a new ichigo-bose game: 東方幻想魔録 ～ The Devil of Decline

[Anima Zero]

Finally mapped out everything in the 3rd stratum.  Those upgraded butterflies were rather lulzy. 

Poison Mist hitting like 3 people is lovely, but that poison doing 240 damage at the end of every turn...did NOT expect that.

Added a Kanako & Flandre to my shikigami team.

Finally, downed a couple bosses.  First one was the guardian I had to carpet bomb to gain access to the 3rd tower.  Compared to the 2nd boss, this one was fairly easy.  Blind sucks, but that's about all that I found really dangerous.

Other boss I downed was much more of a fight, the first tower boss.  That one took a few tries and some shuffling of a few shikigamis, but I won after a pretty tough struggle.

Basic strategy was to shift the land towards fire in the first turn with one of Reimu's shikigamis, then block the boss's charged move with the shikigami that has the Ice Wall skill on the next turn.  Yuyuko & Eiki did a bunch of buffing & healing while having fire spells available to power Mokou & Youmu's fire chasers, which were my main source of damage.  I even had Reimu get in on the fire spell casting spree because when the land is heavily shifted towards fire, boss's Ice attacks aren't too bad.  Koakuma's Dark Illusion also helped out many times.

Nobody got KO'd during the fight which was surprising.  Yuyuko got a bit close near the end though.

Now I just have to go do the 3rd tower and things will happen, whee.

[Pesco]

If you have a consistent way of finding yukkuris and a way to deal at least 1 damage to them, I offer a way to speed up your grinding. Obviously Cheat Engine is required.

Enemy HP is stored in a fixed location. It's all based on what slot on the field the enemy occupies. Find yourself a lone enemy, preferably one that you won't kill in a single attack. Have CE find its HP. You'll need to hit them a few times and track the HP changes. Once you've got that lone enemy's HP address, it stays the same for every fight while your game is still open. The address for a lone enemy is the first enemy slot. Adding 4 to the address and thereafter will get you the HP address of the subsequent enemies on the screen.

With that, whenever you encounter your farmable enemy, set their HP to 1 and do your business.

[Serela]

Alternatively, encounter a yukkuri along with other enemies.

Revive it and deal 1 hp damage, rinse repeat, , profit.

[Pesco]

My method starts the fight with it at 1 HP. Can be applied to other enemies too.

[Serela]

Mhmm! The one I suggested still works for people who don't wish to cheat, however, and also allows you to possibly get even over 200k exp in a single battle, which is pretty great if your goal is just getting EXP. (Two result pictures stolen from poosh: http://puu.sh/fI3W http://puu.sh/fI3I )

Or you could do both of them at once. They aren't exclusive of each other! :3

[MewMewHeart]

I might need a new Yukkuri hotspot to grind my Yukari route file to prepare for Kaguya and Eirin.

Since, I'm right now doing Byakuren's route on another file although, I did get lucky to find some decent items and got 10 chocolates more faster than my other file.

[Anima Zero]

Cleared the 3rd tower today, collecting some new shikigami in the process.

First up, fighting Shou & Nazrin.  Joke fight basically because I almost wiped Shou in a single turn.  Would have done that if one of my attacks didn't miss.  Nazrin went down on the next turn.

Skill wise, they're both good.  Shou's got Saint Chaser, Nazrin has some nice buffs.

Monster shikigami wise, got Buckbaird (That eye monster that loves to reflect physical attacks...and has a spell that can induce Berserk to everyone) and a Dragonfly from the tower.

Also got some kind of weapon from battle...probably from that Saladin or whatever it's called.  It does have some nice slayer effects on it though.

Tower boss?  Joke fight basically.  Easier than the 2nd tower boss even.

Path to the final tower opened up,  but I took a moment to go around the world and collect a few things.

First up was acquiring Suika & Yuugi.  Not too bad of a fight really.  Decided to drop Suika first, then Yuugi afterwards.

Suika happens to be a new party member, but I chose not to use her because Mokou & Youmu are plenty good enough for doing physical damage.  As for Yuugi, she has some pretty useful skills as a shikigami and rather nice offensive stats as well.

Grabbed Tatara as well.  Not planning to use her either right now.

Went on my way to the final dungeon while picking up Power Ace going thru Makai 5 in the 3rd stratum.  More Saint Chaser users are always nice.

Then I get to the final dungeon (I would assume), and...suddenly the game shifts into destroy everything mode.  Enemies suddenly get really really dangerous.  I ended up doing minimal battles and basically did a speedrun through the first couple of sections while collecting treasure along the way.

