Great Mahou Daisakusen

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Great Mahou Daisakusen

Title screen

Developer:	Raizing
Publisher:	Capcom
Official site:	8ing Museum
Producer:	Tatsuya Minami Masato Toyoshima
Planning:	Kenichi Yokoo
Music:	Atsuhiro Motoyama Manabu Namiki Kenichi Koyano
Program:	Yuichi Toyama
Art:	Kazuyuki Nakashima
Designer:	Kenichi Yokoo
Release date:	2000
Previous game:	Battle Bakraid
Next game:	Brave Blade

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

Gameplay screenshot

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

Power ups

Name	Description
Small coin	Collecting several of them levels up the player's shot.
Large coin	Levels up the player's shot instantly.
Magic book	Levels up the player's magic.
Small bomb crystal	Fills a small portion of the player's bomb gauge.
Large bomb crystal	Fills a large portion of the player's bomb gauge.
Bomb	Increases the player's bomb stock.

Characters

Solo-Bang

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Slow. Shot: Wide shot. Sub-shot: Beams fired forward. Charged shot: Creates a sword. Can be manipulated by the player's movement. Bomb: Giant sphere that sticks to whatever it hits. Solo-Bang moves slower while the bomb is active. Strengths: Solo-Bang's wide shot provides a much needed coverage for his slow speed and his sub-shot is surprisingly effective neutralizing polarity bullets, albeit neither of them are particularly strong. Good charged shot with piercing properties. It's also simple to route for scoring. Weaknesses: Slow speed. Not helpful seeing as using the sword is the best way to deal damage and it involves being at close range right in the line of enemy fire, other than that Solo-Bang is a fairly weak character. The sword has a really short duration and it is almost impossible to obtain secret items that only appear with a level 8 usage, the Axe set needs to be completed as soon as possible to avoid this problem.

Karte

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Medium-fast. Shot: Narrow wide shot. Sub-shot: Bullets aimed at enemies by the options. Charged shot: Summons two knights that home-in on enemies. Bomb: Thunder fired forward. Karte moves slower while the bomb is active. Strengths: One of the easiest characters to just pick up and play. Karte offers very useful tools with her homing option shots and above average speed, notably for unexperienced players who won't be familiar with stage layouts and where enemies will come from. Similarly, using the knights to quickly sweep the screen is a good strategy when trying to deal with enemies. Weaknesses: Despite her survival usability, Karte's homing weapons can easily be her most annoying assets for scoring. Her options can accidentally kill enemies especially thanks to their long cooldown after firing. Likewise, the knights' AI is completely random and can lock-on to unintended targets. Karte's shot is bugged. It will gradually become weaker each time it is leveled up, meaning the shot is at its strongest at the initial level and P coins need to be avoided at all costs. This is a particularly troublesome issue if the player's intention is to score because the P coins start to drop frequently, making it hard to collect items and survive. Her bomb is unremarkable and possibly the worst in the game. It has little coverage and duration.

Miyamoto

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Fastest. Shot: Forward shot. Sub-shot: Grenades fired at a diagonal angle. Charged shot: Summons ninjas that throw shurikens. Bomb: Several sword slashes that travel across the screen. Miyamoto moves slower while the bomb is active. Strengths: In usual Raizing tradition, Miyamoto features the fastest speed out of all the characters, making it easy to not miss any items by being too far away on the screen. This is also useful for macrododging and cutback-heavy patterns (the Infernon boss fight is a great example of this). His charged shot covers a lot of the screen and can take out several small enemies (ergo, more items). This combined with his speed makes Miyamoto one of the highest scoring characters. One of the best bombs in the game. Using it at pointblank range is enough to drain a huge amount of a boss' HP. Weaknesses: Actually putting Miyamoto's scoring potential into practice is much trickier than it sounds. His speed alone can make him extremely difficult to control. It is not rare to die by accidentally ramming into a bullet or during a micrododge movement. Miyamoto's option grenades and the angle they are fired at have a frequent tendency of accidentally killing enemies and damaging boss parts too much. For some reason Miyamoto is one of the few characters (the only other one who shares this being his clone, Golden) whose charged shot is affected by his current magic level. In this case, being at the lowest magic level summons 2 ninjas instead of 4 which is generally useless, as they only fire diagonally. However, even when the magic level is maxed out the ninjas are rather weak and they share the same issue as the sub-shot.

