Touhou Rage Thread XV: No "No Misses" Edition

[Tsym]

Oh come on!

First image, died with 2 bombs in stock to Nue.
Second image, died with 2 bombs in stock to Magic Butterfly and Milky Way, and got a supremely unlucky clip to Stage 4 Nue.

Byakuren. Why are you doing this to me? Also, holy crap Milky Way and Devil's Recitation have a ridiculous amount of health. 2 bombs for each? Now that's just plain annoying.

I swear that Byakuren is the only truly hard final boss for me. She has the absolute lowest number of patterns that I can reliably do among any final boss. Most other final bosses are only hard because of one or a few attacks (Remi, Kanako, Okuu, Miko. I would add Yuyuko to that list but I'm not terribly good at her middle few patterns). It's only Byakuren that I can basically only impotently shake my fist at because none of her attacks seem to be safe from the threat of serious clippage. At least with Kaguya you get an absolute metric ton of resources to use, plus it's really only Dragon's Necklace and Life Spring Infinity to worry about, given that you've practiced Hourai Jewel a bit. But Byakuren... God damn it.

The only plus side is that Byakuren as a boss is tons of fun to play against, unlike Kaguya. But it's all so meaningless because I know I'll clip something when I actually do fight her. Ahhhhhhhh!!!

[チソウ タイゼン]

Is getting steamrolled by LFS like, a rite of passage or something? I literally cannot count how many times I've seen this happen now.

[Cor]

I don't think it's a rite of passage. It tends to happen to people like dying to last spell cards happens to people. I don't remember having massive problems with it.

First image, died with 2 bombs in stock to Nue.

Nue is the last, biggest middle finger the game gives you right before the final boss. You're probably already starving on power from stage 5 and if you get hit by her you won't get the FULL power item. Your run is fucked from then on. Bad design.

Anyhow, you should try learning to dodge Magic Milky Way. It's her second-easiest card for me, not very cluttered, ~40% capture rate and you can easily see when you're gonna be screwed over and have to bomb. Saving the resources there would help a whole lot 'n' whatnot. DR is not super difficult until the last phase either, when it starts forcing you down. You can skip that phase with a single bomb.

And uh, you shouldn't be facing the glowshit clip attacks like her first spell and second non. I don't know of any other clipping attacks of hers.

[I have no name]

Nue is the last, biggest middle finger the game gives you right before the final boss. You're probably already starving on power from stage 5 and if you get hit by her you won't get the FULL power item. Your run is fucked from then on. Bad design.

Not really because you can be like me and stock up on bombs and bomb through Shou, giving a 3/4 power ending to Stage 5: guaranteeing a 4 power Byakuren start.

[Tsym]

Is getting steamrolled by LFS like, a rite of passage or something? I literally cannot count how many times I've seen this happen now.

It is. Just like getting steamrolled by Scarlet Gensokyo and VoWG is a rite of passage. They're just rather tough cards that cap off a high stress boss fight + run. Because of its length and bomb immunity, you'll find that many runs end up dying here after bombing through everything else. Alas, such is Touhou.

Nue is the last, biggest middle finger the game gives you right before the final boss. You're probably already starving on power from stage 5 and if you get hit by her you won't get the FULL power item. Your run is fucked from then on. Bad design.

Anyhow, you should try learning to dodge Magic Milky Way. It's her second-easiest card for me, not very cluttered, ~40% capture rate and you can easily see when you're gonna be screwed over and have to bomb. Saving the resources there would help a whole lot 'n' whatnot. DR is not super difficult until the last phase either, when it starts forcing you down. You can skip that phase with a single bomb.

And uh, you shouldn't be facing the glowshit clip attacks like her first spell and second non. I don't know of any other clipping attacks of hers.

Eh well. I don't think that going into Byakuren with 2 or 3 power is really that bad. You should have gotten enough bombs during the stage to wreck Cloudy Purple with 1 or 2, and you get 1 power after that, so you're up to either 3 power or max. Now bomb the non-spell after (you better have at least 3 bombs if you came into stage 6 with none), do Magic Butterfly, and you're up to 3.5. Probably die to Milky Way or something and you're down to 3 because of the .5 power that drops. You get 2 bombs, so you'll go into DR with at least 2-3 power, then you get another 1 power after it, bringing you up to 3 or 4, and you're pretty much maxed for LFS. As long as you don't clip something, you won't be that far down.

