My findings show that rares are not dropped more often, but

[Tiger]

I decided when I made Tiger for GC, I would list record every red box item I found. I have recorded everything until Tiger reached lvl 100. Today he has and I'm reporting my results. Here are my findings:

Normal Mode:
Nothing

Hard Mode:
Inferno Bazooka (10 star)

Very Hard Mode:
2 DB Sabers (both 9 stars)
4 Bloody Arts (9 star)
3 Varista's (9 star)
Club of Luconium (9 star)
Fire Scepter: Agni (9 star)
Photon Launcher (9 star)
2 Amplifier's of Resta
2 Amplifier's of Gifoie
Amplifier of Anti
Amplifier of Barta
5 Photon Drops
Yamato (10 star)
2 Gobooma's arm (both turn into 10 star weapons)
1 Gigobooma's arm (turns into 10 star weapon)

Ultimate:
Dragon Claw (turns into 10 star weapon)
2 Bravaces (9 star)
Storm scepter (9 star)
Club of Zumnium (9 star)

All these findings were random stages on online mode and all offline findings happened in forest, cave's, and ruins.

Ruins was last in all modes to have found any items. It seems rather than getting more rares, the rares have been % dropped have been spread out between all levels rather then just in 2 places. It also seems that more bosses drop gold star weapons than before.

Now what is strange is that when playing on both Very Hard, and on Ultimate mode, in the Ruins hardly ANYTHING was found. Every weapon in boxes were ???? Scepters or something of that sort. It looks as if sonic team had made all the 9 star weapons look unique, and made less % of them being dropped. So really in this version finding a 9 star weapon is very hard to find compared to DC PSO's, and gold star weapons are a little easier to find than compared to DC version's. Oh and if you want to know, which is pretty important total time on memory card is 183'39".

[Kupi]

Yeah, I noticed this too. I really like the change; it's made both ends of the "worthless" spectrum better. On the one side, you had Varistas and DB's Sabers, which anyone could find several thousand of. I've seen one of each, now, in plenty of VH Ruins runs. The other "worthless" items were the really rare ones that nobody would ever find... and if you did, you probably had a weapon with %s that would trump it completely. All the rare weapons have some kind of value now, I think. ^_^