Touhou Blogging Thread

[cactu]

Found a new trick on Stage 4 that gives 5M. Slightly hard, but can definitely be useful for recovering bad runs. I'm consistent on it since I have a visual que, but the first one is still more doable as you have time to set up.

[I have no name]

You could always try for improving your high scores. If you haven't scored before, it should be very different from what you're used to-- the distinctions between gameplay gimmicks and shot types are much more relevant, and a lot more of your actions matter than just whether you died/bombed/collected resources or not.

I have considered it but it doesn't really interest me, due to a few reasons, mainly that I don't want to end up on top of -another- slippery slope of "awesome, improvement!...but I'm not satisfied with it ".  Other reasons include:
1. milking.  PCB and GFW especially come to mind here.  I just don't want to be doing a lot of milking or stalling attacks, simple enough.
2. strict resource requirements.  Either EoSD where everything but 1 bomb is called for scoring purposes, UFO where EVERYTHING is called in addition to...
3. large penalties for small mistakes.  You lose hundreds of millions for small errors in UFO summons, no real room for error during those stages.  In addition to that, TD and MoF are both very punishing, for the loss of trance and crippling blow to faith.

That leaves...IN, StB, SA and DS as unmentioned games.  I don't have enough interest in StB, and SA benefits from milking as well (on any nonspell really, as far as I can tell).  DS seems a tad luck-based for any sort of "decent" score (or very precise timing), and for now anyway I still enjoy trying to be as consistent as possible on it.

I suppose I might try IN at some point since there are few milks (I can deal with a couple), loss of resources only translates to lost score at the games end (and reactive deathbombing makes avoiding loss easier) instead of crippling the run completely...though the last spell rush at the end is hugely important to score and comes right at the end.  From speedruns, I already know how frustrating it is to have something that crucial to the end result right at the end, and I can see losing potential PBs just to that becoming very annoying very quickly.

...in trying to explain why I really haven't gone into scoring I wrote a wall why does that happen whenever I try to write anything
if I have any misconceptions about these then tell me

[Sakurei]

Let me warn you:

If you think IN has very few milks, you're going to have a bad time. IN has a lot of milking on all difficulties if you plan to score well, especially with solo Youkai. A regular 1cc takes about 20 to 25 minutes, but when I play a credit, it around 40. Considering that I play solo Youmu, you can probably assume that every team has a similarly long playtime. Solo Youkai are even longer, afaik. And even if you chose to play either Reimu, Marisa or Sakuya, you'd still have to milk via shooting familiars instead of the boss, and stall for more familiars on some of them. Waiting for the best cancel and so on. The prolonging of the game starts with midboss Wriggle. There are only very few nonspells where you don't at least wait for the biggest cancel. Yes, you don't really stall spellcards unless you graze them, but even on those you do things to make them take longer. On some you wait for a better cancel (which is usually shortly after you could have finished the attack. Think midboss Marisa's 2nd spell) and on others you avoid shooting the boss and shoot familiars instead for maximum timegain. [Think Keine's 2nd spell (first spell on easy)]
And while it's true that dying doesn't cripple you run like it would in MoF, there's a still a much larger penalty than you seem to think. Not only do you lose you life (and excess bombs), you also lose time. You get a bonus for your time after every stage, so dying lowers that bonus. There's also the momentarily gain - especially in a stage potion. Like, if you died in the 2nd half of stage 4, you'd very likely be dropping some items and at that point in the game, point items are worth a lot. Of course, it varies with difficulty and shot, but for me, they should be around 1 million per item on normal (alas, they aren't because of mistakes). And there are a lot of items in that section. If you just dropped 10 of them, that would result in a loss of 10m points. Immediately. And then later the 25m I lost from the life. And the extra bombs. (Of course, if you died in that section, and that section alone, it's still possible to max out your resources)

IN is rather milk-heavy, is that I want to say. Even if it doesn't necessarily appear to be the case at first glance. I don't mean to stop you from trying it out. Do it, by all means, it's a great game. I just want to prevent you from going into it with false hopes. And yes, failing one of Kaguya's last words in bad and can easily result in not PB'ing when the run was otherwise fine. But that's why you practice them beforehand. But still: You can get a good score even if you fail one. As evidenced by the fact that the WR for Solo Youmu fails one on both normal and lunatic.