Grimlen

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Slowest. Shot: Forward shot with two side shots fired at a 20° angle. Sub-shot: Skulls fired forward. The options' angle can be changed by moving up or down. Charged shot: Throws a large scythe with a boomerang effect. Bomb: Releases several ghosts that travel across the screen. Grimlen moves faster while the bomb is active. Strengths: Grimlen's weapons are some of the strongest in general. The sub-shot is surprisingly competent and will suffice even if the main shot is underpowered, has the best charged shot in the game for several reasons and a long-lasting bomb, allowing for considerable pointblank damage opportunities during boss fights or simply getting rid of all the threats when used in an emergency situation. The scythe deals huge damage, has piercing properties, range and lasts for a while. It has a predictable trajectory: when first launched it flies towards the top of the screen, stays there for a brief moment and returns moving towards Grimlen. This means experienced players could effectively control it to avoid damaging unintended targets. While the scythe having a long duration may seem as a problem, Grimlen has an exceptionally fast magic meter (the fastest out of any character), being able to use the it very often, something helpful even outside of scoring context where the scythe could be used just to speedkill large enemies with it. Grimlen is the highest scoring character because of this. They have an easy time doing several tricks the other characters would struggle with thanks to their superb firepower across the board. Weaknesses: Slowest speed. Practically need the shoes set completed to be viable. Heavily reliant on shot power especially if the goal is to score. Because not all the enemies will be dealt with by the scythe, the shot needs to be maxed out as soon as possible.

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

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Fast. Shot: Wide shot. Sub-shot: Axes fired at a diagonal angle. Charged shot: Creates a sword. Can be manipulated by the player's movement. Bomb: Giant sphere that sticks to whatever it hits. Gain moves slower while the bomb is active. Strengths: The only fast character with wide shot. Despite being functionally the same, for some reason Gain's magic bomb lasts longer than Solo-Bang's version, being able to deal a hefty amount of pointblank damage. Weaknesses: The absolute worst character for scoring. His magic meter has a massive delay before it starts filling up and it does so incredibly slow. His charged shot has a needlessly short duration (it's shorter than Solo-Bang's version of it by a few frames, so needing to complete the Axe set quickly is present here too). In a game where scoring is using the charged shot as often and efficiently as possible, this already severely hampers Gain's scoring potential. Adding into that, when it's actually used, the sword does little to no damage and it's difficult to move it around because it does not keep up with Gain's speed compared to Solo-Bang. Furthermore, its hitbox is busted and several sections of the sword essentially don't do damage (notably almost the entirety of the sword's tip and the edges of its body), making enemies even harder to hit. Having wide shot and Miyamoto options is a terrible combination. Gain has the hardest time dismantling bosses like Dration and Dribling while not destroying parts you wouldn't want to. Same shot bug as Karte. In general it's extremely finnicky to do anything other than camp at the bottom of the screen throwing axes. He is somewhat competent for clearing, but scoring will be a nightmare.

Chitta

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Medium-fast. Shot: Narrow wide shot. Sub-shot: Thunders fired forward. Charged shot: Summons two genies that home-in on enemies. Bomb: Giant sphere that sticks to whatever it hits. Chitta moves slower while the bomb is active. Strengths: Chitta is relatively straightforward and simple to use as far as her weapons go. She doesn't struggle safely dismantling bosses due to her narrow coverage and because of her fast speed lack of wide isn't a real issue. Her bomb duration is longer than Solo-Bang but shorter than Gain, being able to net good damage if pointblaking while the bomb is active. Weaknesses: Chitta's charged shot has an exceedingly lengthy duration. Technically, this could be seen as an advantage, as she can spawn level 8 items for longer than any other character, except Chitta's magic meter is slow. It's troublesome to collect items as the magic meter is draining because it takes several seconds for this to happen and then charging for whatever level you want to use next has the same issue. These two factors ultimately restrict how often Chitta can collect items during a stage. Moreover, the genies staying on screen as long as they do has virtually no benefit even for survival play because they are much weaker than Karte's counterpart. Because Chitta is a clone of Karte, she has the shot bug. Bugged hitbox? (more research is needed about this). Overall, Chitta has similar problems to Gain, almost everything about her is slow and weak. However, she has a slightly easier time scoring due to a better sub-shot and her charged shot covering more area.

