Touhou Thread 6 - Fear and Loathing in Lunar Voyages by Hunter S. Clownpiece

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Touhou Thread 6 - Fear and Loathing in Lunar Voyages by Hunter S. Clownpiece

Which religion is the best? This poll is closed.
Shintoism	59	9.58%
Buddhism	77	12.50%
Taoism	66	10.71%
FEAR CLOWNPIECE	414	67.21%
Total:	616 votes

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Tsym: Dec 30, 2012

Wow I didn't realize that this got a new thread. Thanks to BlitzBlast for reminding me :v:

.

But I'll get in on the IN action: Lunatic 1cc with Netherworld Team. This was the first time I played this game in over half a year, and I still managed to grab the 1cc after like 20 minutes of practice (and liberal use of bombs). Thank God this game gives you so many resources. But as for how well my run went... I think my clear stats screen tells the picture quite well:

I still hate this game for requiring so much memorization though.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 06:55

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 22:25

Tsym: Dec 30, 2012

Played the Touhou 14 demo, and I'm actually fairly impressed. ZUN's switching musical styles again, and although I think he's a bit hit or miss with it (come on ZUN the stage 2 boss track sounds rather repetitive), he gets quite a few good tracks in the first three stages. The stage 3 theme is great, and the title screen track is really great past the opening section.

Gameplay is looking really good right now too. On Lunatic (haven't played on lower difficulties), pretty much every enemy shoots out a flurry of death bullets that makes PoC'ing the items rather harrowing. I'm sure that solid routes through the stages will make things more manageable, but right now I think the difficulty is in a good place with regards to the resource system.

Even better is that the boss patterns are mostly all fun to play. Cirno actually manages to be pretty threatening, and I really like the pure dodging aspect of the stage 1 boss's spell cards. The stage 2 boss is a bit of a low point in design though. The strategy for most of her stuff is pretty similar since they all follow the same formula. Stage 3 boss is pretty fantastic. First of all, she's freaking hard. It could be me, but the fact that her bullets only split when they get right up in your face makes it rather tricky to read. All of her patterns are really well designed too, and I love her gimmick.

Plus I love the wacky nature of the shot types. ReimuA is so hilarious, especially the bomb. I laughed for a good while when I saw that. SakuyaB is the only one I'm a bit confused about. Is her focused shot really just pure forward damage? Because she's not doing a very good job of competing with Marisa's shot types if that's the case.

Leveling posted:

I just noticed there is a small effect on the stage 1 boss' tail so it looks like it is underwater.
And that this effect his dropped when she is using a spellcard.

The best part is that it is written in her profile than she is gaining power while she is underwater, but use her spellcard out of water. Zun logic.

Given her spell card names, it sounds like she's using her tail to splash water at you for her first card, and conjuring up large waves of water for her second. Of course, waves of water have their biggest impact on the surface of the sea, so it does make sense.

# ¿ May 26, 2013 18:55

Tsym: Dec 30, 2012

Maximum Chenergy posted:

I'm pretty sure the EX Stage in 11 doesn't even give you extra lives, only pieces for getting spellcard bonuses. Then again I don't even remember any of Koishi's spellcards aside from her last one so I'm not sure I'd say she's easier or harder than Flan.

SA Extra has 20 life pieces total, so you have a maximum of 6 lives. You probably aren't going to get 6 lives though since you'll be losing life pieces to deaths, so if you clear the stage with no extra lives, you'll have gotten 3 extra lives for a total of 5. One more than EoSD Extra.

The number of extra lives says nothing about how difficult an extra stage is though. Hell SA and UFO give you like 12 lives, but they're still drat hard. Like most other people, I think MoF Extra is probably the easiest just because of how trivial most of the stuff in that stage is. More than half of Suwako's attacks barely require any dodging, and the ones that you actually need to do stuff in can either be bombed through or is trivial enough that your chances of failure are rather slim.

Still though, EoSD Extra is reasonably difficult, mostly due to what a pain most of Flandre's attacks are. Probably only Mokou, Marisa, and Mamizou are on par/harder than her, so that puts Flan around the middle of the pack in terms of difficulty in my opinion.

Clarste posted:

The impression I get from his interviews is that he kind of makes stuff up as he goes along. Like, he writes the stage music for stage 1, programs a level for stage one, and then comes up with the boss after he's already got the stage done, rinse and repeat 7 times (including Extra). I mean, hopefully he has some vague idea of where he's going, but the precise details like whether or not Byakuren is an old man or a space invader aren't settled until he actually gets there.

So I doubt there's concept art of Old Man Myouren or anything like that. It was just an idea bubbling in the back of his mind before he got around to the part where he would use it.

With the more recent games, I think ZUN did have a pretty solid plan going into designing everything, although yeah a lot of it is definitely made up on the go as opposed to traditional game studios which concept out everything before production.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2013 07:57

Tsym: Dec 30, 2012

a cartoon duck posted:

Wait, is Flandre really considered in the middle in terms of difficulty? I mean, I guess ultimately there's a subjective element to difficulty, like, Mokou is one of my favorite extra bosses, so I play IN Extra a lot and can do it with relative ease nowadays whereas I just don't like EoSD Extra so I play it less and have less experience with it. It's pretty hard for me to relate to the idea that Mokou could even be considered harder than Flandre for that reason.

Anyway, while extra lives don't really say how objectively difficult extra stage bullet patterns are, they do have a bearing on how easy or hard it is to get through Extra. For example PCB Extra/Phantasm gives you roughly a million extra lives, bombs and cherry borders, rounded down, so that alone gives you a much larger margin of error when playing for pure survival. I usually barely scrape by on my successful runs of EoSD and SA Extra, so it stands to reason I would have an easier time if I had PCB Extra's resources, no?

Eh difficulty is most definitely subjective, though my standard of difficulty for Extra bosses is how many patterns I'm going to die on in any run through. For me at least, Mokou has a ton including Iwakasa, Fujiyama Volcano, Hourai Doll, Imperishable Shooting, Rings of Death and many of her other non-spells. With Flan the only patterns that I can think of that screws me over are Starbow Break, Catadioptric, ATTWBN, and QED. If you want to add in medium difficulty patterns, then it'd just be Woo + Phoenix Tail for Mokou, and for Flan I can see myself screwing up on one of Four of a Kind, Kagome, Kagome, and Maze of Love. In terms of difficulty curves though, Flan is probably harder to learn if only because of Maze of Love.

I think that putting aside PCB Extra (which does give you a ridiculous amount of resources when you add in cherry borders), extra resources don't have much bearing on how easy or difficult it is to get through a given extra stage. Since Extra bosses have bomb immunity for spell cards, you're going to have to learn how to do them either way, and extra lives don't really matter too much when you're going for the clear. You end up having to be proficient enough at roughly the same number of patterns in each extra stage in order to get the clear.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2013 06:57

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