I have not been playing very much (say compared to when I was playing IN extra) but for some time now, I have been working on Phantasm with ReimuB. Give or take, I'm at 50 hours of playtime now and it is about that amount of hours where I draw my first conclusions about a new category, usually.
My score is still very bad and only barely qualifies as something that scores (1.3 billion right now) but I think I have a decent understanding of most things in the stage right now. My biggest issue so far is that, at the end of the day, I don't understand everything and that is quite horrible (well that, and I'm bad at dodging). For starters, I don't understand the very first border of the stage; or rather how to bomb properly to get it consistently. Too early and you don't get the border, too late and you kill fur balls whose bullets you're supposed to graze. Furthermore, I don't know how precise the positioning is for the bomb. Because of not knowing how it works, I can't tell what I am doing wrong when I don't get it. Of course, as it is the very first thing in the stage, it's not problematic to reset over it a few times but it is quite annoying when I get stuck for a long time because of something like that. Other than that, the grazing during the border is incredibly precise if you want to graze every bullet; moreover there doesn't really seem to be any cues for when to move so I end up moving more often than necessary, losing me more graze even if all of my taps were to be very small. It is likely something I just have to get a feel for through muscle memory.
One thing I am glad about is that managed to figure out the section after that. When I started, I thought it was an autistic mess and it drove me nuts, but it turns out it's not that bad. Of course, it's possible to go the extra mile and graze here and there, get extra cherry+ for a better border than what everyone else does but that is probably not something I need to care about just yet, even if inevitably I'll try to do it the way Yu-suke does way too soon.
When it comes to the mid boss, I'm being pretty scrubby to be honest. Missing graze on every attack with bad borders. For the non spell, it's mostly because I try to not do something too risky. I am not at the point where I need to risk my life for extra 30 graze during a border yet. Of course, over the course of the whole attack it is far more than that but outside of borders, each graze is only 2,000 score (actually 3,000 until 10,000 graze total but endgame bonus caps at that number and I reach that much either way). On the second spell though, the reason why I lose graze is because it's an incredibly difficult spell. Yu-suke gets 800, which is what I take as a benchmark to see how well I did and most of my attempts just end in dying. The best I have done was 650 once or twice. This is no doubt one of the spells that I have to practice the very most. Super precise unfocused bullet/laser hugging isn't one of the things I do very often, after all.
The second half of the stage portion is where I lose most of the cherry max. For now, that is acceptable, albeit not pleasant. The timings for the border breaks seem to be hanging in the air but maybe I just haven't found any useful cues yet. I haven't seen anyone screw them up the way I do so I suppose there must be something people look at when they break their borders. I lose like 30,000 cherry max when I do all this well, which isn't very good. I hope to improve this soon. Other than the borders, I also miss some graze outside of them, but again, it is only 2000 per graze so for now I can bear that loss.
Yukari herself Is mostly very easy or very hard for me. Only a few attacks have moderate difficulty (penultimate or the first survival for example). The ones that are consistently very difficult are the Ran spell (8th) and the final but I have personal issues with the laser spell (3rd) and DBDB (7th) because I can't dodge. Of course, when I say easy, I mean right now, scrubbing it out more or less. Doing any of the grazing spells well is likely going to be at least somewhat tough. Examples of this are the swastika spell (6th) and also the multi laser thing (5th) most likely. But overall, I believe I have a better understanding of the boss fight than the stage portion. I don't want to go through each and every pattern because some are self explanatory, and I don't think anyone who has managed to read this far wants to know about how to stream the non spells and that kind of stuff (once I have a good run I can do that and give numbers and everything but not now). But there are some attacks I want to talk about and some things I have noticed like comparing replays and doing bad math.
The graze you get on the laser spell is random nonsense. It can be as low as 900 but it can also go as high as 1200. That is regardless of your ability to sit close to a laser but rather RNG depending on how the lasers spawn around you. You can be lucky and get 4 lasers spawn on top of each other or you can have horrible luck and only get 1. This is pretty stupid and Yu-suke gets quite good RNG overall (1,100 graze). The average seems to be somewhere between 1,000 and 1,100, by the way. A funny coincidence is that if you were to misdirect the pattern for the whole timer as you do in the beginning, it would be about the same as getting slightly better than average RNG, meaning you get about 1,100 graze (obviously impossible since the waves speed up).
