Touhou Blogging Thread

[Monkeypro257]

I 1CC Mountain of Faith on Hard Mode in my 8'th attempt. I tried Lunatic after that, but I only made it to Kanako until she knifed me to death with her non-spells. -_- My limit in 1CCing games is Hard mode, anything above that is just too much. If I ever play Lunatic, all that ever happens is rage quitting and me grinding my teeth. . .

[Mr Jovial]

I 1CC Mountain of Faith on Hard Mode in my 8'th attempt. I tried Lunatic after that, but I only made it to Kanako until she knifed me to death with her non-spells. -_- My limit in 1CCing games is Hard mode, anything above that is just too much. If I ever play Lunatic, all that ever happens is rage quitting and me grinding my teeth. . .

The jump from Hard to Lunatic is quite a big one. Normal to Hard is partly due to more bullets and partly due to pattern changes (think Remi's spellcards). But Hard to Lunatic is a very large jump of almost entirely more bullets. If you really want to get to Lunatic standards you need to put in quite a bit of work. To give you an idea, the last Hard 1cc I did (UFO) I got on Christmas Eve last year. The first Lunatic 1cc (IN) I got in this year's Summer holidays. Admittedly I procrastinated quite a bit. Had about 4 extra stages to do then I went and did both photography games until I went back to IN and was still only getting to Stage 4. Then I worked and noticed progress; getting to Tewi, then Reisen, then the opening of Stage 6 and then lots of runs ending around Kaguya's 3rd lifebar. MoF is a bit of a strange game since you need to manage resources so you have about 3 lives for VoWG but with practice, this will slowly become doable. You could stay at Hard but imo, Touhou is the kind of game where you should almost constantly be pushing yourself towards some form of goal. Perhaps a statistic from the thwiki polls will be helpful. 22.88% of responses (3946 of 17246) claimed to be able to 1cc MoF on hard. 9.36% (1614) people claimed to be able to 1cc MoF on Lunatic. For SA-TD its similar with 5-7% of responsess claiming to be able to Lunatic 1cc. Its a small number, but I'd still strongly recommend you keep going for it. It feels quite rewarding when you finally get your 1st 1cc on Lunatic.

tl;dr: Blah, blah, blah. *insert encouraging you to Lunatic 1cc*

[Oh]

Disgusted with my lack of skill today but managed to cheer up by looking at cute HomuraxMadoka pictures.
Even if I cleared my run would be shit because my route is bad. I guess I lack motivation to spam credits now, and feel an urge to improve my route. I gotta get my route up to at least coa's level if i want to score beyond 2b in MoF Hard. Also having a shit 13 inch laptop monitor that refreshes at 15fps sucks.

[CyberAngel]

Seems I've found a slight survival trick. On Hina's "Broken Amulet", stay low between where the corners of "unbroken amulet" shape point. Those points are where walls of bullets intersect, leaving space between them much safer. This seems to work even on Hard, though not as much on Lunatic.

EDIT: A small correction. Where the SPIKES point, not corners. Pretty much the same, except for Normal. And it does seem to work on Lunatic alright.

[Mino ☆]

I've decided that the best solution for my problem is just to take a break. So that's what I've decided to do. I'm not sure how long it'll be. But I feel confident that if I just get my mind off Touhou for a while, I'll get back into the zone once I return to it.

I'm not going to quit. Touhou is still my life. But I'm just putting it on hold.

[Emerald Mint]

A break is always nice. Once you come back with a fresh approach, you'll find you'll still enjoy it the same or better than before.

[CyberAngel]

Just played a very nostalgic stage. I remember the time when I became brave enough to no longer stay at the bottom all the time there. It felt like I was crawling before and suddenly learned to fly. Nowadays I can PoC unfocused through all the bullets like they're nothing. It's awesome to be able to look at your own advancement like this. It's very inspiring.

[Mr Jovial]

Ahh~ Its a good feeling to finally figure out a way to do something yourself. I've probably played SA Stage 4 around 60 times now and its taken this long to figure out how to do the last part of the green amulet part (the streaming). Feels good to figure it out yourself :V. Now I've just got to get DBDB down and I'll get this stage perfected .

[Szayelaporro Granz]

A break is always nice. Once you come back with a fresh approach, you'll find you'll still enjoy it the same or better than before.

Miraculous things tend to happen for me whenever I got back from Touhou break :3

Anyway, I think I'll lose my normal mode player title quite soon. I'm pretty close at PCB Hard 1cc, last time I lost all my lives and bombs during Yuyuko's Sumizome Perfect Blossom. Almost. There :ohdear:

[Emerald Mint]

Tried for a first survival clear of SA Lunatic using ReimuA, no risque scoring tactics. I was making decent progress, until I lost my credit Orin's first non-spell. It's better than what I usually do, seeing as I have a pet hate for SA.