As for the "awsome, improvement! not satisfied" people: That isn't influenced by whether you score or not, but rather your attitude towards the games in general. That may be the case for denpa and me, but from what I have seen it isn't the case for Karisa for example. It differs from person to person. Also, there may be some people on this board that can give you more insight about IN than I can. I don't really know much about the game and my knowledge even for the shot I play is quite limited.

But still, if you do get into IN scoring, feel free to write me up a PM or something when you have questions. My knowledge is modest, but I can at least make an educated guess about why you have to do something.

[cactu]

EoSD scoring is fun and the resources aren't that strict unless you go for +600M. There's a replay by a Japanese player who gets 617M and he doesn't do a single wave of Meiling opener, he survival bombs 3 or 4 times during the game and he enters stage 6 with an extra life. Anything under 500M the resources become very lenient, since it's all about not fucking up badly (as in dying with bombs).

[I have no name]

As for the "awsome, improvement! not satisfied" people: That isn't influenced by whether you score or not, but rather your attitude towards the games in general.

I already know this is how my mindset towards pretty much anything quantifiable is, whether it's a game or not.  It might not be the best way to see the world, but it's just the way I do.

And while it's true that dying doesn't cripple you run like it would in MoF, there's a still a much larger penalty than you seem to think.

and that's all I would really want-to be able to keep going despite a mistake without going "oh, well there goes 25% of my score".  Naturally with regard to Kaguya's Last Spells...I'm not exactly consistent at pretty much any of them.  On any difficulty.  I believe I captured 1 in my 'best' pure lunatic survival run (2.2b, 4 deaths [2 Stage 2], 19 bombs), and I know I captured 4 in my LNF run.  Even on easy or normal I still routinely fail 1 or 2 (and the safespot on the 4th I've only ever gotten twice, ever, and failed to escape it both times...)

[cactu]

A bomb on a spellcard in EoSD makes you lose about 5M, which is 1% of 500M so that's nothing. A death with 3 bombs loses you 20M, and even that's not that big of a deal. I can get 650M even if I die twice with 3 bombs. My current PB is a gameover, so failing something at Remilia and gameovering isn't that big of a deal. If you gameover on Gensokyo you lose 20M+5M from the spellcard bonus.

I really don't see a problem with playing EoSD for score, at least from the things you said. Seems like it would be a fit. I also find it very rewarding to get a new highscore in this game.

Other reasons include:
1. milking.  PCB and GFW especially come to mind here.  I just don't want to be doing a lot of milking or stalling attacks, simple enough.

EoSD has short spellcard and nonspell timers, so there's not too much milking going on. And the gain from doing them isn't that big either so you can skip a lot of them if you want.

2. strict resource requirements.  Either EoSD where everything but 1 bomb is called for scoring purposes, UFO where EVERYTHING is called in addition to...

As I said there is no single way to play EoSD. You can choose the resource route you want to use by yourself. If you want to maximize score and get the WR then yeah you probably want to not use a single survival bomb but the game is quite lenient with the resources if you choose so.

3. large penalties for small mistakes.  You lose hundreds of millions for small errors in UFO summons, no real room for error during those stages.  In addition to that, TD and MoF are both very punishing, for the loss of trance and crippling blow to faith.

As I said, barely any penalty in small mistakes, really.

Sorry for repeating things I've already said... I'm lazy to do a proper post.

[chum]

If I recall correctly IHNN doesn't really care for EoSD.

It's true that there's little milking, and what little milking there is can be largely ignored at first due to the relative insignificance of doing them, but whether or not It's a very strict game surely has to come down to opinion.

I had the persistence to not give a shit when I fucked up stage 3 horribly in my Lunatic high score run, but at the same time, it did force me to play stages 4-6 almost as well as I possibly could to make up for that fact, resource-wise I was demanded to NMNB Patchy and NM1B Remi and that's with major losses on stage 5. Most people would've reset and that's that.

The game is strict and a pain in the ass and will not be most people's cup of tea at all. Did you mention to IHNN about all the pixel precise tricks? Those, coupled with the relentless RNG and big losses from misusing resources surely makes it a hard game to get into.

The problem with MoF scoring is that, unlike in a NB run, you absolutely cannot afford to die, but just like in a NB run, spellcards are ideally to be captured. Bombing a couple is fair game in a score run, but incredibly demotivational, surely you'd rather try to capture them, but dying means your run is suddenly shit, no matter how well you were previously playing.

