Super-Hydorah Walkthough – A strategy guide (spoiler)

This is a walkthrough, or strategy guide, for Super Hydorah. There are a number of walkthroughs on Youtube that show the gameplay of brilliant players. I have two issues with those:

  • They are not in line with SuperHydorah’s “old school” vibe. We used to get our walkthroughs in magazines, so it makes sense Hydorah should have a textual walkthrough with maybe a few screenshots.
  • They are wholly inefficient. Wonder where to find the secret in Dunarys? Spend 15 minutes seeking through the video, or just scroll quickly through an article. My choice is done.
  • Often, they don’t explain the reasonning behind strategic choices.

There you go, that’s actually three reasons.

This guide is in progress, as I am also crawling through the game.

I already wrote a walkthrough for Hydorah, which is still useful here.

There is an exhaustive list of where to catch the secrets on Retromageddon

Where are the weapons?

Here is a map of all the levels, with the weapons they give you. This is central to plan where to go first.

Hydorah map

What’s a good path?

Presumably, there are many ways to get to the end, however I like to follow this path:

  • Outer Wall, Cyclade, Orbital tree, Dunarys, Verminest

Turriwall is kind of useless, so I just leave Forgotten Labs till when I have serious weapons.

  • Deep space to pump up the laser, and then:
  • Galactic Inferno!
  • Untulia, Red Eden, Underground base, Silent Tomb

Now we have Vulcan which we’ll use pretty much all the time. I remain undecided for the secondary weapon between Scorts (x2 or x4) and Homing. Homing are brilliant.

The path is less decided from there on. Definitely do Path of Scylla to get Wave for Rubinia’s boss. You need Rubinia’s Light to enter the Black Gate.

How to get the good ending?

Just do all the levels.

How to get the bad ending?

You need to finish the game but not destroy all of Hydorah’s seeds, which are found on Dunarys, Path of Scylla, Black Gate, and Underground base.

Thing is, I personally find No Mercy and Meropticon to be extremly hard without the Ancient Sword from Black Gate: so I need the Light. Rubinia’s boss is manageable with Laser and Homing, so I leave the seed in Path of Scylla.

How to get the hero ending when you suck?

Hero ending is when you finish the game in normal mode without using any continues. During my first way around the game, I used continues. Many continues. So many in fact, that at around a hundred I wondered if the counter would wrap around as it would on some old 8-bit games. It did better than that: the counter wraps as a signed 8-bit integer, so it went from 127 to… -128. It took me another 50 to 80 continues to finish the game, so my continues counter was /negative/ when I finished the game. Steam awarded me the hero ending.

I expect the wrapping in Hydorah is a “fake bug” to reproduce a common bug from the 80’s, and that Steam is not aware of that bug.

Note that this happened in 2018, so it might have been fixed since.