RefRain - prism memories - Scoring Basics V1.0



Welcome to my basic scoring guide, as a huge fan of this game
I decided to make a fairly straight forward guide for people
interested. It primarily covers the scoring mechanics of the game to the best of my knowledge. As excellent a Doujin STG Refrain is, it does not have much information available
regarding the gameplay mechanics and systems (in the English Language anyway).


No Miss: In the game means taking no hits whatsoever. It grants you 1,000,000 for this at the end of stage 1, and an additional million for each stage successfully "no missed". (3,000,000 for stage 3 etc.)

Rank Bonus is simply your end of stage score multiplied by a numeral determined by your difficulty setting. This is inaccurate Afterall as amassing an enormous prism count can in fact raise your rank to 1.5. It is just more common in Hard due to the increased waves of enemies and projectiles.

Hit Bonus: Refers to the total amount of Hits you can land on a large enemy or boss (it will always be a boss or at least mid-boss that gives you your highest total) while stun locked by level 3 & 4 MEFA2 attacks. Your total # of "Hits" is multiplied by 1,000. Referred to as "knockback bonus" in the manual but "hit count" in the game.

Stage Bonus: Straight forward, the stage you are completing * 1,000,000 (finish lvl 3, get 3,000,000 and so on).

Skip Bonus: If you are able to kill a boss fast enough that it can't progress to its next pattern you are granted 2,000,000 (this is only possible through repeated stun locking of the boss with lvl. 3 and 4 MEFA2 attacks)
Time Bonus: Variable as it applies to the killing of mid and end bosses and at what speed. I will have to research this later to gain a bit of clarity on the rate at which time is valued in the kill but it appears to be consistent across characters based on my experience. In battles with end or mid bosses possessing multiple phases/patterns. You will a receive time bonus after each one.

Prism Value: What the game refers to the coins you collect throughout the levels by destroying enemies as. They are essential for multiple reasons. Namely scoring,
extends (extra lives), as well as being the means to fill your "Concept Reactor" (an important bullet canceling mechanic within the game) the latter two we will touch on later). Having a higher prism count increases scoring potential but also rank. Rank is not extremely impactful on the overall game but is noticeable if you are playing well and scoring a lot of bonuses, death and overly defensive play will lower prism count and rank.

As for scoring, there are five different sizes of Prisms to collect.They each vary in value based on increasing size as one would assume. Outside of receiving coins from
large stun-locked enemies. The determining factor of prism size is souly based on kill proximity and nothing else. So while dangerous at times, the game obviously rewards playing
somewhat aggressively as you can only receive the largest coins from point blank range. Certainly within a centimeter of the enemy I'd wager. The game clearly shows you if you succeeded as Large coins (aside from the obvious size increase) will almost "bounce ever so slightly and be immediately returned to the player requiring no chasing on their part. All other coin types will fall for you to collect manually (except coins from enemies killed with MEFA attacks but that can be covered with that mechanic).
The 5 coins and their values are as follows:
Largest: 2,000
2nd Largest: 1,000
Medium: 500
Small: 250
Extra small: 50

Coins received from enemies killed with MEFA attacks home back to the player as well. I'm almost certain they are medium coins. Either way proximity does not appear to have an
effect on the coins received from boss, or boss type enemies as I have shot them at point blank countless times and don't appear to get the large coin as opposed to with a
conventional enemy.

Firing your special/bomb style attack "M.E.F.A.2." device as the game affectionately refers to it. Can produce several effects that are beneficial to scoring and gameplay in general. Aside from all characters lvl 1-4 attacks all having bullet canceling properties. With each character, hitting a large enemy/Boss with a level 3 or 4. You will gain a stun lock on the boss allowing you (depending on lvl 3/4 and which character ship is in use) a window of time to fire on the boss and collect . These moments aside from a few densely populated enemy sections are the best moments for racking huge amounts of prisms/items/extends/points/fills your concept reactor gauge. Basically everything you want to obtain in the game.

These times are also essential to score in that they are responsible for the "hit count" score at the end of each stage (which is multiplied by 1,000). So on certain bosses if you effectively manage to get repeated stun locks through careful management of mefa attacks along with maximizing concept reactor use (so your losing as minimal bar as possible when spending 4 by hitting a bunch of the converted projectiles ((which are turned into totally harmless floating debris)) which in turn replenishes portions of your meter with each hit) thus allowing you to in some instances get as many as 3 (possibly more but in my experience) consecutive stuns which enables you to rack up a hit count of over 1,000 in several stages. Also the only way I've found to obtain skip bonuses, as you must prevent the boss from moving on to its next phase. The last thing of I can think of as far as scoring with the attack is the sort of aftershock orb (or beam or special projectile depending on ship) it releases, and its multiplier effect on enemies defeated with it (8x lvl 3, 16x lvl 4).

The former is an effect of level 4 attacks only I believe. In any case this leaves a large sphere shaped (if using ship 3) object on the screen in the path of your ship about a half second after you launch a powered-up attack. If you move to another spot immediately after your done placing your level 4. The sphere will spawn where you moved to. If properly timed you can wipe out a wave of enemies with this and it grants a X16 bonus on the enemies it kills. Lastly, landing the finishing blow on a boss with a MEFA2 attack will grant you the multiplier of the attack used with up to an 8x bonus granted for lvl. 4. So, this is big as it gives your base score for killing the boss an additional increase.

Extends: If you look at the counter just under your prism count, you will see "item count". This counter is also based on prisms but does not pertain to your score during level progression. It is a direct count of each individual coin you collect. No matter the size, extends are based entirely on this count. Extends 1 & 2 are obtained at 500 items.
3 and 4 require 1000 items.
After that every additional extend takes 3000 items to obtain until you have amassed 5 at 3,0000.
Then it is 10,000 each the remainder of the game.

Hopefully I can update it with more advanced tactics or information at some point, but I think this gives players interested in the game a good base if they are interested in pursuing the game at a higher level.

Thanks to any potential readers that find this is anyway helpful.
Andrew -

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