Let's just face it, Touhou score running just isn't for everyone.

[Reiko]

Seeing that we're on this subject...
I'm thinking about giving score running a fair try, most probably in EoSD normal. Any general advice on how to actually get into this ?
I watched marus' 300M replay, but I'm having trouble sorting out the most important aspects (like which grazes are the most profitable). I tried to use some tricks, like bombing/suiciding to get into graze spots, but it ended being a waste of resources (i.e. I would have gained more points from keeping them for the ending bonus).
Not quite sure if you can just copy parts of a run and still expect a decent score ? Or is everything tied up to the resource route you're using ?

So yeah, any advice would be welcome ; I'm still not sure I'll really commit to this, but having general guidelines on how to proceed can't hurt.

[chum]

Resource usage doesn't amount to a big portion of your score in EoSD Normal. Using MATSU's record as an example, my guess is that around 50 million points in that run is from resource usage. The bombs are 100% worth using as long as they are worth more than a million each, but do make sure you also know how to use the lives for graze and power up cancels.

Grazing is the most important thing, without graze, bomb glitches are worthless. You'd do well to learn item collection and cancels too (in general, cancels are best when the boss is near the middle of the screen, but there may be more to the cancels depending on the attack)

If you have any questions about specific strategies (how they work, or whether or not they are worth doing depending on what you are aiming towards) I'll try to help.

[Zil]

you should all just be cool and play pofv

1. milking.  PCB

Eh. You shouldn't be doing much milking in this game. That is, in my opinion, part of the beauty of it. Grazing outside of cherry borders (and a few huge easy spells like Repository) isn't very useful, and certainly isn't something you should worry about while you still have other places to improve. And furthermore, the penalties for dying in this game tend to be very low. I'ts possible to die several times and still clear with a full life stock. If you want to get into PCB, the things you'd probably be doing are learning to PoC the items and unfocus a lot for more borders. Then try to plan some borders to sync up with some of the easier graze spots, like places where all you have to do is stand still or tap stream to get lots of graze. Harder supergrazes tend to require memorization of static patterns. I don't know if that's the kind of thing you like.

If you're very against memorization though, I'd recommend EoSD. Or DDC perhaps. As far as I can tell that game works a lot like EoSD. It's probably a bit less punishing for mistakes too.

[Karisa]

If you're very against memorization though, I'd recommend EoSD. Or DDC perhaps. As far as I can tell that game works a lot like EoSD. It's probably a bit less punishing for mistakes too.

I'm not sure DDC scoring is that much like EoSD, aside from that they both involve frequently bombing for canceled bullets. I'd compare it more to MoF, in that it involves stage portion item collection (sometimes using the PoC, sometimes bombing), bombing nonspells for PIV, and spell card bonuses.

It does have relatively little penalty for dying, though. Since you only need 3 life parts to gain a life, and the life parts drop as you score (unlike, say, UFO), dying isn't that harmful compared to a lot of Touhou games.
(On higher difficulties you'd need to not use every bomb you can if you feel like saving some lives in case of mistakes (same applies to EoSD/LLS/UFO on all difficulties), but the current WRs actually still do that to allow for failing spells on stage 3+. I don't really know, since I normally score Easy anyway.)

Not sure if you (IHNN) would consider bombing nonspells to be too much milking though, or if you even have any interest in DDC.

Anyway, I'd also like to say to try not to judge from the precision of the WRs-- I'd be pretty annoyed too if I tried to include every technique from the WRs right away when starting (though Sakurei seems to prefer doing that). Personally I prefer to just gradually build up scores, often finding a replay that's a little higher than my current best to use as a goal.

[Mero]

From what I've seen in PCB scoring, the penalty from dying comes mainly from messing the item spawns because of the power loss, like a fairy drops, say, 12 point items at full power, but you died just before that so now it drops 6 point items and 6 power items, which turn into cherry items when you get back to full and that desyncs your border route (or you just get less point items), but I could be wrong...