And it might just be me, but I've almost never had problems with power at the end of stage 5. I rarely go into stage 6 with under 2 power, and the cutoff for pretty much guaranteed 4 power for Byakuren (without dying in the stage) is 2.5 (.4 or so from the opening fairies, at least .1 from the red fairies from Nue, and 1 power afterward if you bombed it). If you go into Shou with 3 power and 2 bombs, you can bomb RTG and her second non-spell, easily do Aura of Justice, clip the non-spell after I guess, bomb Vajra and CC, and you're into stage 6 with at least 2 power; 3 power with only 1 death through Shou.

I actually watched a replay and practiced stage 6 afterward, and found out that I had been doing MMW the wrong way this whole time. I was dodging it near the middle, when it turns out you should be fairly close to Byakuren's face. Made the whole thing much easier. Still has a lot of health though. I haven't gotten used to the blue walls in DR yet. I'm always really scared of them because I'm not good at figuring out where I am relative to the arena they form. I think I've only seen Byakuren's cards maybe 20 or so times, with about 15 of those times in 1ccs (so I bomb away!), so I think it'll come with practice.

PS - I think Superhuman is tons easier than MMW. The only reason I don't have a better capture rate is because it's the penultimate card, so I have a major freak out if I get there

[Makedounia]

I try to 1cc EoSD with 1 life on normal (I was expecting game over at Sakuya)
I'm surprised I made it to Remilia with 1 life and 3 bombs
Survive all the way to red magic
I'm hit by the big bubbles at the beginning.

= Ragequit & banging my head against the table like a madman

[Byronyello]

Not obvious enough?

Why? I'm not even on Lunatic >.>

[ARF]

Lost a no horizontal SA Easy on Heaven and Hell meltdown. At least 4 easily preventable deaths happened, 3 of which had boms in stock.

[Yatakarasu]

I died "Rorschach in Danmaku" in two runs last night. Both times I had bombs in stock. Both of those runs had me game over at "Genetics of the Subconscious," also with bombs in stock.
 :colonveeplusalpha:

[LadyScarlet]

EoSD Stage 5 practice run. Lost my last life to...
Misdirection.
Yeah.  :colonveeplusalpha:

Also just had my best EoSD Stage 4 practice run. Lost my last life at Sylphae Horn High Level. Yeah, the one that's easier than Princess Undine.

[Validon98]

So, my Mystic Square Hard run just went something like this:

Stage 1: Perfect
Stage 2: 1 Bomb
Stage 3: A Life and some bombs
Stage 4: A couple bombs, a life, and a Perfect Yuki fight!
Stage 5: Fine... then several deaths to Yumeko
Stage 6: Died at Devil's Recitation... then continued and perfected her last attack.

I hate Devil's Recitation so much.

[Zork787]

Any Pattern that are a combo of random bullets and an actual pattern! (such as Unknown "Skyfish with Unknown Shape" for example)

[チソウ タイゼン]

Okay.... how does one no-vert Reisen?

[I have no name]

Okay.... how does one no-vert Reisen?

luck and bombs.

[Tsym]

Tried some PC-98 for a while. A few things that I just have to rant about, because putting words to emotions is fairly therapeutic.

First off, a general wtf. This didn't happen in PoDD before, but suddenly during my most recent runs, PoDD and MS decided to randomly switch colors every time, which was annoying as hell. It switched back after a spell or a flash on screen, but still. What the hell. I had experienced this problem before, so the solution was just to kill explorer, but to be frank, I do not want to kill explorer every single time I want to play a PC-98 game, even if I can just do it simply through a batch file. I quite like having a number of explorer windows open so I can access different things quickly, and killing them all is just so... Painful. If there's a way to do this through Anex86, well, that would be amazing, but looking at Zil's thread in Tech Support, I'm guessing that no one knows/has experienced this issue, so that sucks.

Now for Mystic Square. I started it off on Hard, and I was very, very disappointed to find that I couldn't 1cc it on my first try. Maybe it's just high expectations for myself, but I would imagine that playing on Lunatic means that I would have a fair chance of just sweeping through the game on Hard, but alas that wasn't the case. I guess I can chalk it up to the color issue explained above and to the fact that there are a LOT of aimed attacks that you need to be prepared for in MS, and I just wasn't prepared for them. Still, I ended up gaming over on Mai and Yuki, and used up all my continues to get to Shiki. I don't know about you guys, but I will have nightmares of those yellow lasers for days to come. They just wouldn't stop coming... Bombs did nothing... Oh dear God. Since there's no stage practice, I can already tell that that singular attack is going to haunt me for a long time, because it's the only thing that I looked at and just went "... Crap this is going to take a lot of practice to figure out."

