Touhou

Wrong Sunday has turned out to be a huge Difficulty Spike. Eternity's "Crazy Butterfly" was be far the hardest spellcard I'd encountered yet. It took over 300 attempts. I had to start treating it like a main-series Touhou game with the camera acting as a bomb before I started to even have a chance of beating it. Right now I'm having trouble with Narumi's "Hope of Calamitous Fire". I feel like I got the basic idea down, but its easier said than done, with the rising fireballs seeming so random.

Update: I've now cleared all of Wrong Sunday. The breakthrough that got me past "hope of Calamitous Fire" was using the time between waves to charge my camera that way I didn't have to worry about dodging the bullets.

Edited by Lightblade on Sep 9th 2018 at 6:19:16 AM

And so, at 9pm on the 9-est of days, I played my first game of Touhou as Cirno (with a tan). The first death came from a bullet I didn't see, the next death was when I tried to slow-move between two bullets, and after that I started to believe I was getting the hang of it, but before I knew it the game came to a sudden end about the time I was thinking "Hey, I might beat this butterfly!"

So there's a lot of room for improvement, but now I can say I have moved out of the franchise's vast Periphery Demographic. (cuts out a 'True Fan' medal from a sheet of construction paper and pins it to chest)

Also, pictures:
(6)
It's not the power of the spellcard, it's how you activate it
Ice Block
Insert DBZ grunt-screaming
I think a group of Cirnos should be called a flurry
-ish

I'm now attempting Wrong Monday, and for some reason I can't move down and right while shooting while using the arrow keys to move. I wonder if there's any way to fix that?

I've had that problem on a lot of keyboards, usually laptops. Basically it's a hardware problem: the keyboard doesn't have the wiring to physically distinguish between the two states. You can solve it by either getting a better keyboard or by remapping the keys to a new combination that works. You'd need to use something like an autohotkey script for that though.

Edited by Clarste on Sep 10th 2018 at 5:20:02 AM

Interesting. I wonder why I never noticed that before.

Anyway, it seems my keyboard's numpad can also be used for movement (with 8, 2, 4, and 6 moving me up, down, left, and right, respectively) without causing that problem. Although I'm finding controlling Sumireko with the numpad awkward, especially with Clownpiece bombarding me with lasers.

EDIT: I think I'll try playing some main series Touhou games on Easy Mode for a while to get myself used to using the numpad for movement before I come back to Violet Detector. I just did a playthough of Double Dealing Character on Easy Mode with Reimu B, and I made it up to the Yatsuhashi.

EDIT #2: After doing a little more research into "ghosting" as the articles I read called this problem, I saw a few mentions about gaming keyboards that are designed to not have that issue. Then as I was getting ready for work this morning, I remembered I still had the keyboard from my old Alienware computer. I'm going to try that and see how it works.

EDIT #3: The Alienware keyboard was working a bit better. Clownpiece is still a serious pain in the ass, though. Her spellcards are interesting, I will say. I got past Hell Sign "Bursting Grudge" by essentially treating the camera charge function as a "super focus" to help me graze the lasers as I circled around Clownpiece taking photos. Hell Sign "Double Stripe" gave me some difficulty as I was often not fast enough on the trigger on the teleport to escape from the lasers. But then I realized that getting between the first gap gave me just enough time to follow it to the top before they reversed direction, so my successful run didn't even use teleportation. Moon Dream "Eclipse Nightmare" has me completely stumped. I can see that the moon blocks Clownpiece's shots and I can take shelter from the danmaku storm behind it, but surviving the time the moon is behind her until it comes around again has proven extremely difficult. It was rare that I survived even one full rotation. I gave up once I got the "Sleepwalking High School Girl" nickname.

I definitely felt like I was getting swallowed up in my efforts to beat that spellcard. I think I'll take that as a cue to call it a night.

Edited by Lightblade on Sep 11th 2018 at 9:50:59 AM

So, after the trouble I had with Wrong Monday's last dream, I decided to stop worrying about getting every dream of every day completed and just move on. Wrong Tuesday featured Sagume of all people. I wonder what (Dream) Sagume must be thinking, seeing the catalyst of her invasion plan again (assuming she slipped her the Occult Balls herself and didn't have a minion do so). I feel like there was a missed opportunity to have them actually speak to each other here. That would probably have been an interesting conversation. Then again, Sagume's not much of a conversationalist anyway thanks to her power. But would that limitation even apply to Dream Sagume? A Berusuke doujinshi I shared here earlier (here's another link to it)goes with the idea that it doesn't, and Sagume only uses the fan-joke workaround of Talking with Signs out of force of habit, but that's just a doujinshi.

As for Wrong Tuesday's gameplay, I completed the first two of her dreams; the non-spell (which I went back to later after getting the Pyrokinesis upgrade), and Orb Sign "Impregnable Fortress Yin-Yang Orbs". The photo range boost came in really handy for those.

Speaking of Pyrokinesis, Sumireko proved herself to be quite badass in the cutscene after the dream to unlock it! Unfortunately, that got me Pyrokinesis (i.e. a spread shot), but didn't count toward unlocking the next day, and I couldn't manage to beat any of Wrong Wednesday's other dreams. The one I came closest on was Dream 4 (Broadleaf Sign "Tanabata Star Dream"). My strategy there was to start by getting right in Mai's face so she was getting hit by my fire bullets as well as the normal ones, take my first picture when the stars got close to me, stay right in front of her shooting point-blank for as long as I could safely do so, then back off and treat it like a normal Touhou game from then on with my camera as a bomb. This got Mai down to 1/4 health at my best before I messed up and got pichuun'ed.

Question: is retrying effectively the same as dying in PCB?

@Hylarn: That track has a really Disgaea feel. It's an interesting take!

In the sense of hit ESC -> Retry. No. It just resets the whole run. (Though it WILL count as an attempt if you hit Retry during a spellcard.)

Good to know

Mexican Tewi and Reisen

Is Reisen tall or is Tewi just short?

Also, I think I'm legitimately starting to get better at PCB. On my last run I made it all the way to the Prismriver Sisters (!) without dying.

Both, usually

Tewi being short is canon. She's among the Legion of Short Stuffs which include the Fairy Nation, Marisa Kirisame, Suika Ibuki and a few more.

Reimu
Remilia
Flan
Moon rabbit traffic light

Reisen is also short, but not as short as Tewi.

New Lyrica Live:

Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly ~ Red and White

Huh. That wa an unexpected subject; I always have associated that song with reimu.

Meanwhile, I had found myself wondering what game this song came from when I first heard the remix that serves as Reimu's theme in Ao CF. Now I have the answer. The original has a very different mood to it. I like it.

Also, in Violet Detector, after taking a break from this game for a few days to focus on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, I've finally punched my ticket to Wrong Thursday. I got through via Mai's Broadleaf Sign "Tanabata Star Dream", using the strategy I described in my last post in this thread. Sumireko's thoughts on this one (and the Backup Dancers' spellcards in general) echoed my own.

Except the word in my head was a bit stronger.

Tojiko
Sekibanki
Seija
Ringo

A friendly PSA:

Mangadex recently had some domain shifts so old bookmarks are now out of date.

You can now find them at mangadex.org. For example:

Visionary Fairies In Shrine is here.

And...

Wild And Horned Hermit is here.

Remember to update your bookmarks!

Testing a bug.

Way ahead of you.

Double-post, I don't care. Is there a way to skip right to the boss/mid-boss in practice mode? One of the things that makes this game so tedious is having to go through the fairy rabble every time die you restart just to get to the part you're actually having trouble with.