counter goes +1 for every 32 frames passed. When the incremental counter surpasses 255, the main counter and thereby the Frame Rank increases by +1. Only this number of the main counter has then an effect on the calculation of the Base Rank.

The incremental counter can increase at a higher rate and is affected by the number of speed ups equipped and likewise by an active shield and active bell power. The incremental counter is not affected by the bell stock as such but only during the duration of the bell power itself (e.g. for the duration the character sprite is increased in size from a Green Bell). If the player loses a speed up/shield or the duration of a bell power wears off, the incremental counter is increasing at a slower rate again.

To put this into perspective, the main counter of the Frame Rank increases by +1 every 136 seconds with a 32f increase rate. In contrast, it increases every 17 seconds with a 4f increase rate.

For every death, the main counter of the Frame Rank decreases by -2 and the incremental counter resets to 0. This means that dying with a high incremental counter can make the main counter decrease by almost -3 at times.

Loops
Unlike games of the Gradius series, the arcade version of Parodius Da! does not feature infinite loops and ends after the second loop. There are no requirements for the second loop so that upon beating stage 1-10 the player will always enter 2-1.

The player loses all of his Power Ups and starts in the default state again. If the Power Meter was highlighted at any position at the end of loop 1, it will be highlighted on the first position "Speed Up" beginning with loop 2. This is very helpful in order to quickly gain more upgrades again.

Minimum rank is much higher during the loop (see above). Moreover, there's a flag for loop 2 that will always activate single revenge bullets. On higher rank, additional revenge bullets can spawn after the first revenge bullet. These additional revenge bullets often spawn with a significant delay which makes them particularly troublesome to dodge.

Scoring
Scoring in Parodius Da! is exceedingly simple and consists of three parts:

Simply destroying enemies is the most important part of scoring. More enemies can be spawned by reaching higher levels of rank sooner. A few more enemies can be shot down when the destruction of hatches that spawn enemies is delayed (e.g. the clowns in stage 2). Some of the bosses are another important source of optimizing points and can be milked for a while.
 * 1) Destroy enemies

It is crucial for scoring to not miss or despawn (due to the sprite limit) any yellow bell. This includes keeping the use of other bells to a minimum as each pick-up of a bell that is not yellow essentially means losing 10k. More bells can be spawned by keeping certain hatches with bell dropping enemies alive (e.g. in stage 5).
 * 1) Collect yellow bells

The double K.O. against the final boss of loop 1 has a twofold function: First, to decrease rank for the beginning of loop 2 and second, to gain an additional 100,000 points per double K.O. for a total maximum gain of 400,000 points when all extra lives are sacrificed this way. In order to perform the double K.O., the player simply has to steer into a wall after the eighth arm is destroyed. The timing for this is very lenient.
 * 1) Double K.O. against the 1-10 boss

Version Differences
There are three different romsets for the arcade game: 1) Japan; 2) Asia; 3) World. No gameplay differences whatsoever have been reported.

Video References
Video index for Parodius Da!

References & Contributors

 * Page created and written by Plasmo.
 * Images showing the hitboxes provided by sikraiken.
 * Rank information is largely modeled on the description provided by Wayder: . Many of this has been confirmed independently by sikraiken.