[chirpy13]

Seeing that we're on this subject...
I'm thinking about giving score running a fair try, most probably in EoSD normal. Any general advice on how to actually get into this ?
I watched marus' 300M replay, but I'm having trouble sorting out the most important aspects (like which grazes are the most profitable). I tried to use some tricks, like bombing/suiciding to get into graze spots, but it ended being a waste of resources (i.e. I would have gained more points from keeping them for the ending bonus).
Not quite sure if you can just copy parts of a run and still expect a decent score ? Or is everything tied up to the resource route you're using ?

So yeah, any advice would be welcome ; I'm still not sure I'll really commit to this, but having general guidelines on how to proceed can't hurt.

The best advice I can give you is to learn the system for whatever game you're trying to play.  If you don't understand the why, you'll have a hard time following the what.  Fortunately the wiki is really good about providing the intricate details, so refer to it often when you're calculating whether something is worth doing on your current route, or where to best spend your resources relative to your route.  And yeah, if you're really not getting something then ask Chum, he knows his shit when it comes to EoSD (and FW).

From what I've seen in PCB scoring, the penalty from dying comes mainly from messing the item spawns because of the power loss, like a fairy drops, say, 12 point items at full power, but you died just before that so now it drops 6 point items and 6 power items, which turn into cherry items when you get back to full and that desyncs your border route (or you just get less point items), but I could be wrong...

It penalizes you in a lot of ways.  The biggest is the cherry drop from dying, which cuts your item value by a ton and can fuck you up for a bunch of items (instant restart in some cases, eg. stage 4).  Then there's dropping items because you can't PoC without full power.  And then you have the Cherry+ getting messed up from the screen clear when you hit max power (easy enough to get back on track by controlling cherry gain after, but if you fuck up a major border because of it then gg).  And of course you lose anywhere from 10m-40m on your clear bonus if you don't get back to max lives depending on which difficulty you're playing.  If the death was on a spell then you can count out the spell bonus (which is absolutely awful if it happens on a milky spell like one of Yuyuko's) and the +100 value on cherry items for capping (which can affect some borders and Yuyuko stuff if you fuck up too much).  Unplanned deaths in PCB really suck :<.

[?q]

I just tried some boss practice for P.Trues Standard Unseen.  I bombed/died seven times on the bosses up to the end of Unseen 2 (which sounds worse than it is considering three of the attacks are basically never-cap).  I'm sure if I hadn't gotten pulled away before doing Shinki it would have been a bit worse (because CHEETO LASER SPELL CARD), but still, I'm more than positive a max-stock run is feasible and I'm psyched to start seriously going for it.

[LunarWingCloud]

I ended up playing Fantastic Danmaku Festival. It's good. Very good, actually. It's pretty hard, though, especially if I'm not using Reimu... but to be honest when I did use Reimu I made it all the way to Remilia's survival card on my first try. :V 1cc coming soon, maybe?

[kitslol]

Getting kind of frustrated at UFO LNB. This game feels like a brick wall. Nothing I've done so far since I started playing has felt like this to me.
I've easily put 3 times as many hours into this game than any other but I'm such an inconsistent piece of shit at everything past the first stage that I'm lucky to reach it to stage 5 in 3-4 hours of restarts. I made it to stage 6 one whole time in like 30 hours of attempts. Wow!
At least in EoSD it waits until stage 4 to kill me over and over. Dying on stage 2 and 3 is just demoralizing. It probably also feels worse because of the power loss from dying.
Seriously I'm just an idiot and my brain can't comprehend how to pick up tokens without getting myself killed. Random deaths everywhere.

Maybe I just need to grind more but honestly it doesn't even feel like I'm improving.
All I can do is just continue spamming credits day after day and hope I eventually win.

[Mino ☆]

Don't worry, it took me a whole month of nonstop playing to get my first UFO LNB. It's a tough game! But don't worry, you'll improve at it. Even if you don't see it right away~

I would recommend grinding the hell out of Drake's boss rush.

[kitslol]

Oh believe me, I have. I have at least a few hundred tries on shou and byakuren. I think my problem is that I grinded the later stages so much that I'm so out of practice for the early ones that I'm suffering for that right now. But eventually it will even out and something will happen. I just had to vent a little bit because no one likes restarting on the first 3 stages for what feels like an eternity.

