Youkai Dochuuki/Stage 5

Arcade
This is the final stage of the game. Your performance in this stage will determine your destination in the afterlife. In order to get the best ending, you must act in a very pious manner. To understand what this means, read the spoiler below.

There's a possibility that when you begin this stage, money will land on the ground right in front of where you start. Two gray zombies and a green zombie will approach you as you start running to the right, followed by two bouncing zombies that you can run under. Jump into the water, and up to the next ledge. In the marsh are a group of starvation souls, so jump over them and up to the next ledge. From the ledge, jump over the next group of starvation souls, and then fall down the gap to the level below. As you run to the right, you will be met with moths and gray zombies, in addition to any face demons and Hell Wheels that may have gathered behind you. Eventually, you will reach a very long row of gates which you must travel through. The gates restrict the height of your jumps, making it difficult to jump over the rocks that roll toward you, and impossible to jump over the zombies. You can either back track if nothing is following you, or barrel on through it as quickly as possible. Once you're through, simply drop down the side of the next ledge. Once on the floor, run to the right into the cavern. Watch out for any bats that appear, and a few lion dancers that appear near the back.

Keep running until you reach a set of clouds that hover up and down and can help you reach the ledge above. There are two ways to approach this. One is to jump on the clouds so that you can reach the lower ledge on the left first, and then leap from that ledge to clouds which can help you get to the rest of the course on the right. The other is to stick to clouds that are only on the right and go straight to the rest of the course, but this can be difficult to do, and the enemies may not allow you to have enough time to do it. If your fortunate enough to have plenty of health, and are only being chased by Face Demons, you might even get a boost from them at the cost of a few bars of health. Once you reach the ledge above, run to the right and up the stairs. The ground below the next ledge contains spikes which will hurt you if you land on them. Try to clear the spikes and land on the cloud to the far right, then jump over the rest of the spikes and on to safe ground. You will pass a hunger demon, and see a girl in a kimono covering her face coming down a set of stairs. Ignore the stairs (they lead to a false goddess like the one in the previous stage) and continue running to the right. Run to the cloud and wait for it to rise so that you can use it to jump in the water. Assuming you are being chased by Hell Wheels, now is a good opportunity to swim down (and back up if necessary) as rapidly as you can to scroll them off of the screen. When you reach the bottom, you might feel inclined to swim to the right, but if you do, this will force you to swim back up and run back to the left in a large loop. Instead, when you reach the bottom, swim to the left. This will lead you to a ledge with money suspended in mid-air.

Fall down the ledge, but stay to the right to avoid falling in the starvation soul pit at the bottom. When you reach the bottom, make a run for the right, but watch out for the pair of rolling rocks that are heading your way. Run through the tunnel until you reach the cavern. Two more rolling rocks will be headed in your direction. Hop over them, and run through the next small tunnel. Once on the other side, you will run along a stretch of ground that has bags of money placed at several intervals. If you're attempting to avoid collecting the money, you'll need to jump over them fairly early on to avoid picking them up.

Run to the stairs, and the run off the following ledge and into the lava. Make your way to the right until you see a set of small clouds bobbing up and down. The left and right clouds have larger clouds hovering just above them. The middle cloud does not. This is probably the most difficult point in the game, and you can only hope that you may have gotten lucky enough to not be followed by any Hell Wheels, although the likelihood is small. As soon as you get the chance, jump up onto the small clouds, and up to the larger clouds above as quickly as possible. If you make it to the larger cloud, the hardest part is over, but you have to keep moving. If you're not on the left large cloud, you must leap over to it so that you can jump up to the smaller cloud above it. From there, you must jump up to the large cloud above that, and over to the ledge on your right. Except for the left edge, the floor is lined with spikes. However, this can actually help you if you have enough health to spare. Stepping on the spikes can boost you in the air, and help you reach the clouds above that lead to a gap in the ceiling. That gap is your final goal. However you have to do it, jump from cloud to cloud until you are able to access the small cloud that climbs up through the gap, then jump off to the right.

As you walk to the right, a few more enemies will attack, but it won't matter any more. After a very short walk to the right, you will meet Buddha. He will praise you for your courage and persistence, and then he will judge your performance. Based on the criteria mentioned above in the spoiler, you will be sent to one of five different ../Endings/. Congratulations on beating such a grueling game. After the ending, the game will immediately end.

PC Engine
The same secret to the endings holds true for the PC Engine version. The final stage begins with two green zombies walking towards Tarosuke, with a 500 money bag behind them. Get beyond them and jump onto the cloud to jump over the starvation souls. You have to jump from the very edge of the large cloud in order to clear all of the souls on the ground below. Fall down the pit with the 1000 money bag located to the right.

The next part begins with a 500 money bag and a 1000 money bag placed on the ground just before a series of hovering cloud platforms. Jump onto each of them in order to cross the gaping pit beneath them and watch out for the clouds that revolve and can cause to you slip over the edge. Throughout this section, if you fall into the chasm, you will be forced to walk through a dangerous section in order to climb back up and return to the platform midway between the clouds. Be especially careful when leaping on to the bridge, as you can't actually land where the graphics just begin. You need to leap quite far out to land safely.

The bridge contains a number of money opportunities; 5000, 1000, and 10,000 in order. A red bird will also fly across the top and drop several bombs. A cloud platform will rise into the air when you jump onto it. You will have to make a big leap from the top of its height in order to clear the starving souls. From here, you must begin traversing another series of hovering cloud platforms which lead Tarosuke higher and higher into the sky, eventually meeting up with Buddha once he has reached the top. Be careful when jumping from one cloud to the next; if frogs are falling, wait for them to stop before you continue.

The ending sequence in this version is a little different from the arcade. When you reach Buddha, he will begin to ask you a series of yes or no questions. Ironically, it actually does not matter how you answer any of the questions, except for one. The question shown to the right is the only important question, which roughly translates to, "from now on, do you believe in doing a good action or deed every day?" If you answer はい or yes to this question, Buddha will simply continue to ask you more questions. To this question, you must say いいえ or no, and push in an effort to get past Buddha. If you succeed in moving far enough, you will receive your evaluation and earn the appropriate ending. If not, you will be dragged back before Buddha, where you will have to endure more questions until the same question repeats itself. To be on the safe side, always answer no to every question, and hold the joypad to the right until you are given the chance to run.

Famicom differences
This is where all of the PIOUS that you collected comes into play. From now on, if you kill an enemy or collect money, you will lose some of the PIOUS that you have earned. The chart to the right shows you how much PIOUS you will lose for each infraction. The set up of this stage resembles the arcade version with added sections. There is a point where you may believe you have reached heaven, but you will find that Buddha is not there. You will be forced to continue to search for him. Beyond that there is an icy section where Tarosuke's momentum is unimpeded, and you are forced to jump in order to avoid traps.

When you finally do reach Buddha in the second heaven, the ending you receive is determined by the amount of PIOUS you have left over. If you finish the game without using continues, and you have over 19,800, you will get the greatest ending featuring heroes from many of Namco's early games. Even if you have over 19,800, if you use a continue, you will get the second best ending which is similar to the best ending of the arcade. All of the Famicom endings can be seen on the ../Endings/ page.