I’ve been trying to capture all the Last Words in Imperishable Night since my last post, and I finally got them all (plus Imperishable Shooting, which isn’t a Last Word but is way harder than Mokou’s actual Last Word, and harder than most/all of the other Last Words). Somehow Wriggle ended up with one of the hardest LWs, and Eirin with one of the easiest. Not sure how that happened, especially since Eirin’s cards in the main game are so hard.
EX-Keine’s took me the longest by far (over 500 tries), but I think Yuyuko’s might be the hardest. Yukari’s also took a while to do even though it took under 100 tries because the spell is just so long and requires a lot of learning. If you already know the first half from PCB, pretty much every attempt takes a minute+ to get to the new part, which is really hard to read/understand if you don’t know the pattern.
I really enjoy super difficult challenges in general. It’s so gratifying to complete something that requires you doing something flawlessly.
I think I’ll have to get back into Super Meatboy some time because that was quite the challenge. It has a nice feature where when you complete a stage it shows you all your past lives going though the stage at once. It’s pretty neat seeing exactly what gave you the most trouble and how close you were to making a jump.
It’d be cool if Touhou had that feature for spell card challenges, but the problem is a lot of the bullet patterns aren’t fixed and are determined by the players position so things would be too cluttered to make anything out.
I could see someone making a mod for it and making some spell cards that had the bullets follow the same path.
That play history that keeps track of your deaths sounds interesting. It would be neat to see something like that for a danmaku game. Since the game records your keystrokes anyway for replays, I would think something like that would be possible if you had access to the right code. I wonder if it would be possible to code something like that into a Damnakufu script?
I like the spell practice/Shoot The Bullet system for tough spell cards, since you can usually retry the difficult part pretty much instantly when you fail. It’s a super difficult challenge, but you can get right to the challenge and not have to play through a full stage every time you fail to get back to it. Long endurance challenges can also be really gratifying, but I usually find them a lot more frustrating to play.
One of my favourite games–Fantasy Explorer Nitroid–is a really hard puzzle platformer set up kind of like that. Especially toward the end, it is about beating one challenge at a time to get from checkpoint to checkpoint. Some of the challenges are fairly long and can creep into endurance challenges, but it still feels like you only have to master one step at a time. Which is fortunate, because you have to get really precise on some of them.
If you like really hard stuff, you might want to check out their games. The circle is called Desunoya. They make Touhou fangames and some stuff with original characters. They tend to start of pretty mellow but get extremely difficult by the end and really push the limits of the game engines.
That looks really fun I can’t wait to give that a try. Still need to check out 13 and 14.
I think it’s cool that ZUN keeps things fresh and tries new mechanics while keeping the core of the series. I think the real trick is making the mechanic something that is really a part of the game rather than just some sort of a gimmick that’s added on but really could have been left out. From the game play it looks like the items or powers are completely necessary to the game.
I think that I may enjoy them more then standard bombs since some of them seem a lot less like tapping out and more like helping hand.
I’d be curious to see if true pacifistic runs might be more possible since I think some of the items don’t deal damage to the boss. But I’m not sure if you’d run out before the boss would die.
I do like the non-standard format the side-games take, where it gives some variety to the typical shooting gameplay from the main series. The only one I’ve actually played is Shoot the Bullet, but I like that one a lot, and the gimmicks for Great Fairy Wars and this new one look pretty neat in how they are designed around the unique mechanics.
I missed the Lily White picture last time I checked this thread, but I’ve also been welcoming spring by playing PCB (also, I confirmed that for now at least Lily White is easier for me on Lunatic than Momiji is on Normal). I realized I only had a handful of spells left to capture in the whole game (not counting Easy), so I went back and got those. The weirdest one was Yukari’s survival card. Somehow I went from being completely unable to do it to capturing it four times in a row as soon as I did get it (I kept replaying Phantasm since I still had to capture “Double Black Death Butterly”). I finally finished by getting “Resurrection Butterfly” on Lunatic today, which was a pretty climactic final spell to capture. Except I still hadn’t played the game on Easy yet, so then things turned completely anti-climactic as I went through and captured all those (and failed Resurrection Butterfly twice in a row on Easy after capturing it on Lunatic).
