How long has it been? Hours? Days? Weeks? I can't tell... there's nothing but darkness all around me... Darkness... constant rain... thunder and lightning... and wild youkai called "puppets" attacking at every turn... From the way she talked, I always thought Gensokyo would be an amazing place to see. If it existed at all. If this is Gensokyo... then I want out.
This
◊ is Viridian Forest.
This
is "Death Forest". Did I mention it was dark? As in, "Better get that useless HM Slave that knows Flash for this!" Except I don't have Flash. Or the badge to use it even if I did. Needless to say... THIS IS UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT! Why would ANYONE think a giant maze like THIS is FUN!? ESPECIALLY IN THE DARK! You could spend HOURS upon HOURS wandering aimlessly through this mess and never find your way out!
So naturally, I found a walkthrough on youtube.
Screw trying to find a way through it or trying to find all the items or trainers. I'm moving on to the next city...
Or rather, I would, but then this girl appeared and challenged me!
Wriggle's Puppets: Sunnymilk Lv.25 (Fire), Yuyuko Lv.26 (Grass/Ghost), Lunachild Lv.25 (Electric), Wriggle Lv.26 (Bug), Iku Lv.27 (Electric/Dragon)
Even though my levels haven't changed much, this battle was easy compared to my battle with Karen. Chen had most of them beat pretty much, with Mystia ironically being a near-perfect counter to Yuyuko to support her. Mystia, being Normal/Flying, resists Yuyuko's best attacks. The only thing she had that would be any trouble would be a rain-boosted Water Pulse. It still took me a few tries to beat Wriggle, mind you, but in the end Mystia was able to keep her team shut down with Sing while Chen splattered them all with mud.
Of course, if this were single battles, I probably would have won on the first try. Mystia could have solo'd Yuyuko, Chen could take on the fairies, and Iku had nothing that she could actually hurt Medicine with. On top of this, Wriggle had Hyper Potions instead of Full Restores. So status moves were more effective. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take too many screenshots of this battle until the end.
Incidentally, I don't think Wriggle's dialogue was changed at all from the bugcatcher she replaced.
I still can't believe I got out of that forest! It was pretty fightening when that insect youkai came at me from out of nowhere, but it turned out she was just another puppeteer. That's another thing that's bothering me, though. Was Gensokyo always full of these... puppets? Well, they're keeping me safe anyway. I guess I shouldn't complain. Anyway, I think I see a city up ahead...
With the stage 1 boss defeated, we can now move on to Heaven City! Though it's a bit worrying that we go to "Heaven" City after wandering through "Death" Forest. And before I forget, here's Death Forest's info:
Death Forest Puppets: cStar S, cLunachild, cSunnymilk, Lunachild (Electric)
, Sunnymilk (Fire)
, Star S (Water)
, cMystia, cWriggle (Bug)
, Mystia, cYukari (Psychic)
. Level range is 13 to 16. Decent place to grind up at least, particularly against the evolved fairy puppets. They're about 300 exp each with a "Demon Egg" equipped. cYukari is an incredibly good wall, but evolves late. Still, I'll probably end up using her. Also, cYukari knows Teleport, naturally, so she's a pain in the ass to catch and incredibly rare to boot. I'm sure you'll be in this bloody forest long enough to find one anyway. Wriggle isn't too bad either. She's also one of only two bug-type families in this game, the other being Yamame.
As for Heaven City, it's basically Pewter City but with the buildings more spread out. And a hill surrounding it for some reason.
Also, this guy
seems to be having some trouble with his Momiji.
Here's the local mart's selection.
You can't see it in that image, but this place has Super Potions. HORRAY! Now I can finally stop hoarding my Fresh Water! Also... Leaf Stone? Seems kinda out of place. Though I do have a puppet that will be able to use it. In fact, there's only one puppet you can encounter up until now that can use the Leaf Stone. In other words, it seems someone realized you might actually need a bit of firepower against this incredibly overpowered gym leader as you'll see shortly.
Speaking of which, here's the gym.
Yes, you read that right. Tenshi. All the gym leaders in this are actual touhou characters who took up puppeteering for... some reason. It's especially unusual for Tenshi regardless of how she's portrayed. As you can tell from the sign, though, we're diving deep into Memetic Mutation here. That's bad enough, in my opinion at least, but this is masochist Tenshi fighting using puppets. In other words, she isn't even participating directly in the fight to begin with.
Whatever. Tenshi is still the rock-type gym leader. My Medicine will mop the floor with her. Right, Medicine? ...Medi?
