Great Mahou Daisakusen



Great Mahou Daisakusen (JP: グレート魔法大作戦, known as Dimahoo outside of Japan) is a vertical scrolling shooting game developed by Raizing and published by Capcom for the CPS2 Arcade system board in the year 2000. It's the last game in the Mahou Daisakusen trilogy, being the sequel to Shippu Mahou Daisakusen. It features a scoring system based around hidden items, with 108 items to collect from destroyed enemies across the entire game. It never received any home console ports.

Story
They came from underground.

It has been 50 years since ‘The Great War of the Demi-humans’ raged across the continent.

The Gobligans, having lost their king, fled underground to build an empire away from the eyes of humanity.

Eventually, the time came.

The seemingly endless peace of the aboveground peoples came to an abrupt end in the face of the the underground invasion.

There was no effective way to deal with monsters who could attack from all sides, appearing and disappearing from below at will.

The young King Anktil, seeing the severity of the situation, secured an alliance between the aboveground kingdoms and reinstated the Royal Knights, then put a large bounty on the Gobligan Empire and spread his power throughout the continent.

Alas, we must pray for the four legendary warriors…

Gameplay overview
Great Mahou Daisakusen is a 3 buttons game. There are six stages the player must go through before finishing. It's a single loop game, although a second loop can be enabled in Service Mode if the player so desires.

Controls

 * A button: Fires the player's main shot.


 * A button (hold): Charged shot.


 * B button: Activates the player's bomb.


 * C button: Autofire for the player's main shot.

When both the A and C buttons are held together, the C button's autofire will take priority over the A button.
 * Start button (hold)+A button: Opens the player's inventory viewer.
 * Start button: Scrolls through the pages.
 * Start button (hold): Closes the inventory viewer.

When opening the inventory viewer, the Start button must be released after pressing the A button, otherwise the commands will conflict and the inventory will be closed immediately afterwards.

Player elements

 * 1) Bomb stock.
 * 2) Magic meter.
 * 3) Bomb gauge.
 * 4) Current polarity.
 * 5) Message box.
 * 6) Item name.
 * 7) Inventory viewer.

Default characters
Solo-Bang

Karte

Miyamoto

Grimlen

Secret characters
After a credit has been inserted, the player can unlock 4 secret characters by inputting a code while the title screen is up (Up, Up, Left, Down, Down, Right, A, B, A, B, A, Start). The secret characters play very similar to the default characters (example: Gain has Solo-Bang's shot and charged shot while his sub-shot is like Miyamoto's), with their own unique quirks.

Gain

Chitta

Birthday

Golden

Item collecting
Holding the A button starts gradually increasing the player's magic meter, up to level 8 (alternatively, shooting down enemies also increases it). Releasing it triggers the player's charged shot and any enemy destroyed while it's active drops an item. Each item has 8 levels that can appear depending on where the magic meter was, collecting all of them completes a 'set' of said item and adds a score multiplier for every subsequent item collected.

Finishing a set also grants a permanent boost to the player, giving an incentive to complete some of them even in a survival context. In particular, the Shoes and Sword can make a notable difference.

The boosts will take effect after the current stage has ended or the player loses a life

There are also secret items with hidden requirements needing to be fulfilled to obtain them. They are worth 100,000 points, making them essential in score runs. Secret items don't have levels, and while they are treated as their own set they won't increase the multiplier and only add up to the 108 items completion. Collecting all 108 items grants a 1,000,000 points bonus.

Polarities
Holding the A button periodically changes the player's polarity as the magic meter is filling up. There are red and blue polarities. Many enemies have a polarity and fire bullets imbued in it. The player's options can destroy bullets of the same polarity, and being hit by them won't result in a death, instead the player's shot and magic drop by one level. A red polarity enemy is highly vulnerable against the blue polarity and vice-versa, and always resistant to its own color. Destroyed polarity enemies have a slight influence in scoring:


 * Destroyed by its opposite polarity is x2 of its base value.


 * Destroyed by its own polarity is 1/2 of its base value.


 * Destroyed by a bomb is 1/10 of its base value. This applies even for non-polarity enemies.

The polarity bonus rules only count if the player has at least a single magic power up.

End of stage bonus
Once a stage has been finished, the player is rewarded with the following score bonuses:


 * Bomb Bonus: 10,000 pts for each bomb in stock.


 * Great Bonus: This is an active bonus that takes place throughout the entirety of each stage. It is calculated based on the player's vertical position on-screen, time passed since a life was lost before clearing the stage and the number of bombs used. The vertical position and time passed are what increases it, while dying and bombing reduces it. In particular, dying resets the time bonus. The maximum amount of score that can be obtained from the Great Bonus is 264,000 points.

Surplus power ups
Collecting power ups while at full power awards points. Interestingly, the value of large coin, magic and bomb power ups can be chained. Letting any of the chainable power ups go off-screen (in the case of the large coin, the small coins also count) will reset them back to their initial score value.

These are extremely minuscule score gains and the player can safely ignore them in favor of developing a good item completion route. More often than not, power ups drop during situations where it's too dangerous to try collecting them (such as in the middle of boss fights), while the only place where benefiting from surplus bombs could be possible is stage 5.