I also had a really good Phantasm clear while trying to capture “Double Black Death Butterly”:
If only I hadn’t been specifically trying to capture that spell, I think I could have no miss cleared it, since failing that spell was my only death and it’s not that hard to survive that spell by breaking a border halfway through. But I’m still pretty happy with that run.
Dang man I’d like to see the replay on that one if you can upload it somewhere.
Yeah I’d forgotten to re-host it when I’d first posted it, but caught my mistake a day or so after posting. I find it funny that Momiji is more difficult, I guess Lily White might be easier because her spell card is more of a solid pattern. (I assume at least. I’ve only really played her on Normal.) Momiji’s spell card is pretty cluttered and difficult to read for me at least.
I think my main problem with Momiji is that I just have trouble reading the crossing patterns she uses, and her pattern is dense and quick enough that I can’t really look ahead to read openings. Half of Lily White’s attack is aimed at you, so it’s not that hard to misdirect. The tough part is when she fires the swarm of circular red and blue bullets, which can be difficult because they are so dense, but they are slow and straightforward enough that I can sometimes get through it even on Lunatic, and even if I can’t, I can usually get through on one bomb. With Momiji, I usually just bomb her twice because I always get clipped by something if I try to dodge it. Plus MoF kind of discourages you from learning how to dodge anything difficult with it’s generous bombing system, so that might have something to do with it too.
You should post pictures if you do add wings to your Aya papercraft.
http://i.imgur.com/osLs9pN.jpg
Finished crafting her wings. I think that I may do some tweaking later on maybe rough the feathers up a bit so they’ll look more full and not quite so flat.
http://i.imgur.com/fb5Imln.jpg
I’m pretty happy with the way I have her suspended as well. She’s right next to my monitor, but she doesn’t take up any desk space. I definitely like to have as much open desk space as I can.
Captured all the spell cards in IN. Spell practice helps a lot, but I think the cards themselves are harder than in PCB, so I probably wouldn’t have done this at all without spell practice.
Yeah I feel like it’d be hard to practice some of those Lunatic cards, I’ve tried some and they took quite a few lives. Not to mention you can’t start them over when you die.
PCB was a lot more manageable for me on Lunatic compared to IN.
I was kind of disappointed that I didn’t capture Yukari’s first spell, and I could have maybe captured “Border of Life and Death”, but I didn’t want to chance it and used my last two bombs just to make sure I got through it. The other one I missed was “Double Black Death Butterfly”, which I didn’t even try to capture, but I still had to dodge some of it because I mistimed breaking the border that should have trivialized getting past it and panic-bombed instead. I might have actually captured that one if I’d tried, but it’s not worth risking it while going for a no-miss clear.
EDIT: I attached the replay file, but I’ll put a recording of it up on YouTube sometime in the near future.
Yeah I’d imagine that it gets pretty hard not to panic bomb as you get further into the stage, considering that if you die your run is somewhat ruined.
Touhou got some mainstream coverage from NHK World:
It starts off as a pretty comical but well-intentioned effort (I honestly don’t know how they could even possibly end up with some of the interpretations they got). It’s also apparent that either there were different research/writing/narration teams, or they recorded some stuff earlier and then got corrections later, because different segments have different ideas about what, for example, danmaku is.
Then they actually do a sit-down interview with ZUN in his studio, though, which is great. And even with some pretty egregious errors in the details, the coverage of the games is actually really good at showcasing them in a way that makes them appealing to someone new to the series (showing footage from easier stages/difficulties, highlighting the music, focusing on the games themselves and their overall beauty rather than just the fandom/fanon stuff).
They mention the games being localized for download sales, which I know ZUN has talked about as a possibility. I wonder if that is actually in the works for the official games, or if they are just talking about the fangames being made available on PlayStation.
That video was pretty great, I quite liked the quirky hosts.
Seeing ZUN and how he operates was definitely a treat. I’ve never really thought about how much tweaking the game would need to get the bullet patterns, music, and visuals so well synced. Also seeing that “Impossible Spell Card” game play makes me really want to give it a try, it looks like a lot of fun.