Another thing I want to talk about is about the Swastika spell, in relation to the 6th and 7th non spells. In the world record for ReimuB, Yu-suke gets a border on the 6th non spell, three borders on the spell and no border on the 7th non spell. That's bad! You're supposed to get a border on the 7th non spell as well. At first I was quite confused why he chose not to get the border. And foolish as I was, I assumed it was on purpose originally. Ultimately, the reason for it is because of a bad cancel on the 6th non spell. The more centered on the screen Yukari is, the better the cancel will be. By timing out the non spell for graze like Yu-suke did, he had no choice but to go for a bad cancel, changing the pattern on the swastika spell. In his current PB, he gets the borders on the first red (and then another red and the third one is blue) but getting the border on red means the third border will not have run out by the time the last blue wave finishes because the start of the last blue is when you get it. The correct pattern is to get the first border when the spell starts - on the first blue wave, and then the other two borders are on red, meaning the correct pattern for the borders is blue-red-red and not red-red-blue. As he result of getting the wrong pattern, Yu-suke starts the 7th non spell with 20,000 cherry+ and not 35,000 to 40,000 or so. If you are Yu-suke, missing a border at this point in the run is over ten million from just that - not to mention the score you lose from missing the extra cherry max. Getting this border is fairly simple to do by being safe and give up some graze to ensure a good cancel on the 6th non spell. This is important to note even if I don't want to beat Yu-suke because it's more or less free extra score.
On an unrelated note, DBDB is horrible for me because I can't dodge. I have to improve on that. It's pretty free if I wasn't so bad at that.
I mentioned earlier that the Ran spell is one of the consistently difficult attacks (unlike the laser spell or DBDB, which can go from easy to super hard). There are a few reasons for that: First of all, not dying is hard. The best way to do this spell is to move from one corner to the other back and forth while shooting Ran for cherry+ and grazing her laser for, well, graze. The way this works is that Ran has her own hit box and and by shooting her, you can get an extra border during the spell. Now, the ideal is that you get a border at the very beginning of the spell, one border in the middle and one border after the spell. however, getting all three borders is very tight with the cherry+. What I mean is, you can miss the last border easily. I'm sure everyone who has played this stage knows Ran aims herself at you. You are in the corner when she does this and while that you shoot her. If you move too far out of the way (i.e your tap is too large) you do not hit with all your shots, which gives less cherry. On the other hand, if you tap is too small, you just die by being rammed. If you miss the right tap two or three times, you are likely to miss the third border (Yu-suke misses the right tap twice and doesn't get it - again, over ten million lost from just the border itself). The other thing is the amount of graze. It can vary a lot and for now, I am not quite certain where the last 100 graze I miss come from. Presumably better laser grazing. I'll have to look into that. It's also important to note that PCB does not have the drumming sound yet so you have to pay attention to Yukari's health on your own. So to summarize: You have to pay attention to
1. your cherry+; making sure you don't make the tap out of the corner too large.
2. Yukari's health, as you do not want to kill her too early but she also needs low health at the end so you don't accidentally time out the spell.
3. Graze. The harder you go at it, the better for your score, obviously.
These three things are what you need to pay attention to while you're in perpetual (unfocused) motion. If you stop moving, you may not make it into the opposite corner in time, thus losing graze and cherry+. You have no time to think. Being slow with anything means you will miss something vital, most likely cherry+. I believe this spell is the hardest thing in the stage and may be even more difficult to do well than Honest Man's Death. Obviously, to me it is harder since I practiced one spell 3,500 times and the other one like 150 times but I'll see how the difficulty even out after a lot of practice.
The survival spell is weird. Not because the pattern is strange but because the way the lasers give graze seems to vary on something and I don't know what it is yet. Right now, I can get 1,600 graze fairly consistently on a capture (Yu-suke gets 1,670) so it's not like I'm doing horribly but something is missing in my approach and I'll have to see what it is. Once I find out how exactly the graze behaves in correlation to the lasers, I think I can match Yu-suke at least.
The last thing I want to talk about is how amazing the final spell is. It's definitely my favorite attack in this stage and it's just a lot of fun doing it. I think I like it as much as I liked Imperishable Shooting. But it is also very difficult and at the end of the stage. No doubt I'll lose some good runs to it but it's just the kind of attack that is super fun to try and optimize. Lots of motion using the whole screen. The best kind.
If you have managed to read all this, congratulations. I'm not sure I would have. w