Actually, Medicine almost beat that Chen but then Tenshi used a Full Restore. I actually managed to take out two of Tenshi's puppets in that test battle. But let me show you what we're up against.
Tenshi's Puppets: Chen Lv.32 (Ground), Yuugi Lv.30 (Ground/Fighting), A-Letty Lv.32 (Ice/Steel), Genji Lv.31 (Rock/Flying), ExSuika Lv.33 (Rock/Fighting), LwTenshi Lv.35 (Ground/Rock)
Remember what I said about evolutions in this game? Yeah, that Last Word Tenshi has a base stat total of 660. That's almost an uber-grade legendary pokemon right there. Her only bad stat is special attack. This would likely be why Drakuaza felt the need to give us the Leaf Stone. Problem with that is that while ExShizuha can do very good damage to these puppets, her defenses are more than a little lacking. She won't be able to take a hit against the likes of ExSuika and LwTenshi.
All this means is more Forced Level-Grinding is in order. Most of Tenshi's puppets will be easy to deal with by the time I'm through which means that, aside from the challenge in facing LwTenshi, all this does is pad out the game length rather than adding any actual challenge. Hell, I haven't been grinding NEARLY as much as I could be! Before now the only real challenge this game has been giving me has been self-inflicted. That LwTenshi is the first legitimate challenge I'm facing here since I could only grind enough to match its capability at this point if I really WAS insane. That rival battle that gave me trouble earlier? Could have grinded up a few more levels, especially if I did so in Death Forest. Would have made things MUCH easier. Heck, coulda had an evolved Alice for the battle to brute force my way past Sanae.
But enough ranting, there's grinding to do. Rather than subject you to the hours upon hours of level grinding I went through, here's the team I'm using against Tenshi:
Yukari
: Flat-out wall with some decent offense. Slower than molasses on a frozen mountain. Or maybe she's just lazy. Only one I leveled to 30 as I wanted her to evolve. Like I said, she evolves pretty damn late. But totally worth it. She knows Trance, Reflect, Light Screen, and Psychic Pulse (read: Psybeam) Why is Yukari psychic now? Because she wears purple.
Medicine
: She makes a return as our Chen-killer. Maybe she doesn't like cats? Added Growth to her repetoire. Not that it does her any good against Tenshi's puppets. Now has Growth, Acid, Stun Spore, and Razor Leaf.
Ex-Star Sapphire
: Caught a cStar S on Route 2 and now here it is, ready to take on Tenshi. The mischevious fairies all evolve from normal to EX by happiness. This would be why all her moves have so much PP. My Nazrins get me lots of PP Ups. Or rather, SP Ups as they're known in this. Like all vitamins, they boost happiness a bit. So she got as many as I could give. Now you might be wondering, why is a fairy related to light and stars a water-type in Touhoumon? Note color, see Yukari above. Knows Pound, Encore, Growl, and Water Gun.
ExShizuha
: Another sudden EX newcomer, Shizuha evolves to EX form via a leaf stone which you can rather conveniently buy in Heaven City. Perhaps it has something to do with a certain weather incident ruining that year's harvest. Wait, wouldn't her sister make more sense then? Knows Leech Seed, Razor Leaf, Magical Leaf, and Stun Spore.
Chen
: Chen returns to throw more mud around. Knows Metal Claw now, as well as Mud Shot, Mud Sport, and Quick Attack. Figured her speed might come in handy.
Athena, aka Marisa
: Marisa... umm... might steal something nice? There's also that Genji. Too bad her only electric-type attack is Thundershock. Sigh. Other moves include Spore, which is basically Swagger for some reason, Swift, and Steal (read: Thief).
First we fight this guy.
He has a Chen, which Medicine one-shots with a "So SStylish!" and "Beautiful!" (seriously, what's up with those messages? What happened to "critical hit" and "super effective"?) Razor Leaf. His ExLetty, on the other hand, proves to be quite formiddable. Ex Star S manages to hold her own until Letty got a lucky "SStylish" Earthquake, but by then Shizuha was able to finish the job in one blow.
After a quick trip to the Eirin's Center, I try to take on Tenshi.