Rank
Great Mahou Daisakusen features a basic rank system that increases by collecting items. Rank affects bullet speed and enemy fire rate.

Strategy
For a list of all the items see: Great Mahou Daisakusen/Item list For a list of all the enemies and the items they drop see: Great Mahou Daisakusen/Drop list For video references see: Great Mahou Daisakusen/Video Index

Destructible scenery
In stage 1 and 3, using a bomb during specific sections can destroy the scenery and reveal items.

Stage 1

Level 8 items can be uncovered from each house and the barricade at the end by using bombs on them. This allows the player to obtain high-level rare items such as the ring early on.


 * First house: Sword level 8.


 * Second house: Shield level 8.


 * Third house: Axe level 8.


 * Fourth house: Armor level 8.


 * Fifth house: Ring level 8.


 * Sixth house: Helmet level 8.


 * Seventh house: Staff level 8.


 * Barricade: Accessory level 8 (x5).

Stage 3

Before the midboss there is a little hallway with tanks and turrets. This section can be bombed to uncover a few important items, like the Dragonfly secret item and treasure level 8, the rarest out of all the regular items. Furthermore, since there's quite a lot of tanks, it's possible to quickly fill the bomb gauge and regain the lost bomb.


 * Vents: Food level 8 (x2).


 * Stairs: Dragonfly.


 * Metallic door: Treasure level 8.

Development History
The development of Great Mahou Daisakusen was a joint project between Raizing and Capcom, who were contacting different shoot em' up developers to make games for their CPS2 arcade board. Kenichi Yokoo, a pixel artist during the previous games of the series, was in charge of the project. For the sound department, Atsuhiro Motoyama and Kenichi Koyano worked on the compositions while Manabu Namiki was in charge of the sound direction and programming. During the planning stages, the team experimented with several ideas such as:


 * Spinning the joystick around to charge/add bombs.
 * Using Marker Missiles that lock-on to enemies à la 19XX.
 * "MY HEART IS SCREWED IN!" was one of the dialogue lines in-between stages.
 * Bombs that trail your ship like a tail.
 * When your ship is shot down, it turns into bones.
 * Pressure-sensitive buttons, compatibility with rotary lever/button control panels.
 * Having the heroine say "arigatou!" at the end.

However, besides the bomb trail behind the ship, the rest of these ideas were scrapped as Toyama says they weren't well received.

Yokoo mentions the polarity system came from the idea of making the game more enjoyable for 2 players, where the enemies and bullets patterns would be arranged in such a way that each would have to switch polarities as they played. The bomb trail behind the ships played into this approach as well, as the players can exchange bombs during a co-op game. He also recalls the treasure collecting wasn't part of the initial design plans and it wasn't until they were testing how to display items by flooding the screen with items that the idea came into life. With this, the team looked back on searching for secrets in older games, wondering how they could implement in their current project. According to Toyama, the team wanted a system where using the polarities would be necessary to achieve a high-score.

While Mahou Daisakusen and Shippu Mahou Daisakusen were known for their character focus presented in the form of stage dialogues and individual endings, for Great Mahou Daisakusen Yokoo made their motivations more "conceptual" and "abstract", claiming: "It isn’t shown in the game, but Solo Bang was suffering from emptiness after his family had been killed, and Karte sacrifices herself in the name of peace. They’re carrying heavier burdens, and I regret that we weren’t able to include individual endings showing each character being freed from them." . A common complaint players have with Great Mahou Daisakusen when comparing it to the previous entries in the series.



The team had plans for Yoshida Kaoru from Soukyugurentai as a martial artist, a sort of beast man based on Bloody Roar and a pair of dwarf brothers with a Battle Garegga motif as guest characters. Unfortunately, none of them made it into the final game. They also wanted to have 70 year old versions of Gain and Chitta, but were scrapped, as they thought expanding the world in that way wouldn't make players happy. Ultimately, since they still wanted to add characters outside of the Mahou Daisakusen series, the team settled for including Armed Police Batrider characters Birthday and Golden, the latter in particular was a favorite of the staff at the time.

Version Differences
MAME lists four versions of Great Mahou Daisakusen, going by the ROMset names they are:


 * gmahou: The Japanese version.


 * dimahoou: The US version.


 * dimahoo: The European version.


 * dimahooud: A bootleg set. Plays the same as the US version.

Rank
Despite all the versions having difficulty set to 4 by default, dimahoo features a slightly reduced difficulty with slower bullets, enemies having lower HP and some of them being less aggressive (notably the ones that try to crash into the player).

Localization
As usual, the text in the international versions has been translated to the English language. Now the player can know how many CHAMPION BEEFS have been obtained in each stage.

Trivia

 * There is a bug with the magic meter. Using a level 6 charge just as it is about to be level 7 makes enemies drop level 7 items, but with the duration of a level 6 charged shot.
 * Another bug involving the charged shot is holding the A button to use it and then releasing it right before it activates. When done with the right timing, enemies will drop items for a brief moment but with no charge shot activation. This is very tricky to do, and it's more noticeable with zako enemies.

References & Contributors

 * Primary info provided by Andrew98
 * Great Bonus research by trap15 posted on STG Rev. 2020 Discord server