[CyberAngel]

I played TD after a long time and found that I don't like it at all. There were a lot of things that annoyed me in it even before, but I would just chalk it up to me not being good enough. Now that I have experience and preferences, I just can't play something I don't enjoy. The things that ruin TD for me are chaotic bullet patterns in stages (which result in constant clipdeaths and being unable to gather all those spirits without unreasonable risks, way to waste your own gimmick, game), too many extra-durable fairies (which usually throw out those chaotic bullet patterns that always get in the way), bland spellcards (some are interesting, but many aren't fun to look at), Yoshika (because if a gimmick can go wrong, it WILL), annoying deathtrance (I can't practice survival properly because of it) and Youmu (I'm fine with limited-range attacks, but hers isn't a good way to do it). All these things make playing TD a chore, no matter how much I try. I also see that Touhou's style have indeed changed starting with TD. It's clearly seen when you have DDC to compare it to, the overall feel is different from older games. Maybe the way Touhou games changed isn't bad, since there are serious players enjoying them, but it certainly isn't the style for me. So it seems like I'm dropping this one as well.

[cactu]

Now that I got my goal of a clear with a good score, I'll have to start doing every single trick in the game pretty much. Probably won't even reach the later stages in a few weeks or even months, to be honest. :V

[Espadas]

 :toot: FINALLY GOT MY FIRST REAL ACCOMPLISHMENT!!  :toot:

Cleared the Extra Stage of EoSD with ReimuB!

And it was an awesome run too, since i captured for the first time "And Then Will There Be None?" and i actually survived (thanks to bombing) "Ripples of 495 Years" the first time i've ever faced it!   

God, this really feels good after all those tries..... Now to do it with Marisa and then i'll tackle an actual 1cc Lunatic (so far i've got 1cc only on Normal and i have skipped Hard completely)


EDIT: since i'm at it, what should i do about Maze of Love? I feel i do better staying under and micrododging than circling but up until now i captured that spell card exactly once.... any tip?

[Oh]

So it's possible to hit 999k with a few missed deathbombs. I failed this run (2.17 potential) to PWG, as expected.
I will probably retire after getting a run done, as there are other things I want to do.

[chirpy13]

EDIT: since i'm at it, what should i do about Maze of Love? I feel i do better staying under and micrododging than circling but up until now i captured that spell card exactly once.... any tip?

Either learn it or get better at micrododging.  You really only have two options.  The circling is easier once you know how it works, but whichever you prefer.

[SleepyYoukai]

So, I beat Nue in UFO and got my first 1cc Hard, which was in TD. Now I'm trying to beat Mamizou but some of her spell cards are just murder.

[cactu]

Came up with a new route for Stage 4 and improved my score to 129.9M. If I played better I could have gotten 133M or so, but I made several mistakes costing me about that much.

[Sakurei]

Okay. I think I have been playing IN normal enough to actually be able to talk about it a bit. Not much, just sharing my thoughts and experiences with the category. No need to read this, if you're not interested. Looking at it now, it's quite a wall. Whoops.

As some of you know and others may have guessed, I am using solo Youmu. Best shot of all time. But unfortunately (?) it also makes scoring significantly harder than if I was using a team. The reason for that should be obviously as I can't turn the familiars in stages and on bosses invincible. That coupled with her amazing option makes her a fantastic, but difficult shot. I haven't ever tried out the other solo humans so I can't give an objective view on things, but I believe that option of Youmu's leaves more room for optimization (which means it's harder) than Sakuya's simple spreadshot or Marisa's napalm would, thus making her more difficult to efficiently use than the other solo humans as well. Maybe. I think. Maybe not. As I said, I haven't tried any of the other shots. Someone more knowledgable about other shots could probably explain better why Youmu may or may not be more difficult.
Now, this doesn't have much to do with the mode in particular and me complaining about Youmu being too hard to use is silly considering it was my own choice to use her (alas, if the alternative was using ghost team to make things easier on myself, I'd rather not. I don't like Yuyuko). What I wanted to say by all this is that Youmu being fairly special in IN may have influenced my feelings about the category in one way or another.

