Karous
Title screen
| Developer: | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Release date: | 2006 |
| Previous game: | Radirgy |
| Next game: | Illmatic Envelope (Illvelo) |
Karous (jap.: カラス, karasu) is a cel-shaded, vertical shmup from 2006 developed by Milestone. It was published by Sega and released November 15, 2006 in japanese Arcades on Sega’s NAOMI platform and later ported to Sega Dreamcast on March 8, 2007. It was the last Dreamcast game, that was officially licensed by Sega.
For replay videos, visit the Video Index.
Gallery
See Karous/Gallery for our collection of images and scans for the game.
Gameplay Overview
Karous is a vertical scrolling shmup with 5 Stages and a TLB. Each stage has boss, stage 3-5 also have midbosses. The player’s ship has 4 different weapon systems, a regular spread shot, a sword for melee range, a shield and a D.F.S. Bomb. The shot, sword and shield can be powered up by earning experience points from destroyed enemies or collecting specific power up items dropped by special enemies. The D.F.S. gauge can be filled by destroying enemies and cancel enemy bullets with the shot or shield. When the gauge is full it can be consumed to use the D.F.S. Bomb. During the D.F.S. Attack the player ship is invincible and the player gets a bonus on experience points and score from destroyed enemies. As soon the shield is leveled up to 20, it acts also as an offensive weapon by refelecting enemy bullets. The overall level of the ship is displayed on the right side of the screen and also appears on the leaderboard The weapon power-ups dropped by enemies can be changed by hitting them with the sword. They can also turn in to speed-up or speed-down items.
At the beginning the game lets you choose from three different difficulty-options:
- Easy: Only the first 3 Stages, enemies shoot only destroyable bullets
- Normal: All 5 Stages, Enemies also shoot undestroyable bullets
- Hard: All 5 Stages, Enemies shoot more and also bigger undestroyable bullets
Controls
- A: Shot
- B: Sword
- C: D.F.S.
The 2025 Ports also offer a rapid-fire option.
Characters
- Karous (カラス) – Player's ship pilot
- Shigi (シギ) – Navigator
- Akahara (アカハラ(赤原))
- Hakugan (ハクガン(剥眼))
Scoring/Strategy
The main strategy is to fill your D.F.S. - gauge as quick as possible and use the D.F.S. to absorb bullets, destroy enemies for score and level up your preferred weapons early. High scoring requires a very aggressive playstyle.
Bigger enemies, midbosses and bosses have destroyable parts, so you want to destroy them piece by piece.
You can earn a lot of points from bossfights, by destroying single parts and absorb bullets with your D.F.S. but the bosses time out pretty quickly so if you take to long you won’t earn points for destroying the boss.
This also makes it pretty easy to dodge the bossfights by sitting on the bottom of your screen and hiding behind your shield.
