One of my goals for this year is to sell games for more money then I spend, which means getting rid of some of the pricier items I own. This includes my Ibara Kuro PCB that I bought last year. This has gotten so expensive now that it’s hard to motivate keeping it, and I’ve finally sold it and shipped it away to its new owner today.
Ibara Black Label (also known as Ibara Kuro) is a remake of Ibara that plays nothing like the original game. Instead of playing like a typical Yagawa shmup, you have a dynamic rank system which increases with medal pickups, and resets on bombs and big cancels. In addition, there’s a multiplier that increments when grazing enemy bullets, which is not a system you’d typically see in Cave games.
Since the PCB is very rare and there’s so far no ports of this game on any non-arcade platform, the price of a PCB has shot up by a lot. While it’s a cool and unique game, I don’t think I’ll play it too much more (I prefer regular Ibara), and I’d rather spend that money elsewhere.
1CC Video and basic strategy
For character selection, I like Bond Type D for his speed and bomb. I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes in practice.
Stage 1: My execution of the initial scoring is pretty flawed, but start by setting up a Hadou Gun, and build a medal chain to increase your rank. Then later on, move to the top left corner and graze the big stream of bullets, to build a big counter for a cancel, to get some points towards an extend. There’s another nice stream of bullets you can setup later on as well (watch the video). No specific strats for the boss. Don’t be afraid to bomb. No missing this stage shouldn’t be a huge problem
Stage 2: I tend to use 5 Way for most sections with small enemies, and rockets for the larger ones. I don’t do any impressive scoring at all on this stage, but just focus on keeping the medal chain alive. The trickiest section to route is the part before the two flame towers. I recommend just replicating the video for that.
On the boss, start by staying above the first phase and taking it out that way, similar to regular Ibara. For phase two, follow a Hadou Gun up the right side of the screen to build rank from medals, and then park yourself in the safe spot right below the health bar. This will allow milking a lot of points towards an extend.
Stage 3: Rockets feel quite strong here. Try to keep medal chain going and start getting a lot of bombs. I’ll use a hadou gun or two towards the later trains, but like to reach the boss with full bomb meter. For the boss, I’ll hadou it once when it gets to unmanageable, and that should be enough.
Stage 4: For the extend ship, I start by damaging it’s right side with a hadou gun activation that I fire on the left side. Then I can sit and safe spot it above the right bullets while building multiplier for some free points towards extend. 5 Way is very strong in this stage, and should basically be used at all times until the big end ships which Napalm work better against. Try to be at max bombs for the boss.
The boss itself is pretty easy in phase 1, but will likely require a hadou gun for it’s second phase which has very dense patterns.
Stage 5: For the first section, small movements with rockets are kep. You can use the same trick with double hadou guns to get full bomb pickups from the tanks as in big Ibara. Just place them in a way so that they’ll destroy both sides of the tanks tracks, without hitting the tanks themselves. 5 Way is very strong at the later parts of the stage since there’s so many small enemies.
For the boss, I quick kill phase 1 by placing a hadou gun shot at the edge of it’s sprites. It then has some pretty silly safe spots for phase 2, which trivializes that part of the fight (see video). You can milk this quite a bit if you want. The last phase is total bullshit and will need two hadou gun shots.
Stage 6: 5 Way is once again very strong. I trigger a pretty late third extend here in my video. Ideally I’d have it earlier, but three extends is what I’d typically end up with on my route.
For the boss, I just rely on my hadou gun shots for anything that looks scary. In my clear, I get really really awkward hadou gun shots, since hitting the enemies that the boss spawns will do very little damage. This causes me to have to do some pretty silly dodges. If you can instead tag the boss in its last phase with two of them, it should be enough.