~Hakurei Shrine~ > Help Me, Eirin!
How to get to grips with Touhou - general hints, tips and advice!
ghost333:
Also a good tip is to dodge forward (or diagonally forward+left/right) and not to always wait for the bullets ,getting used to dodge in all directions is a must.
Another good tip that most new players don't know is that the bottom of the screen is not always the best place since it restricts your movements to only left-right ,upwards and their combinations , and at some attacks it is usually more tough to dodge becuase of the high density and the great number of bullets.
A small mention to deathbombing should be ok too.
Otherwise a great topic!
good job sapZ
Marisa Kirisame:
Heh. I'm i found out the hard way the EoSD wasn't exactly the best place to get my introduction ino Touhou games (although the username seems to evidence of the mark it left). I didn't even realize there WAS an actual hitbox until I played PCB and Imerpishable Night. I still have troubles with panic bombing though. Is there and good way to avoid that?
Sapz:
'Panic bombing' is usually a good thing - if you're panicking it usually means you've lost track of what's going on, which is the opportune time to bomb seeing as a bullet could hit you at any moment. Of course, as you practice, this will happen less and less often, but it's good to keep a bombing reflex like that handy.
Generalguy:
I'm the HRtP master here (because I said so :V) so I'll contribute a bit :
- You have three basic moves : amulet (Z), swing the gohei (X) and slide (X + move). Learn when to use them :
- The slide is by far the easiest way to control the orb, as it sends it at a specific angle no matter how close to the ground you hit it. It should be used about 90% of the time. Be careful not too slide too much though : sliding non-stop will make Reimu kick every second slide, catapulting the orb around the screen and often making it very hard to get back before it touches the ground. A kick can be useful but it's hard to hit with it on purpose when you need it.
- The gohei will usually send the orb at a steeper angle than a slide. This is useful for avoiding obstacles, or changing the orb's flight pattern when sliding can't hit any card anymore, and is useful for deflecting a thin wall of bullets (a thick wall will just kill you after your swings end). It's kinda random though, as sometimes the way the orb gets hit will send it much lower than expected, or even sometimes it'll launch it straight up.
- Amulets are used to deflect the orb when it's high on the screen, and are also the main defense against bosses. Only throw one at a time when trying to control the orb because if two hit the orb could bounce on the ceiling very fast and end up straight in your face. Hitting with one amulet sends the orb at a (probably?) fixed angle depending on the area hit so it's usually easy to predict. But it's sometimes hard to get it where you want, because shooting too early will make the orb go the wrong direction, or rarely it'll hit dead center and the orb will go straight up (often incredibly annoying). Against bosses, this can completely neutralise bullet spam attacks that don't angle much, notably YuugenMaagan's bullet spam with the star, where standing in the middle of the screen and pressing Z will make all bullets miss, though the orb can still hit you (swing the gohei when it gets close, then resume spamming amulets).
Some more advanced attacks exist (amulet fast-fire, spinning kick), but they're hard to pull off and thus very unreliable.
Now for some level strategy :
- The orb's normal speed (at launch, after a slide, and pretty much any time it hasn't been catapulted) is EXACTLY THE SAME as Reimu's running speed. Why is this important? Because it makes it extremely easy to follow the orb and make it not touching the ground. Stay under it at all times, slide when it gets close to the ground, repeat. You usually want to slide the orb forward (aka don't make it backtrack) so it doesn't cover the same area nonstop.
- Your first priority in a normal stage is to not let the orb touch the ground, unless you're on your last life. As you get an extra life every 400k, and a card can give up to 25k, that's an extra life per 16 cards turned over. Sliding the orb forward makes it easy to do keep a long chain. Point items and end of stage bonus are completely insignificant comparatively. Time maxes at 65530 (around 1300 left) and Continuous is based on max combo anyway.
- Any empty stage (no teleporters or blockers or any of that) can be cleared in about 10 seconds for a max combo. The way the orb is launched, a slide to the left will make it hit the wall and come back to almost the same spot you hit it. This makes it possible to slide into it, bomb immediately, and if done correctly (correct slide distance) the orb will come back to hit Reimu as she's bombing, bounce back to the left, and go down nearby, close enough for Reimu to catch it with a slide, keeping the chain alive the whole time. This is huge for scoring and thus for survival.
If that's kind of hard to understand here's a video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8HWTnPEDW4
I used that strategy in stages 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17. It works better in Makai because most of Jigoku's stages have obstacles. You can also see a bit of that "walk under the orb constantly" I talked about earlier.
It also showcases THE most important trick in HRtP :
- Suicide. :V As you get an extra bomb every death, suicide is very useful to boost score, and thus get extra lives to survive longer. Dying DOES NOT break a combo. This is why I think Lunatic is much easier than the other three difficulties (unless you go no-bomb or something) : you can die whenever you want to. By accumulating bombs by suiciding a few times in an easy to clear level, the next ones can be cleared very fast and give a lot of points to get extra lives for the next boss. This means an almost automatic max lives for every boss. Easy, Normal and Hard have to few good suicide opportunities (only boss attacks on Easy), forcing you to go the long way and risking a death to a orb hit or a Harry UP!, while getting a crappy score and few extra lives (especially because cards raise in value a lot slower on lower difficulties). Sure the bosses are harder on Lunatic, but as said before you'll probably have more lives. Also, they're not that much easier, as bosses tend to keep their hardest attack through all difficulties. YuugenMaagan still has his Red Arrows of Death on Easy. Same for Sariel's BS Laser Spam. So once you actually know what you're doing, Lunatic is the easiest difficulty. It's also a lot more fun :)
...I wrote that at 3 AM so I might not be expressing myself very clearly :ohdear:
If so, tell me and I'll try structuring it a bit better.
Zil:
I don't think you mentioned this, but it might be good to say how you can further slow your movement by moving diagonally into the bottom of the screen, if focused movement is still too fast. Essentially you just hold the down arrow, then move left and right as you normally would.