And finally PoDD. I went down to Hard because Lunatic is just insane. Even still, Hard was still.. Uhh.. Hard. Nothing particularly phased me until I got to Marisa. Learning to dodge the laser array she fires was tough, especially with everything else going on in the screen. But you know who was just absolutely evil? I don't know her name, but she shot meteors or something that had the most ridiculous paths. There's absolutely no way to predict which way they're going to go, and they can either fly in a curve or in this U shape, and it's annoying as hell. Second, Rikako. Those indestructable things are just plain stupid. But the absolute worst was Chiyuri and Yumemi. First, Chiyuri's lasers actually box you in, and it becomes impossible to do anything if you get caught in that. Rikako's crosses are just plain evil because you only have a limited reaction time to deal with them, and they will snipe you at the bottom of the screen, and they'll box you in even harder than Chiyuri's lasers do. Like what're you supposed to do with that? Insane. PoDD bosses also suffer from the same problems that plague PoFV. Characters are like God until you die once. I guess I didn't expect anything different, but it's still annoying to see. But I guess my biggest gripe has nothing to do with the attacks or whatever. It's how the damn spell system works. You don't get some screen clearage after casting. That's cool. What's not cool is the screen pausing every half a second when a big cluster of spells go off in rapid succession. You basically can't do ANYTHING while that chain is going off because the game pauses like every second while cut ins flash on your screen and messages appear everywhere cluttering your screen and making you disoriented trying to figure out which direction the bullets are going and you're annoyed as hell because you're trying to get off that charge attack of yours but it just doesn't seem to go off and holy what in the world a bullet is flying straight towards me oh God to the right! Wait I overshot it! Damn i- *picchun*. Oh, and if you really do have to go through that dialogue with Chiyuri and Yumemi every single time with no quick way to skip past it... Blarg.

Whew. There goes a gigantic block of text. I will admit that PoDD's base system is far more fun than PoFV's base system (as in charge attacks and spirits and the cool different ways in which enemies move). Not a fan of how some attacks tend to look like the background though. I don't like fighting against Komachi in PoFV because her coins don't contrast well with the background, and I swear that some of Chiyuri's danmaku looks like the exploding effect. Same deal with Shinki in MS, where there were background explosions that looked like bullets. Could have been an effect of the color thing tough. I dunno. Also MS has a lot of similarities with EoSD. I swear that some attacks from EoSD were lifted straight out of MS. Like with LLS, still not a fan of the stages. They're boring, repetitive, and dry. At least they're not as long. Although I guess my biggest criticism with MS is just that only Shiki and Yuki and Mai have any real distinctive qualities about them. The other bosses are basically a blur of "bullets. Lots of bullets at different speeds flying towards me and around me". I quite like the much more unique theming of EoSD. Definitely makes the game pop out, and part of the reason why I still do prefer it over MS.

Well that's it. I do feel better getting all that off my chest, even if I'm going to guess most of it isn't justified. Maybe it's because I'm really tired and irritated that my first impressions of the PC-98 games seemed so negative. If you actually read every word of the above, :toot: Your patience must be great, because I sure as hell am not a good writer. Sigh. Tired... Need sleep...

[Zork787]

So I felt like trying a MaricaC Normal mode run in SA and was actually doing pretty well, went into stage 5 with 6 lives thanks to some great deathbombing I did in the previous stages, buuuuuuut then Orin thought it'd be funny and make me game over...

suffice to say, I am less than cheery at the moment  :V

[Seppo Hovi]

One spell card.

One fucking spell card.

[Zork787]

I swear to GOD deathbombing in EoSD is Impossible! *headdesk*

[ARF]

I lost a SA Easy no horizontal run to Subterranean Sun  :V With 3 bombs in stock. Incredibly lame. This is without a doubt possible. It's probably possible to clear with like 3 lives in stock.

[redlakitu]

There are days when I feel like I could perfect anything the games may throw at me.

Then I lose three lives to Meiling and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.

[LadyScarlet]

Note to self: Never play Touhou when mom is home, lest you want to risk thousands of interruptions.  :colonveeplusalpha:

[Bang Jan]

One spell card.

One fucking spell card.

Which one?

[Kaze_Senshi]

Note to self: Never play Touhou when mom is home, lest you want to risk thousands of interruptions.  :colonveeplusalpha:

Never play Touhou when some child is home, you need to handle interruptions and questions like "ohh this game is for girls isn't?"  "barbie game \o\" and etc

[Wriggle]

...
Some no-focus timeout attempt.

[Seppo Hovi]

This was supposed to be an one-line answer.

Which one?

The 4th last spell. I am rusty, missed fairies in stage 2, messed up bullet cancels all over the place, collected shitton of items under the PoC. And then the huge bane of runs, the fourth last spell.

