icycalm wrote:Can you elaborate on that? I never bothered with trying to maximize crystals in DMC games, so I've no idea how the Style meter works. It always seemed to me to work in a rather arbitrary fashion.
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=8989#8989
Well first of all, any time you want to maximize your orbs in DMC1, you've got to go for perfect ranks at the end of the mission, to get the perfect bonus of 2,000 orbs(a metric fuckton).
In DMC1, the Style meter is based purely on consecutive hits, with about a second, maybe less, allowed between hits. The timer is short enough to make maintaining a Style rating unfeasible for the gauntlets. At D, a Marionette will drop 1 Red Orb, while an S will net you 25 Red Orbs. The actual orb requirements for the perfect bonus vary anywhere from 100 all the way to 1,000 for individual missions, so 25 orbs is pretty good.
The problem is that the time requirements for the bonus are very tight, especially since the mission timer keeps ticking even when you pause the game to switch weapons. You're virtually always better off just killing the Marionettes in one hit, like with Ifrit or the grenadegun, than wasting time building up Style. You'll get most orbs from critical hitting enemies. A few enemies have critical hits, which you get by attacking enemies in specific ways, such as hitting a Blade while it's down, but only if it's lying on its stomach. The one thing all criticals have in common, is that they kill the enemy instantly(even if the enemy is invulnerable to normal attacks, as with the shadow cats), in addition to an increased Red Orb drop. Sin Scissors for example, take several Shotgun shots to kill normally, which gets you 20 orbs, while a critical kills them with one blast and gets 43 orbs. There are also hidden orbs, triggered by standing on specific ledges and such, sometimes in very large amounts.
The only reason the Style meter has any effect on skilled play is because in Mission 1, there are no critical hits or hidden orbs available, so you have to use it.