Scored some new shikigamis as well.  Keine joined up, I beat up a Lily White in a random battle (Surprisingly easy considering the enemies in the area), and I got some kind of fire witch to join up as well.

Oh yeah, I ran into a Tenshi as well.  Utilizing some strategy, mainly involving her not using a 1st turn Ectoplasm Net or nuking my mages and abusing Thunder Chasers with Youmu,  she fell after a few attempts.  She ended up joining my team as a new shikigami.  Didn't have a chance to level her because the next room featured an unwinnable battle, a boss running away, and me getting another shikigami (Akyu), three new characters (Byakuren, Meiling, Yukari), and like three dozen new recipes.

One of those recipes happened to be the Kusanagi Sword.  Having the stuff needed for it, I made it right away.  Should be good for Youmu and her chaser abuse.  Haven't decided on anything else to make yet though.

Also, my final team has been assembled (Reimu, Youmu, Meiling, Byakuren, and Eiki).  Whee.

Gonna be leveling up Meiling & Byakuren tomorrow while checking out any areas I can go to with my new fangled longshot.  I know there's an area in the Forest of Magic, Heaven, and I think the area where I picked up Medicine, but I don't know if I missed one at all.  Hopefully Koishi is in one of those three areas cause she sounds like she'd be a good debuffer of sorts (and those stats, sheesh).

[BT]

So, uh, my last question went kind of unanswered.

These melee skills are kind of hard to decipher. Is there a list somewhere?

[trancehime]

These terms, man. Chasers are what, the regular (weak) elemental attacks?

Also, kinda hard to find out which melee ability (the ones you learn by using your sword/spear/blunt object) is effective against which type of enemy. Is there a list for this somewhere?

聖刻十字斬 Sacred Cross Cut
SLAYER: Undead / Youkai

覇王の一閃 Conqueror Flash
SLAYER: Magician / Warrior

強襲彗星剣 Comet Assault
SLAYER: Beast / Insect

居合い斬り Iaigiri
SLAYER: Giants / Psychics

ドラゴンストライク Dragon Strike
SLAYER: Dragons / Beetles / Aquatic

デーモンベイン Demonbane
SLAYER: Majin / Angels / Psychics

ftr, I translated these on the fly because there's no repository that i know of for them

[Serela]

Majin is Devils, right? And I -think- Psychic might just refer to transcendentals in general, but I'm not sure. Psychic would be a kind of transcendence in itself I suppose, not sure if it's been slimmed down into something more specific since GoS or not. (Or if it was even a more correct translation to be Psychics in GoS, but. But I'm too lazy to go find the japanese characters and see if they're identical, in any case.)

That group gave me trouble in GoS because of me going "...what even counts as that?" until I started being able to remember which image corresponded to which grouping.

...also think that "Beetles" and "Insects" being different groups looks weird, as does Beetle being covered by "Dragon Strike". Google translate says aquatic reptile dragons, is that what it should be?

From what I remember, those (which are all sword skills) are all the slayer skills in the game. There are slayers on weapons of all types (Not rods, but) but just not on their actual skills.

But anyway, it's very nice to have all those done and in one easy place. Slayers is definitely one of the more obfuscating things in playing the game in japanese without knowing it.

[Barrakketh]

Majin is Devils, right?

Yeah.

Psychic would be a kind of transcendence in itself I suppose, not sure if it's been slimmed down into something more specific since GoS or not.

I refer them to as transcendents, a.k.a. the goat head icon.

being able to remember which image corresponded to which grouping.

That was the easiest thing for me.  The hardest was remembering which moon runes corresponded to the appropriate sword for Sakuya, but I ended up remembering them by their attack power :3

[trancehime]

don't ask me where i got beetles from, i was tired :derp:

[Serela]

1.12 is out! It just ends the valentines event, nothing else.

[Vilkni]

Yeah, I looked, and it is only one line saying the event is over and nothing of note on any other changes.

Not sure if I can take this as a sign that this game is almost ready for the translation team to work on, but that's a relief at the very least. Especially considering the engine this game uses was ported to GoS and it proved that the new engine is much more stable even with a english patch used on GoS.

[GuyYouMetOnline]

I see no reason translation couldn't start now. I'd start on it myself if I knew (and could read) Japanese, but, well, yeah.

[Barrakketh]

I see no reason translation couldn't start now.

Presumably no one wants to re-translate any text that changes (or gets added) in future patches.

[trancehime]

I see no reason translation couldn't start now. I'd start on it myself if I knew (and could read) Japanese, but, well, yeah.

The game got 12 patches in just a bit over 1 month.

Let's wait for the patches to stop rolling in please; then I'll help.

