Ng+100%

Compared to a clean file, new game plus allows for more powerful weapons to be used to absolutely crush the enemies, as well as some different characters. For this run, I (MURPHAGATOR!) used Katana Jaguar with weapon set D, and Mr K used Lucia with weapon set F.

Katana Jaguar moves slower and has a larger hurtbox than the other characters, but has unique katana attacks which completely destroy anything he is capable of getting into swinging range of. In general, the katana replaces the more powerful weapon in the standard weaponset, so I select weapon set D entirely based on the lock-on weapon, the Heaven Laser. This is by a wide margin the most powerful and accurate lock on weapon in the game, and chews through most of the things the katana is unable to reach. The other primary weapon is the lighting bolt, which does minimal damage but chains off of enemied and pierces through sheilds.

Lucia has a smaller hurtbox and does (slightly) less damage than the other characters, but makes up for it with a faster move speed. This lets Mr K pick up stragglers without falling behind. Weapon set F is used primarily because of the GV laser, which is extremely powerful in the situations that Katana Jaguar is incapable of doing. In addition to doing huge dps, its can be swept to clear out large numbers of small enemies, and it passes through sheilds which screws up some of the expected bosses defenses. The downside is that the alternate weapon, the Ring Laser, is basically useless, and the lock-on Variable Laser, while fairly powerful, is not particularly fast and sometimes tends to orbit targets instead of hitting them.

Unlike the NG run, I generally take out airborne targets and K takes out ground targets during the movement sections. This is because of the extreme strength of the GV laser and heaven laser making those the easier targets for us to attack. In addition, Lucias faster walking speed meant that K had more time to clean up enemie while Katana Jaguars slower speed means he had to move more continuously to keep the screen moving. It was important to keep our character selections to K being Lucia since hitting bosses with Katana attacks safely would have been impossible for K to learn in the time we had for this.

We start with stage 4 because the boss is one of the most difficult fights to do with our team. The stage itself requires a lot of circling around in order to hit all the tragets necessary for 100% hit rate, but otherwise doesnt have much of note. The boss' arms both have to be destroyed before finishing him off, and doing so without killing the boss or having Jaguar ram into him is more difficult than it really should be. The rest of the stages are played in order, and theres really not much detail to elaborate on here other than saying that all of our detours were necessary to get the hit rate up. For more detail on the specifics of the AI, see the single player NG 100% commentary.

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Mr. K's comments:
This run took place during the third Contra Conference and it was my first Contra run on a non-Nintendo console. My loyalty to Contra runs very very deep.

Most of my comments here will match my comments about the other runs. I picked up this game in a very short amount of time and I did so for the sole purpose of doing a co-op run with Murphagator. The game is significantly easier with two people, although we had a very small window of time to work on the run. Murph runs this game single player and I'll defer to him for most of the explanations.

This category was quite weird to say the least given how broken Katana Jaguar is. Heaven't laser is ridiculous and that katan is even more ridiculous. Playing as Lucia meant running faster than Murph as Katana Jaguar which meant I could dally for a bit and we wouldn't lose time. All in all the weapons are broken and it was a fun and short little outing.