Let's aim for 1,65 on Yukari. She feels too shabby and I need to relearn lots of stuff, so 1,7 will not be coming soon. Top 3 would certainly feel funny, now that I can upload things on royalflare (it was all about the english patch, removed it and wonders happened)

-

Looked at my Yuyuko stuff, tried my thing for Wriggle's first card, success rate has fallen from over 75% to 1/25. Even AM-style felt scary, lost lots of time and swore a bit. Other things that need work are stage 3 and midboss Keine. And gaining full consistency on st-style Keine's finale if I ever wish to go for the dreams.

Stage 4 is normal. I feel like there is something that could be done with the noncards, but stuff feels too scary to be tried, it wouldn't work anyway. Maybe if I need extra punch. Stage 5, I need to work on optimal collection AND midboss Tewi. Maybe Reisen's final non, too. Looking into numbers and stuff.
Strategy for stage 6B is to skip everything and succeed at 4th last spell. I should maybe refer to some replays on Kaguya and look into numbers. Maybe. I'm bad with math, proved by that yes-no-yes 111M stage 3 PCB.

-

Long-term goals, stuff that requires work, the Yuyuko runs are. I wanted the damn record within a year last winter and even jokingly posted about it on the finnish forum, but now I feel like this will take several. Probably a good thing, better not stress myself too much over things.

More recently, I have looked at 2,7B Magic team, 2,5(?!) Nether team and 2,4B Border team. Anything with Sakuya in it, no. Not until I can call myself consistent at the fairy safespotting shenanigans of stage 4. Humans have it so hard.

-

Tried a Youmu run on normal. Tried a Marisa run on Extra. Died all over the place.

Maybe non-easymode difficulty scoring runs are harder. In a sense of tricks, optimal play and survival. Or maybe I am just an example of a shit-tier player who can only play on easymode, as some person kindly stated on /jp/ recently. Still, it might not make optimal goals easier, consistency throught thirty minutes is hard to achieve. Easy can be hard, lunatic can be harder, all a matter of viewpoint. I also guess you could let people play whatever they want to, but humanity seems to have a hard time understanding differences.

-

I posted to the sin atonement thread about a week ago. Bad, bad idea. I had recently played SA more than enough, and going for graze in it is a thing that is literally killing me, ingame. So, ran around in stage practice and made a really simple route on suiciding and bombs. Now all that is left is to pull off a run without a fuckup. Been giving it only 100 restarts a day, I can't play it more without hurting myself. I hope the yama are enjoying themselves, since I'm coming down to hell and telling them a few things unless I'll be done with this game soon enough. It just isn't my thing. Has good music, though, and I like Yamame. Nice girl, hell of a first spell. Too bad most of the fanart on her seems to be lewd.

-

Decided against uploading the pofv video. Chum seems to be more enthusiastic about it and better at it, so I'll leave it for him. It was a horrid shitrun, anyway.

-

I, uh... Sorry.

[Tsym]

Sigh. This run was the most trash runs, and I still got to LFS. But seriously. This card is just being such a DICK, especially with ReimuB's low power and bomb. I bet even MarisaB's bomb is better than Reimu's in this situation because at least hers should clear the screen. ReimuB's doesn't, and it's so annoying. It'd be nice if I could get my clear before the 10 score slots are filled up but... Sigh.

Also maybe I should stop posting these because this is happening like every single run now. I don't know how or why, but... It just is :V

[Zork787]

I Swear Zun went out of his way to make Stage 5 in SA on normal one of the hardest normal mode stages out there along with making Orin one of the hardest/most annoying Normal mode Stage 5 bosses in the process (at least with MarisaC anyway :V)

Edit:
Words cannot describe the rage I felt just now so I'll let this video do the talking...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGvLbI9eXik

[MTSranger]

I don't get how people find LLS so easy.
Why am I failing the extra stage...
Are my eyes just bad or what.

Also is there a vsync patch for this?
Why does movement feel so sluggish.

[Goldom]

"Vsync" for Anex86. I'd normally recommend just switching to NPII, but it runs LLS poorly by default. Read all this if you have the patience though, once you get it working its way better.

As for difficulty - I find LLS to be a quite easy main game - I'd say its Hard is probably the easiest Hard in the series, because it's almost identical to its Normal. On the other hand, I'm much better at MS's Extra than LLS's.

[MTSranger]

"Vsync" for Anex86. I'd normally recommend just switching to NPII, but it runs LLS poorly by default. Read all this if you have the patience though, once you get it working its way better.

As for difficulty - I find LLS to be a quite easy main game - I'd say its Hard is probably the easiest Hard in the series, because it's almost identical to its Normal. On the other hand, I'm much better at MS's Extra than LLS's.

Oh my god you are my savior.
LLS Extra 1cc GET! It's way too long overdue.
http://i.imgur.com/z9Kcy.png