Been a long time since I've had to just give up on something I've been trying for for a while. But it happened, just now.
Mountain of Faith, lunatic, no bombs, something I've been trying for on and off (mostly on) for the past 4 months, at least...I can't do it. At least, not now. Why? Because:
I perfect stage 1 maybe half the time >_>
Stage 2 follows maybe 30% of the time. This level of consistency makes me not want to reset to bad mistakes in Stage 3 because it takes a while to get a no death run there.
Stage 3 always seems to have 2 deaths. Hydro Camouflage is understandable, as are Nitori's 2nd and 3rd spells if I screw them up. But the fairies after midboss Nitori? Yeah, I die to those as often as Hydro Camouflage itself (60% of the time).
Stage 4 varies. Can't really complain about that since I usually escape with 3 deaths at the worst, 4 if I derp Aya's last spell. (Momiji, random clipdeath, PWG, Aya's last sums up an average worst case scenario run, though I used to be consistent at Momiji).
Stage 5 is where I start to realize I can't actually do this right now. I die to literally anything and everything. I had a run which died 3 times on midboss Sanae to game over. Dying on her is an average run even though she's not hard and I capture both patterns 95% of the time in stage practice. I have died to the yellow spread streaming bullets at the end of the stage in a run. I had a run which died on all 3 of Sanae's nonspells. I had a run which entered Sanae with 3 lives and game overed on Moses Miracle. and yet, when I go to Stage Practice immediately after failing, or as practice before attempts, I get either an NDNB or a 1DNB because I made a silly mistake somewhere.
Stage 6 is the final proof. I tried about 50 times today to perfect the stage in practice. I got to Kanako 7 times. I captured her opener on 0 of those, tried dodging it without shooting for a bit after dying, kept dying horribly to it every few seconds. Dodging that for me is pure luck, and I hate it. and people say that it's easy, sure, I can see that if your reading speed is fast enough. Mine's not. How do you fix that? At least all attempts that I didn't reset got everything from her first spell through her last nonspell, so it's not completely hopeless. 0 captures of Source of Rains. Died once 4 times, twice, well, twice and 3 times on 1 attempt. This spell has way too much RNG involved with the arrows, and you have to be very precise with bad luck...which I consistently got. and to top it all off, Virtue of Wind God. I used to capture it every time. Now...I can't. Simple as that. Even though I was timing it out for further practice, only one attempt survived past the part where the timer starts ticking down-and that died at 91 left, which wouldn't have been a capture. Add to that that I didn't feel like today was an off day for playing...what happened to me.
I hate giving up, but just by looking at where I die, I can't do it yet without thousands of tries, and I'd rather spend that time doing things that I know I'll get a good result out of, and not just "hey I reached Stage 6 with 0 lives AGAIN, let's game over to the stage or maybe, if we're lucky, Kanako's opener".
