So this is going to be a mild tangent here, what with all the Labyrinth 3 talk, but I recently finished routing a speedrun for this game up until the first 20F Murakumo fight, and figured you guys would enjoy hearing about it and watching videos of such a run. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, you start from a New Game and try to beat the game (or in this case, a specific goal) as fast as possible. Because the fun you get from this type of run is finishing the game fast, rather than having long and difficult boss battles, some very cheesy strats are employed, including:
- Wriggle PSN spam
- Kasen PAR/SHK spam
- Komachi/Yuyuko DTH w/Reisen's Intense Vertigo
- Diva Aya
- Yuuka+Satori spamming Beauty of Nature to increase TRR to absurd levels, then Parsee nukes with Jealously of the Kind and Lovely
The final boss is beaten at Reimu Lv55, so the cheesy strats are pretty much mandatory to ensure there's as little grinding as possible. We also skip many optional characters since they don't offer a significant advantage to any fights that would justify going out of our way to get them. Currently I skip: Kogasa, Kaguya, Mystia, Nazrin, Yuugi, Meiling, Alice, Patchouli, Eirin, Suika, Ran, Flandre, Byakuren, and Eiki. To make sure I stay somewhat decently levelled throughout the game I do small grinding sessions after exploring each floor to get some consecutive battles EXP and money bonus, and that seemed to work fine for most floors. I also get almost every treasure chest to acquire the 256 chests achievement, which gives you 50k money.
Right now the run is very unoptimized, there's unnecessary equipment going to a few characters, there are unnecessary treasure chests being collected, and overall menuing speed can be improved drastically. There's also the random AI factor in boss fights making me carefully think about what I'm supposed to do, rather than just adapt instantly to what happens. This will be developed with time, but what I have now works as a proof of concept. As far as RNG goes, there are some RNG heavy sections, particularly the bosses that require DTH to proc and the entirety of stratum 5's [optional] bosses. Yuuka, Yuyuko and Yukari are no joke.
I have 2 finished runs so far, and they've given me some feedback on what could be improved with my current strategies, so I'll rework some sections to try to save some time. Both runs are under 10 hours in real time, and are very close to a flat 9 hours in game time. The first run is a segmented run, I played 1 or 2 stratums each day and stitched together the segments' times to present it as a full run, clocking in at 9h55 real time and 9h16 game time. The second run is a single segment run, played through the entire thing in one sitting (and lost an entire day in my weekend :V), clocking in at 9h56 real time and 9h03 game time. There are videos for both of them below if you guys want to watch. The single segment run has my (somewhat poor attempt at) live commentary if you're (not) into that.
Segmented run:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3eHe2wxlYthwfDU034a04rrQhHcN_bQ5Single segment run:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/541762929?t=00h05m33s