[homing curvy laser]

I don't think the patches are over yet - remember the shikigami and skill contests? Well they said to look forward to something in the future. Also, the Valentines event was stated to end at February 7th, so it wouldn't make sense to delay a patch just so they didn't have to only change one thing.

[MewMewHeart]

Baaaawah... I hope they add in the Ten Desires cast in Devil of Decline in a future patch.  :V

But, then again one can only hope and dream.  :derp:

Edit: Took me two tries to beat up the Earth Demon to get Suwako, and I gotta say my Yuka and Byakuren trolled the boss pretty badly enough due to Yuka was doing 323 damage whenever my Byakuren had used Chain Slash with her lighting Sword. I gotta say revenge is sooooooooo dam sweet. Odd thing though the boss at the end used a Regen Field that healed 90 HP and canceled my Earth Jammer field. Oh well, it didn't do him any good anyway by the time I was done with him.  :V

[GuyYouMetOnline]

I think the 'fix' patches are probably pretty much done. There may be patches to add stuff, but that should be easy to add into an English patch, right? It'd be very little work compared to translating what the game has now, and unless I'm way the hell off on my understanding of how these things work, it'd probably be fairly simple to add the new stuff into the patch files.

Basically, the post I was replying to was wondering if it was fairly safe for the translation to get started, and I was voicing the opinion that yes, it is.

[Vilkni]

To be honest, the reason I said I wasn't sure if it was safe to translate the game yet has to do with a critical detail that occurs when patching the game:

See, the problem is that this game is exactly like GoS in terms of patching the game. This means when you have a change that you need to implement into the game, the way things work FORCES you to CHANGE THE ENTIRE GAME to implement a small change, a large change, or even many changes in these. Unfortunately, the thing is, all the text in the game are subject to this problem - which means every time that a patch comes out, you end up having to merge files in the correct way with the Japanese version just to get the English patch to work. Furthermore, the company may decide to change some of their text, requiring extra translations on top of that as well.

That's why we want to go 2 weeks or more without a patch before it's safe to say so. Besides, like homing said, I'm not sure Valentine's Event was the thing they said to look forward to, which means they might have another event planned. The Yuuka cutscene bug (thank god for skip) still exists for some people on version 1.11, and I'm not entirely sure if the Suika bug was squashed in 1.11, so we still have fixes to look forward to.

[Barrakketh]

See, the problem is that this game is exactly like GoS in terms of patching the game. This means when you have a change that you need to implement into the game, the way things work FORCES you to CHANGE THE ENTIRE GAME to implement a small change, a large change, or even many changes in these. Unfortunately, the thing is, all the text in the game are subject to this problem - which means every time that a patch comes out, you end up having to merge files in the correct way with the Japanese version just to get the English patch to work.

That's not necessarily as big of a deal with with GoS/DoD because the files are all text-based, and a three-way merge can deal with most of the work automatically.

You could go even further and write a tool that compares the text fields in a CSV file between two versions of the game, copies the translated string when the translation doesn't need updated, or copies and marks entries that need a TL check.  That's not necessary now since we're waiting, but it is doable.

[Pesco]

Could start text dumping in the meantime, right?

[MewMewHeart]

Ah so, I wasn't the only one who kept crashing when I tried to select, Suika then... good because, the bug was not fixed even in patch 1.12. 


Edit: FINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLY!!!!!!!! I FINALLY BEATED EIRIN AND KAGUYA ON MY BYAKUREN ROUTE FILE!!!!!

Thank goodness I had learned 覇王の一閃 Conqueror Flash so early with Byakuren.

Byakuren was doing 1,283 on Kaguya and Eirin thanks to Yuyuko/Koishi getting a few lucky de-buffs on Kaguya and Eirin with Subterranean Rose while Sanae/Nazrin used Weapon Breath along with Marisa/Dragon Maid using Dragon Blessing. Yuka/Komachi helped out with the damages too. Sanae managed to sneak in a few heals while Conqueror Flash was on cooldown, I used Yuugi's Knock out in 3 steps combined with Aya's 41 mp skill to double the damage I did on Eirin which made her go down faster.

DE-buffs that I had used:



Party/Shikigamis that were used in the battle:



Sheesh,,, that battle was a PAIN IN THE ASS CRACK... now I have to suffer on my Yukari route run.

Welp... now let's see if I can beat up the Tower bosses again... starting with the 2nd Tower.

[Anima Zero]

Haven't done too terribly much these past few days aside from leveling up Meiling and Byakuren a whole bunch.  Pretty happy with how they are turning out.  Meiling's got pretty good offensive stats while Byakuren is essentially another Eiki stat wise.