I think it's rather useless to say something like "I started this category X months ago". What matters for progress is the gametime. This is a fairly accurate guess, considering I started this category pretty much when I had 100 hours of playtime on my current score.dat. It says 136:30 hours now. I like to think my progress within this category was quite fast, but considering that my PB is quite, uhhh...questionable, this is probably something that depends on one's point of view. But you know you're playing a category nobody cares for when you lolwatjusthappened run is third on royalflare. I still remember the amount of hours it took me to get 3b in easymode and 2.6b in extra as well as my score in SA normal, and if those are any indication, then I'm still quite a few ways off from getting anywhere. Which is funny, because that implies I got anywhere with those 3 categories, lol. At least the two IN scores I want to improve sometime in the future. But I digress. What I meant to say was that if I take those three categories as a comparison (admittedly, SA normal was significantly faster "done" than any IN category), then I'll have a lot of practice before I reach the territory of scores that I perceive to be decent/good. Now, that makes it sound like I was expecting some miracle to occur in which I WR in 20 hours, which obviously was not, and never would be, the case. Good scores take time. Something I know, but I am an impatient person nonetheless. I don't think it has any effect on my play, but sometimes there's this little qtpi devil sitting on my shoulder whispering into my ear asking why the fuck I'm so incompetent and keep failing the same things like the imbecile she thinks I am. of course looking back, I can laugh about all those failures in runs now. Anyway, but I'm trying to say here is that I will probably play IN normal for quite a long time longer than I did with any other category, bar maybe Chiyuri lunatic? I don't really know how much time I put into 110m. Probably not very much.
IN normal is probably the hardest category I've tried (since I wasn't trying to get 3.3b in easy mode w), but I enjoy it. Stage 1 becomes a pain when the infinite restarts happen, but generally speaking, I don't mind it. Wriggle is somewhat of a dull boss, but the stage potion has a lot of depth to it, which fascinates me. Sometimes fairies die before they spawn their familiars and sometimes they spawn them just in time and my timing is (I'm pretty sure, but it can't be true) always the same. And that's only stage 1! Stage 2 may actually be more difficult to get right.
I consider stage 2 to be the stage that has most mystery points. Sometimes when I have a better than average stage 2 I wonder were those extra timeorbs came from. Sometimes I know like I got good cancels on the random-spawn fairies or something, but at other times I stare at the screen and don't know what gave me those extra points. One thing I was considering learning were the super tough, but cool ~frame perfect~ cancels in the beginning of the stage (or middle?). But looking at it right now, there are other, more fundamental flaws in my play that I must fix first. And I think there are also other, easier (and maybe more valuable?) tricks I can't do (well) yet that I have to learn first. Fortunately, Mystia is a very easy to understand boss. She doesn't have any complicated grazing tricks to her and the milking is fairly simple as well, which is nice.
To me, stage 3 has almost always looked very straightforward (when I was starting out, I was like "how the fuck do I lose so much time, but eventually found out the reason). It doesn't look to me like it hides its potential points as well as stage 2 does. But that of course doesn't mean there aren't any improvement for me to be made. There certainly are and I also know where, I'll just have to learn them. Stage 3 does have its difficulties though. And by that I don't really mean the midboss supergraze - I learnt that quite quickly I think, alas I am less consistent on it than I probably should be. No, what I mean are Keine's nonspells. They're hard and I'm bad at dodging and you time them down for more familiars which translates into more time. That's scary. Bullets are scary
Currently, I think stage 4 is, on a more fundamental level, my worst stage. Even if I happen to...not die (which is maybe 1/3 of the time), I still lose a lot of points every time due to bad fairy hugging. Since I'm scared. Because there are bullets very close to me. I realize it's a terrible flaw. One that I definitely have to fix. Destroying half the familiars in the stage every time is a big loss that I don't like having. It's not so much the difficulty of getting some super precise canceltiming, but rather me not running into a bullet when there's more than one big fairy on the screen. I think it would be best if I somehow learnt the positioning and the sweep to the other side through some visual cue so I know how to do it with something more than just my rather dull intuition (which is incidentally how most of my learning is done. "oh, this 'feels' good). This may also be a mistake perhaps? I don't know. Having no visual or audio cues for pretty much anything in the game is possibly asking for trouble. Maybe. Marisa, again, is a very straightforward boss as well. I despise her last regular spellcard, but there are ways of dealing with it that I am willing to learn. I don't like the feeling of failing the same attack over and over again.
