One theory is if you don't have a certain amount of points , you don't have access to Bonus stages . For Normal difficulty , I think the require amount of points is minimum 500k . ( If it works with amount of points )

Another one is maybe some characters don't have access to Bonus stages . This was when I played Musou mode with Predator.Hunter . I had 6 lifes expecting to fight double Akuma but ended up fighting double Bison . Maybe again not enough points ? Who knows? if you know more info feel free to post here ! Thank you and have a nice day !

I was able to get the bonus round of stages to start with around 477k points, give or take a few. For reference, if Akuma spawns into the Bison fight, that will always ensure the extra rounds happen yes?

do you remember what character it was ? so maybe 475k ? I had around 450 and didnt get the bonus stages . Yeah If you get Akuma , you have to do bonus stages .

I was playing as Mai, truth be told I was actually trying to complete a run and thought I did! Only to see there were all of these afterwards so.....rip that recording T.T

Edit: On normal difficulty.

Thank you for the info ! Yeah the bonus stages are very tough to be honest . I really like playing easy mode because of that xD . GL on the runs !

I may possibly have a theory as to purposely not triggering the extra stages after the Akuma fight (which will also be just the Bison fight). It will need to be tested more, but here is what happened fairly consistently across my attempts at Normal/Bonus runs.....

• Sometimes I would not get all of the barrels on the 3rd bonus round. This could be either with a death on the prior stages, or with no deaths leading up to this point. Anytime this happened, my score ranged from anywhere between 380k - 430k+. I have a hard time getting to this point with lower scores, simply because in order to save time, we end up doing a lot of combos in this game xD

• Occasionally, however, I would still get all of the barrels in the barrel bonus stages as well as fully destroying everything in the destructible bonus stages. At this point I'm thinking both deaths and score are for sure part of the equation here.

yeah maybe route could play a thing too . Didn't pay attention if the bonus are different but skipping them like the one with glass you can just run to the end and not get the points . the car and other stuff you do wanna break them since its faster . Good to hear more about the bonus stages . We are getting close to something ! Thank you for posting !

The bonus stages are only different if you pick top/bot route I believe. I haven't had any instances where selecting the same one yielded a different bonus stage. I'm going to test the deaths tonight to see if that has any further results.

And hoping to get a run up soon! ^ _ ^

thinking about it , deaths could play part too . Hope we can find something because for the moment it seems kind of random how it happens xD .

Now that I've got a run with the bonus stages submitted, I'm going to be putting the information to the real test later tonight. Hopefully results on No Bonus runs soon!

Yeah It is pretty confusing on how to get bonus stages but we will discover how . Glad you got the run done and congrats on the WR ! Hope you can get that no bonus run !