Even started grinding in the lower levels of the final dungeon.  It does require having some specific shikigami equipped to handle some of the more nastier mobs.  Even then, there were still some enemies I just plain didn't like (Those tank enemies with the ass kicking cannonball AoE and Beholders whom can randomly use a skill that can cancel out magic casting that turn.  Doubly sucks if the Beholder comes with annoying monsters too).

On the plus side got a bunch of accessories from battles, recruited a Beholder, and got a couple weapon drops, one of them being the Plasma Knife.  Byakuren actually does surprisingly well with this weapon equipped right now.

Character level wise, I'm around 35-36 for Reimu/Youmu/Eiki and 29 for Meiling & Byakuren.

[MewMewHeart]

Haven't done too terribly much these past few days aside from leveling up Meiling and Byakuren a whole bunch.  Pretty happy with how they are turning out.  Meiling's got pretty good offensive stats while Byakuren is essentially another Eiki stat wise.

Even started grinding in the lower levels of the final dungeon.  It does require having some specific shikigami equipped to handle some of the more nastier mobs.  Even then, there were still some enemies I just plain didn't like (Those tank enemies with the ass kicking cannonball AoE and Beholders whom can randomly use a skill that can cancel out magic casting that turn.  Doubly sucks if the Beholder comes with annoying monsters too).

On the plus side got a bunch of accessories from battles, recruited a Beholder, and got a couple weapon drops, one of them being the Plasma Knife.  Byakuren actually does surprisingly well with this weapon equipped right now.

Character level wise, I'm around 35-36 for Reimu/Youmu/Eiki and 29 for Meiling & Byakuren.

I hate the Tanks too... they spam that dang cannonball A.O.E  like it's no tomorrow.  :V

But, the huge dragons and that weird angel with the green gem are the ones that push my buttons in a bad way.

Also, I would like to say the tower 3 rematch boss is such a troll... help...   :derp:

[theshirn]

I hate the Tanks too... they spam that dang cannonball A.O.E  like it's no tomorrow.  :V

But, the huge dragons and that weird angel with the green gem are the ones that push my buttons in a bad way.

Also, I would like to say the tower 3 rematch boss is such a troll... help...   :derp:

I leveled up a bunch trying to get various enemies to join (King/Hagure/Sisters, Greater Daemon, G-3, no luck on any of them ).  When I came back and tried her, I was able to just stomp her into the ground by spamming my strongest physicals.

[Anima Zero]

Today's session of DoD had me running the final dungeon from the beginning for more exp.  If I got any items & shikigami, that'd be even better.

Good thing I did because I found a hidden passage in the first part of the final dungeon a couple screens past where you get a shikigami in a cutscene.  Those sneaky hidden passages D:.  It had some crafting items and a silver chest with a bunch of accessory recipes (The ones that boost stuff like Atk, Def, M.Def, HP/MP, and so on).

Also during this part, I got a drop from the Beholder, an accessory that does...something.  Heck if I know what though ;P.

Second part of the final dungeon I just cleared out damn near everything I could while finishing up with item collection here.

After all that, tackled part 3 of the final dungeon which featured a music change for the area and a new battle theme.  Both of them are very catchy and very nicely done (Battle Theme especially).

Enemies started much tamer compared to the last two parts.  The Lizard Knights had some rather nasty looking AoE attacks while the Gapuin enemies had really really high evasion...but only 100 HP.  The high evasion part doesn't really mean much when one hit sends them packing + being weak to thunder attacks + my Eiki being really fast and having the Dragon Maid equipped.

I did get one of those Gapuin enemies to join my party though so I guess there's that.

At the higher levels of part 3, things turned fairly quickly.  There was these giant slime globs that appeared in GoS...stage 13 I believe (the heaven stage IIRC).

Protip for these suckers:  Do NOT shift the land toward thunder's favor heavily.  You will get spammed by a thunder attack that will basically kick your ass and leave it by the wayside.  I had a laugh when I saw the attack for the first time because I was spamming thunder element attacks that fight and saw it spike my Meiling and Reimu for ~320 damage while Youmu got wiped twice over as it did a little over 700 damage to her.  I ended up getting Game Over'd by the sucker spamming that attack over and over and over.

At least once I figured out it was weak to Ice, all I needed was Meiling with a normal attack using her ice element sword, Eiki with an Ice Breath, and Youmu performing an Ice Chaser to drop it on subsequent encounters with it.  I even got one to join my party after killing a few of them.  Has weaknesses to Fire/Ice, but double circle resists in Slash/Pierce/Blunt.  That could be very useful for some boss fights methinks.