[Immortal Smoke]

I'm not terribly skilled at touhou, but I've gotten a little better. I've managed to see all of the good endings in EoSD and IN, and now I'm trying to do the same with PCB. Yesterday I managed to time out Black Magic - Event Horizon while listening to SLAYER. There's not much else worth mentioning.

[Mino ☆]

Well I'm back from my one day break. My Touhou addiction is so big that I can't take anymore than 1 day away from it...

I did better in terms of rage. And I even got a PCB Perfect Lunatic attempt all the way to Yuyuko, ultimately dying to her first spell (UGGGGGH AND THE GAP WAS SO EASY TOO, I REWATCHED THE RUN)

So um yeah.

I seriously need to stop dying to Yuyuko, especially if I want this LNNN. That makes 2 runs that have lost at Yuyuko in an LNNN attempt.

At least I'm making my runs this far. I remember 2 months ago when trying this I couldn't even get past stage 5.

I've been working on this for about 5-6 months now. I hope I get it soon.

[Oh]

How do you guys even play lunatic there's like so many bullets I only made it to stage 3 twice in 3 hours of esc+r

[Sakurei]

So I was playing SA normal wanting to get some runs in. Since that is important to get a feel for the full game. Things were going okay. I made some grazing mistakes, but nothing I'd cry over. I entered stage 4, so basically I entered the part of the game I am super inconsistent at. Stage 4 has a lot of execution. It's pretty hard, and I am nowhere near optimal either. Good thing I don't need to be. To be honest, I half expected to die in the second half. To my surprise I didn't. I entered Satori, and again, I didn't die to DBDB. What did I die to instead? safepotting BoWaP. probably one of the silliest ways to lose a run, but I kept going, wanting to finish the game. Stage 5 is also rather difficult. I assume mostly due to lack of practice though. I learnt the route and the fight and practiced each just a bit. However, again, I didn't die to things I expected to die against. One was the first half with rhe orbs. In normalmode scoring, you have to PoC the items yourself and speedkill them. Now, this sounds hard, but at 3+ power, it's actually really easy once you know how to PoC (which I do). I am actually not sure what killed me - I wasn't paying attention to Reimu, but rather the orbs I was trying to go under. I assume it was a stray red bullet. Now, I died one more time to the popcorn section. I can "live" with that death. It's nothing super hard, but you have no power to bomb when in danger (you spend 4 bombs on the midboss and time it out) and inattention will still kill you, even on normal. Both the second and the third death didn't affect me nearly as much as the first one did since I didn't have much base PiV yet, though dying so much hindered me from finishing with full lives.

You know, dying in SA scoring (outside of loonie) is pretty much a reset. You will absolutely never want to die. It resets your base-piv (I was at 78k when I died to BoWaP and fell back to 50k - with the 23k graze I had after BoWaP, this is a multiplier of over 3, so I lost million and million of points because of that) and not only did I only die once, no I died thrice. Now, why is this important? Because I got a PB. And it makes me feel sour. I mean, don't get me wrong: PB is PB, but the fact that I got 780m on a run that wasn't supposed to go anywhere. Now, 780 isn't some super score. Hell, it isn't even good, but it just fucking irks me so much. I don't even know why. How much would I have gotten with 1 death less? with only dying once? with no deaths? I don't know. No deaths would have probably carried me to around 1b, though. Irrelevant. I don't even know why I care so much. I confuse myself.

I don't even know why I am posting this. I probably shouldn't.

[Karisa]

Dying to the BoWaP safespot happened to me extremely often back when I was going for SA Normal 800m. Yes, it's an extremely silly way to lose a run, but I probably failed it at least half the time, losing at least 10 runs that were no-death (well, 1-death) up to that point, perhaps 15 or more. I'd say it's possibly the primary reason why that 866m run took me so much longer than I expected it to take...

If you're not already doing this-- Nindel recommended to me to stay directly below Satori, and line up Reimu's hitbox using Satori's legs rather than that cloud surrounding her. It gave me a higher consistency rate, I think.

[Blue]

Thanksgiving break finally happened here(it's the entire week this year for some reason), and so I took the opportunity to play Touhou for pretty much the first time in forever and see how much worse I was. I'm roughly about the same level as I was when I stopped having time to play, which was around the end of August/start of September, so I guess I should be thankful that I haven't fallen too much. Today I basically tested if I was at the same level by testing IN Hard and DDC Normal runs, Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get some actual progress on my goal list now that I have time.

[Tengukami]

Making some headway with Marisa A in DDC Hard. I find her shot type a real challenge to begin with, but she's excellent for resource collection. Using her, I think, has been sharpening up my playing; without the luxury of homing shots, I have to plan paths more carefully. The weird thing is, though, that I spent so much time practicing later stages that earlier ones are more of a challenge. I suppose the lesson here for me is to use Practice more sparingly, maybe even just keep it to Spell Practice.