Stage 5 is difficult to me in the sense that I have problems making out where time differences happen. Usually I attribute it to the Tei cancel being good/bad, but that's obviously not everything. The spawm fairies (the ones with 4 familiars) are probably a more frequent reason for differences, since at times it just happens that they lose some of those flames, earning the player less time. Other then that, I believe the stage potion to be quite simple. The fairyhugs, or rather bunnyhugs at this point, are far easier than they are in stage 4, so that's quite a relieve. I probably still make mistakes during them - some that I don't even notice, but I'll pay attention to that  the next few times I play the stage to make sure to get things right. Small improvements add up, after all. Now, Reisen is simple overall, but there are things to keep in mind. For starters I have been wondering whether it would be worth it to finish the first nonspell at +30% and then graze the first rings in the following spell (note that you start the non at -50%, but switch over when her health is almost depleted). It might not be, but I want to do some testruns for that. Maybe it's a small improvement, maybe it's not. I'll see about that. I think the first spellcard is the first attack in the game you stall not for a bigger timecancel, but for a bigger bulletcancel. At this point in the game you (or I) should have enough graze to easily outweight the one or two million points lost from the spellcardvalue. I've talked about this in the stream I had earlier today. st grazes so well over the course of the game that he simply gains a lot more points than anyone else does simply because his bulletcancels are that much bigger. A lot of these grazes are very small and maybe even seem kinda silly, but they add up and make up some few tens of millions I believe. Of course I didn't crunch the numbers here, but that's something I don't ever do anyways. The remainder of Reisen's fight is fairly simple and easy to understand. Milk the last non, milk the last regular spellcard, kill the rest as quickly as you can (I suppose, maybe I am missing something after all?).
Stage 6 is painful for a few reasons. The bunny RNG is very tiresome to say the least. Of course, a good player will still be able to handle the situation without resorting to scrubstrats like me (which results in me losing tens of millions lol). I like it when they're all lined up :< As for Kaguya: I still sometimes wonder what ZUN was thinking. The first half of her fight is far harder than any normalmode boss should be. Youmu is very powerful, so she can kill the first nonspell without much trouble, but the other attacks are like "wat" to me. Sometimes I sit there and see a tiny wall of bullets coming towards me while my character is trapped between rainbowlasers. I cry every time. I like to think I've gotten somewhat better at Buddhist Diamond, but that may just be my imagination. The first couple things are random attacks and I wouldn't be surprised if I, at least occasionally, died to them in runs even after a lot of practice. But holy fuck, the salad nonspell is the worst. What is that shit, it makes me cry before I even start it. It's basically that one attack in the game where I hover over the bomb botton with my finger. A button I really don't want to use this late itnn the game. But a manual bomb just has that much less penalty that a deathbomb (or a death even) would have, so I'll forever be prepared to bomb that thing. And while the rest of her regular fight is quite simple (Eh, Hourai Jewel is a bully, but I haven't practiced it yet, which I assume would make my consistency go up), her last spells are peculiar. Sometimes I feel that the first one behaves different in full runs than it does in spell practice. This is probably just my imagination, but it has made me fail it more often than I'd like to admit. The second one is disgusting crisscross shit. Something I used to be able to deal with rather well, but I somehow lost that ability and it's now possibly the hardest of the last spells to capture for me. Maybe. I was wondering whether practicing the lunatic version would help me better, but I'm playing normalmode, so it might be best so stick with normalmode. Third last spell is ezpzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The fourth one is...well. How do I say this? It's much easier than it probably looks, basically. Once you got the hang of it I might add. It's one of the things I struggled a lot with when I was playing easy mode. I failed it a majority of the time, getting it right maybe once in 50 tries. But after getting it right a few times, I felt like my consistency on it increased by a lot. I'd guess that I'm getting out of the safespot about 70% of the time. Which is more than 2 out of 3. Wheeeee. watch me fail it on a 4b+ run, lol. The last attack of the game is quite nervewrecking with some decisions to be made. Do you go unfocused for more time and spellbonus? That makes it harder obviously, but it's a lot of points for something that may seem so trivial. It's the last attack of the game and each timeorb is worth over 8000 points. I think you got like 2000 if you capture it at -50%? I don't remember too well, or rather it's not something I paid much attention to. but that alone would make 16 million if my math doesn't fail me, which it probably does. The timer for Rising World is also particularly long which makes the spellcardvalue rise to over 45m that way. All those points...