There's many things I could have done, in retrospect, to make this battle easier. Training a Sunnymilk would have been a big one. Will-o-Wisp would have been a great utility move to have, not to mention she could take out A-Letty quite nicely. Instead, I end up doing a LOT of flat-out walling and stalling with Yukari, who I end up relying on for 4/6 of Tenshi's puppets. I've got a feeling I'll be relying on Yukari a lot in general. Grinding a bit more definitely would have helped, too, I'd say. Lunachild probably would have been a better choice to raise than Marisa simply because I could have had Ex-Lunachild with at least Spark. Goddamn it, Marisa, learn a better electric attack already! Finally, a well-trained Mystia likely would have been a big help to out-maneuver LwTenshi.
Chen goes down easily enough to... oh, wait, she beat Medicine. Again. Goddamn criticals! ExShizuha has to finish this one and takes a hefty hit herself. Suddenly starting to hate Chen.
Next up is A-Letty and Yuugi. A-Letty is 0-threat to Yukari, though Yuugi is entirely unpredictable thanks to Magnitude. Thankfully, Yukari manages to outlast both of them. Then comes ExSuika. Now THAT one was a pain. Yukari has great defenses, base 110 each, but Suika's attack is so high that she just doesn't give a damn. Nor does she care much for my continued attempts to keep a Reflect up.
Genji I didn't necessarily have to wall, I was just taking the easy route here. Healed up my team with Oran Berries, kept Genji preoccupied with Pecha Berries, and then finished it with a combination of poison and leech seed. This didn't have to take nearly as long as it did as I could have sent Marisa in to hit it with Thundershock a bit, but oh well. Didn't even get to steal anything...
Finally, LwTenshi. Remember my earlier rant? Well, turns out that Tenshi gave this one something else to dial up her ridiculousness even further. Power Band, which is a renamed Choice Band. What does that do, you ask? It increases her physical attack power by 1.5x but locks her into a single move. Normally something like that would make an opponent ridiculously easy, and it IS what saves me here too since she lets herself get locked into her weakest attack, Slash. However, at this point in the game, you have all of one puppet that can truly take advantage of this: Mystia. If LwTenshi gets locked into Earthquake, Mystia is free to do what she wants with her. At least until she runs out of PP and KO's Mystia with Struggle at least, but if you have, of all things, Tickle, then you can use Mystia to drastically lower Tenshi's defense and attack and then move in for the kill.
As mentioned, though, I get lucky and she decides to knock Chen out with Slash. Brick Break would have been good, too. Star Sapphire manages to survive a Slash to weaken Tenshi with Growl. That was it for her, but at least ExShizuha was able to survive now to Leech Seed. I briefly debate whether or not I want to deprive Tenshi of her Power Band when Marisa hits the field and in the end make a move for it, but it turns out to be a moot point since LwTenshi was still faster. Yukari then just stalls her out and wins.
This fight was ridiculously long, but I'm still happy about finding a way to win without overlevelling my party. Even if the fight took, oh, over half an hour. Cut the video down to just about 7 minutes though...
This installment is getting pretty long, so I'm going to cut the game content here with having gotten Tenshi's badge and pick up next time after some more grinding and head for whatever Mt. Doomsday or whatever Drakuaza decided to call it. Before I do, though, I want to mention a few things in regards to how this game compares to the original Touhoumon Lunatic.
Somehow, the Japanese game is a LOT more fair while offering more of a genuine challenge and actually shows a lot of work went into it. I mean, the Japanese Touhoumon Lunatic Version has D/P's physical/special split. In a Fire Red ROM. Also, you can't use Revives in-battle and in some places you can't even save. The levels, while higher, are still MUCH lower than Touhoumon Insane. And here's the kicker: you're given a LOT more varieties of touhoumon to use earlier in the game, even many that can't evolve pre-national dex. Even in spite of that I would have LOVED to have had a cFlandre in these battles. One with Intimidate, specifically.
Basically what I'm saying is Touhoumon Lunatic offers a challenging gameplay experience which, while still a bit on the grindy side, is still fair and especially so in comparison with this game that was inspired by it. Well, maybe "inspired" is the wrong word. That forest I complained about earlier? The map was ripped right out of Touhoumon Lunatic, unchanged aside from the trainers, items, and wild puppets. I suppose that means the guy who made Lunatic is who I should throttle for that forest, but I'd still prefer Lunatic to this. Moonspeak and all.
Anyway, that's it for now. Later!
Heaven City. Seems like the first of those "gym leaders" is here. I decide to try challenging her. Tenshi. A masochist apparently, and she's kinda creepy about it. It was a tough battle, but my puppets pulled through in the end. A puppet named Yukari did all the work. Come to think of it, she looks kinda familiar...