[BT]

I suppose the lesson here for me is to use Practice more sparingly, maybe even just keep it to Spell Practice.

Nah, the stage portions in DDC are important, you want to consistently get a bunch of resources from those. Stage Practice should help you with that.

The whole practice start vs game start thing is an issue in all of the games. It's kind of obvious why - every credit is a pretty large time investment. You need to find the right balance, I guess.

[Karisa]

The weird thing is, though, that I spent so much time practicing later stages that earlier ones are more of a challenge. I suppose the lesson here for me is to use Practice more sparingly, maybe even just keep it to Spell Practice.

It'll balance out soon enough, whenever you go for full runs, since you'll get plenty of practice on the early stages then. Late-game practice is more important anyway, since you can't just Esc-R after a mistake. And it should always be better to have more practice rather than less, unless you manage to spend so much time practicing you can't tolerate the stage/spell anymore.

[chirpy13]

since you can't just Esc-R after a mistake

[Sakurei]

Only you restart on a mistake in late stage 5. Everyone will at leats usually finish the run for practice's sake.

[Immortal Smoke]

I managed to get past Flandre's Maze of Love for the first time tonight (then I got wrecked by Starbow Break :/). It wasn't too long ago that I could rarely make it past L?vatein, but now I'm capturing that card more often than not.

[Oh]

My neck hurts like HELL now. I suspect it to be because I was playing touhou lying down with my face sideways.

[Space Flower]

For a while I had one very specific angle I had to look at my screen from to play optimally, and so I had to sit an exact way and position my laptop up on my lapdesk exactly and etc.
I'm over it now though, but it used to be a curse for my spine to have to sit in such a weird way for hours.

[CyberAngel]

I already bragged about my best EoSD Easy NB run (which was no-miss to boot), so I'll leave my thoughts here instead.

Doing EoSD Easy NB runs proved to be nice and simple. I only make a few mistakes, and as was proven, I can even do without them if I want. Most of them tend to happen at Sakuya, so it's just a matter of getting better at her battle. Anyway, pacifist run is quite possible and taken into consideration for the nearest future.

Normal NB proved to be way harder. I do well enough with just a few random deaths (though Meiling's "Extreme Color Typhoon" proves to be a challenge). Until Sakuya, that is. She usually eats through all my lives I've managed to save up until then, after which Remi eats up a whole continue. Now, I admit I just didn't know the tricks behind some spellcards, but even now that I do, I need more practice with them to get better.

Hard 1cc progresses nicely, actually. I usually reach Sakuya midboss spellcard, and if I can get past that getting to stage 6 is no problem. Still need a continue for Remi, but she's doable. Lunatic is still out there, though. I even still can't unlock stage 6 (thank you, Scarlet Gensokyo).

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I'm taking back what I said about ReimuB. She IS damn strong, but only when she's at low power (when her main shot isn't wide yet) or when shotgunning. Executing the latter is a task in itself, but when you do... Just wow. Depending on how long you can keep it up, she may be even better than MarisaA.

Now, moving on to getting more Normal 1cc's (I hope).

[Oh]

So I decided to put one credit into MoF LNB for fun and got a 2 miss.

Put one credit into PCB LNB for fun and gamed over to Reflowering. Hurrr.

[CyberAngel]

Do you know which bullet pattern is the most dangerous part of "Game of Rising"? Medium-sized whitish ones. Small black ones are orderly and easy to keep track of (being drawn above everything else helps), and bubbles are, well, bubbles - hard to miss, easy to navigate. The white ones, however, are 100% hitbox and are obscured by familiar's spam (basically, the only way it's any relevant), so they should be paid the most attention. I've captured these spellcards a few times before by reflexes alone, but now that I see the trick behind it, it's a lot easier to understand this isn't just some plain "spam stuff" thing. Awesome utilizing of draw order too. ZUN still keeps amazing me.

In other news, practicing Eirin in pure masochism. No wonder where that "punishment time <3" thing came from.

[ARF]

Streamed some IL attempts, got a 76.36 1-3 and a 180.72 EX-6, also a few 180.5x+ times in a row on that scene. I also have a 85.80 in 1-4 from before, so in 3 scenes I'm really close to beating Random's times, just a bit of luck, skill or whatever and I should have them. Gonna try to stream whenever I go for this so that it's documented in more than one way (replays).

[Chuckolator]

Streamed some IL attempts, got a 76.36 1-3 and a 180.72 EX-6, also a few 180.5x+ times in a row on that scene. I also have a 85.80 in 1-4 from before, so in 3 scenes I'm really close to beating Random's times, just a bit of luck, skill or whatever and I should have them. Gonna try to stream whenever I go for this so that it's documented in more than one way (replays).

Link to your stream?

[ARF]

http://www.twitch.tv/arftoho