Birthday

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Slowest. Shot: Forward shot with two side shots fired at a 20° angle. Sub-shot: Bullets aimed at enemies by the options. Charged shot: Throws a saw that tracks enemies. Bomb: Releases several saws that travel across the screen. Birthday moves faster while the bomb is active. Strengths: Karte options overall aren't a bad addition considering Birthday's slow speed. Birthday's saw is pretty strong and it can easily get rid of all the enemies on screen thanks to its homing properties. Same bomb as Grimlen but with even higher damage, making it an outstandingly powerful asset. A single bomb at pointblank range is enough to instantly destroy the vast majority of the bosses, rarely ever failing (this generally only happens if the shot level is low). This makes Birthday by far the easiest character for survival play. Weaknesses: Slowest speed. Another one of the worst characters for scoring but for different reasons compared to Gain and Chitta. Birthday is an unpredictable character and difficult to route because there is no way to tell where the saw will go and more often than not, it aims for the wrong target, especially troublesome during bosses. Karte and Chitta have a similar issue, but nowhere near as bad since their knights/genies selectively attack enemies instead of wrecking whatever happens to cross their path, and because they move faster than Birthday they can handle the situation much more easily. To make things worse the saw has a very short duration, not only being hard to collect items of a specific level from a midsize if it happens to go the wrong way but also specific secret items, basically any secret item that requires level 8 to be obtained will need the Axe set to be completed. Birthday's shot is quite underwhelming when underpowered and it's a trouble when recovering after a death, something inherited from Grimlen made worse by a weaker sub-shot.

Golden

Portrait			Name	Stats
Overview: Speed: Very fast. Shot: Forward shot. Sub-shot: Hearts fired forward. The options' angle can be changed by moving up or down. Charged shot: Golden summons clones of himself that fire hearts. Bomb: Laser fired directly forward. Golden moves faster while the bomb is active. Strengths: Second fastest character, being a tiny bit slower than Miyamoto. Has Grimlen's strong sub-shot, combined with Golden's narrow coverage this makes dismantling bosses pretty easy. Like Miyamoto, the lowest magic level only summons two clones when using the charged shot. However, the Golden clones always fire forward instead of diagonally. Golden has Karte's bomb only with a longer duration and, strangely, speed is not reduced but instead increased while the bomb is active, being able to quickly get rid of danger all over the screen. Weaknesses: Golden's speed can still make him difficult to control. Golden handles very similar to Miyamoto and while the bomb is weaker, he has subtle differences that make him easier to use, such as all of his weapons fire straight.

Scoring

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.

Set	Effect
Sword	Stronger shot.
Shield	Smaller hitbox.
Axe	Longer charged shot duration.
Armor	Smaller hitbox.
Ring	Stronger bomb.
Helmet	Smaller hitbox.
Staff	Stronger sub-shot.
Accessory	Stronger charged shot.
Food	Magic meter charges faster.
Shoes	Faster speed.
Treasure	None.

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.

//////////////////////////// A2+10 = time_accumulator every 64 frames, increment by 1, reset to zero on death, otherwise never resets //////////////////////////// A2+12 = bombs used during the stage //////////////////////////// A2+3C = height_accumulator for the stage the value is reset to zero every stage every frame, height_accumulator += c_height_table[(y_pos / 32) & 0xf]; (bottom is index 3 [value = 0]) (top is index 12 [value = 5]) c_height_table[] = { 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, } //////////////////////////// 3710A height_bonus = min(height_accumulator,65536) / 256 * 1000 time_bonus = min(time_accumulator,256) / 32 * 1000 bonus = ((height_bonus + time_bonus) / 100) * c_bomb_reduction_table[min(bombs_used, 7)]; c_bomb_reduction_table[] = { 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, 0, 0, 0, };

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.

Power up	Value
Small coin	100 points
Large coin	1,000 points. Increases by 1,000 until capping at 10,000 points
Magic book	1,000 points. Increases by 1,000 until capping at 10,000 points
Bomb	2,000 points, 5,000 points, 10,000 points, caps at 50,000 points

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

Bomb here for an easy scoring opportunity.

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

If available, you can include information here about the hardware, the development of the game, and its general reception. Try to have as much information in this section cited as possible.

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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.

Gallery

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  Japanese version logo

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  International version logo

References & Contributors

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