So those are my rough impressions on the stages of the game and their bosses. As I said before Iwill very likely be sticking with this category for a while longer if only due to the fact that it will take me that long to reach a score I would be content with. But that is not a problem, since, as I said (again), I enjoy this category quite a bit. Even if my complaining sometimes doesn't make that impression w.
This was longer than I intended it to be; but I suppose this just makes sure nobody is going to read it, much less correct me on anything. Which is good. That way I can keep my credibility or something.

[Mino ☆]

My new job has taken some time away from my Touhou playing. Even tonight I'm way too exhausted to do anything.

Oh well. When the summer comes, my free time will appear again, then I can go for PCB LNNN and stuff like that.

--

Also. Changed my icon to a cute puppy. Everyone do that! Let's make it a new MoTK trend~! <3<3<3

[Jq1790]

After a while of nonplaying I decided to pick up Touhou again.  My current capabilities are baffling to me.  On one hand, I seem to have slightly better analytical ability, at least when playing PCB.  However, due to my hiatus, my overall skill level has fallen drastically.

I've been trying to focus on IN, working towards a FinalB Normal clear with Netherworld Team as well as Extra with the same, and I've done...poorly, we'll say.  I'm terrible at about half of Marisa's stuff, and most of Reisen's(Also Tewi's annoying even though I should be able to read those bullets easily since they're so slow), and don't get me started on Kaguya.  Have yet to see any Normal spell cards of hers past Dragon's Necklace, which while I have a general method worked out, still utterly annihilates me.

On the flip side, I switched to PCB a bit ago and while my ability in Stage 5 is crap right now, I've started being able to read Youmu's last spell more easily, which is something that'd always given me annoyances before.

Stage 6, meanwhile, was the MOST confusing to me.  All of the spells I'd normally cap really easily or at least with only slight trouble eluded me(Lost Soul's Village, Swallowtail Butterfly) and yet I capped Butterfly Dance(or whatever it was called.  Her second spell.) as well as Repository of Hirokawa with pretty much no problems at all.  The part that got me the MOST though was my cap of Sumizome Perfect Blossom, a spell I'd only gotten once before.

I think I'll be able to return to form eventually, but it'll be a rough road probably.

[Lepetit89]

[...]
So those are my rough impressions on the stages of the game and their bosses. As I said before Iwill very likely be sticking with this category for a while longer if only due to the fact that it will take me that long to reach a score I would be content with. But that is not a problem, since, as I said (again), I enjoy this category quite a bit. Even if my complaining sometimes doesn't make that impression w.
This was longer than I intended it to be; but I suppose this just makes sure nobody is going to read it, much less correct me on anything. Which is good. That way I can keep my credibility or something.

It was an interesting read, seeing how IN is probably the game I have spent the most time with myself (though not for scoring), so I liked going through this detailed summary of what you think about the individual stages. Out of curiosity, though, which one is the "salad nonspell"? I'm not particularly fond of both Kaguya's second and third one, though I can't remember if the third one is as bad on Normal as it is on the other difficulties.

Nonetheless, particularly in IN's case, I always thought that many of the patterns are more difficult on Normal than they are on Hard. The way I always saw it, there are two variations, Easy/Normal and Hard/Lunatic, where two successive difficulties contain the same pattern tuned differently, resulting in Normal and Lunatic being the hard versions and Easy and Hard the easier ones (which the different names kind of imply anyway). Particularly Kaguya's first Spellcard and Eirin's last regular one are great examples of this; Eirin's Spellcard, for example, is so infuriatingly slow, everything becomes so annoyingly cluttered - if I were given a choice, I'd take the Hard mode version over the Normal one.

[Mero]

My "goal" for the last month or so was DDC LNB, quotation marks because I didn't really had the intention of doing it, you could say I was practicing for it because I would usually go on practice mode to improve my general survival, but "I want to do DDC LNB" was never a thought (probably because I felt I wasn't ready to go for it). My actual goal was just NMNB stage 6, and maybe later try for LNB, and I was planning to work on it during the past two weeks, since I had a break from college, except I got both on the Monday of the first week. Because of that I did just whatever, to keep me entertained, and actually came up with something to do next, I just don't know what.

I kind of want to go back to SA scoring, but nothing too fancy (3.3-.5b maybe). I also want to do another LNB (you know, as an actual main goal), and I decided it's going to be MoF, haven't played it in a while, and it's a good game, I want to go back to it.

Still, there's plenty of time to decide, because whatever it is will have to wait until summer, my class schedule doesn't really allow me to grind for such goals.