Back to annoying monsters, I'd have to agree with MewMewHeart about the new dragon enemy and the enemy with a green gem in its chest.  Both are asses, plain and simple.

As for boss fights, I managed to take out Kaguys & Eirin before ending my session for today.  I setup Youmu for the sole purpose of being able to pull off some massive damage, Meiling to fill a similar role (Not anywhere near what I could do with Youmu sadly enough), and everyone else for support (and decent damage in the case of Byakuren). 

Kaguya & Eirin are goddamn dingbat extremes.  Kaguya beats you up with magic, Eirin with physicals that seem to be 90% hit your entire damn party.

After several fails, I gave Meiling Koakuma so she could kick off the fight with Dark Illusion.  That way if Eirin wanted to try a screw you, I could nullify it one time.  They both went before Meiling, but on my winning attempt, they thankfully went for the least threatening combo of moves...Kaguya using Detonate which hit Eiki and someone else while Eirin pulled off the Jackpot field effect.

Also on turn #1, I had Youmu buff everyone's Str, Reimu just poked something for lulzs, Byakuren to use Lyrica's Heat Weapon buff, and Eiki to use Nazrin's Weapon Bless on Youmu.

Turn #2...I planned for Kaguya to go down hard.  Reimu used Aya's skill that let someone use a skill twice that turn.  Used it on Youmu, she used Lunasa's single target attack skill that costs 10 MP and hits really really hard sometimes , Meiling fired off Murasa's Colosseo World field effect that nullifies healing for everyone, Byakuren I believed fire off a Conqueror Flash (Or whatever that skill is that has slayer effects on Magicians & Warriors), and Eiki used Dragon Maid's Dragon Force buff on Youmu.

Would have helped if Youmu didn't miss on one of her Lunasa attacks, but when it did hit...Kaguya got whacked for roughly 1800-1900 damage while being equipped with the weapon the Saladins in the 3rd tower drop that has Magician & Warrior slayer effects.  Kaguya & Eirin have 5000 HP.  It sure adds up ;P.

Next turn...Kaguya got boomed with a combination of Meiling using Chen's Sword Chaser skill and some application of Conqueror Flash.

The next two turns had Eirin failing to revive Kaguya thanks to Colosseo World while she got rolled hard via Lunasa's attack & Conqueror Flash spam.

Got both as shikigamis afterwards.  Kaguya has some very powerful magic attacks while Eirin seems to start out with a heal spell.  Think I'll be leveling both of them while hunting down a Decarabia and hopefully getting it to join my team.

[MewMewHeart]

I leveled up a bunch trying to get various enemies to join (King/Hagure/Sisters, Greater Daemon, G-3, no luck on any of them ).  When I came back and tried her, I was able to just stomp her into the ground by spamming my strongest physicals.

I managed to get one of those Zombies with a Chainsaw  shikigami to join my party today, I might explore the 1st tower rematch dungeon so, I can grab a few treasures, and try to level up my people. My main party is going to be Byakuren, Yuka, Marisa, Yuyuko, and Sanae. Funny thing though during  the rematch against Chole, she missed with Fullmoon revenge on Yuyuko and only got her once by 225 damage which didn't help her case. But still I think you're right Shim, I do need to level up... because being level 34~ 35 is not going to cut it, if I want to tone down the final boss.

@Anima Zero:

I told you both of them were a pain in the ass... and even alone the Angel with the green gem can lolwut pwn you in a nano second if you don't have high light resistance and allow it to shift the land to Light.  Even then using it's weakness which is Darkness doesn't help much since it seems to have some high magic defense.

The Dragon I warned you about in the final dungeon can be recruited as a shikigami from what I read on the Japanese wiki, but I'm not taking the risk of getting one right now, I might do what you're doing and get a Decarabia and I might try and hunt down a few things also, like the Gauntlet of thieves from Star Platinum which gives +25% chance of an item dropping.

[Vilkni]

So I said I would finally get around to resuming playing this game, right? Well, I certainly did, because right now I can enter the third stratum AND I killed the second stratum tower main boss (to be honest, I don't even know why this boss and the third tower main boss are much easier compared to the first tower main boss). So I guess I shall go on a monster hunting spree. but first before I do that, didn't I recall someone saying there were Touhou shikigamis I could recruit in the second stratum tower unless I misremembered? Also, I'm at 13 touhou characters recruited for the main party. All this happened and the main party was below level 20 overall. EDIT: Managed to confuse the second tower with the third tower somehow. Bleh.

Also, I need to remember which touhou shikigamis are rare encounters and require you to get Satori beforehand.

EDIT: What the hell is a prescott?  I might note this is on the japanese wiki on the list of captureable monsters by the way, and it's on the first stratum.