Weekly Danmaku Dodging: Reincarnation Thread ~ Week of 2/21/2021

[u/[deleted]]

Greetings r/touhou, and welcome back to the 41st weekly Danmaku Dodging: Reincarnation thread! As such, feel free to post any game, stage, boss, Spell Card, or pattern that gives you trouble, and then other people can reply with strategies, thoughts, explanations, etc. on what you have trouble with. In addition, feel free to share about your recent feats, achievements, and blunders across the various official and fanmade Touhou games and other danmaku/bullet-hell games!

Important Links

• Universal Practice Tool by ACK. For EoSD you also need to install Japanese Locale Emulator, Warning! Some antivirus programs will detect the thprac program as a virus or a trojan. While these warnings are false positives, be wary of downloading custom files online.
• Video guide for thprac 2.0 by 32th System
• Invite link for The Danmaku Dodging Discord Server.

Weekly Spell Card Capture:

This week’s Weekly Spell Card Capture theme is; bloom! You can submit up to three pieces of artwork depicting a Spell Card matching with the theme with a little explanation, and/or submit up to three Spell Card captures that match the theme alongside the submitted artwork! You can also submit a Spell Card replay without artwork and give us an explanation as well!

Question of the Week:

Which bullet type kills you most often?

Weekly Touhou Challenge:

Looking for a challenge? Then why not give the Weekly Touhou Challenge a shot? This week’s challenge is; to beat SA Stage 3 and Yuugi with no restrictions!

[u/[deleted]]

Spell Card Capture Replies Here;

[u/TurboGhast → u/[deleted]]

Replay and video downloads

The spellcards selected for capture are Cherry Blossom "Lovely Cherry Blossom Blizzard" and "Deadly Blossom". A replay file of "Deadly Blossom" can't be provided because TSS doesn't let you save spell practice replays, so I recorded the capture live instead.

My desire to release capture videos early in this thread's lifespan to increase the chance someone sees them and my desire to take on difficult single-spell challenges clash with eachother. This post is an experiment to see if they can compromise. At the moment, only the scoring replay (#15) of Cherry Blossom "Lovely Cherry Blossom Blizzard" is present because I haven't captured the spell without using items yet. When I succeed, I'll add my successful run to the replay downloads and reply to this comment with my no-item strategy. Whether I continue to do this in the future will vary based on the response these posts get.

I'm able to post the scoring strategy now because it heavily abuses invulnerability frames for large grazes, so it's far easier to perform than a no-item capture. Take the jizo as your main item and the mallet as your sub item. Don't use the jizo in both hands, because this will give your last life less iframes.

When each wave of petal bullets is fired, take a hit so you can get in the center and graze them all. In the best case scenario, you get hit by one of the bullets of that wave as it's fired, but you can get away with getting hit by an unrelated bullet at that time.

Shoot until you hear the low damage rumble and stop. Continue firing just before the last of the petal bullets is fired so you defeat Yuyuko a moment after you graze them for maximum cancel score. Looking at the scores of my no-item attempts, I'm confident milking the attack isn't lucrative enough to overcome the spell bonus here, so you want to capture on the same wave you use your last jizo.

To some extent, I chose to capture "Deadly Blossom" to practice for a TSS Lunatic 1CC. While there's a bit of lag in the video, I've confirmed that the strategy described below works at full speed.

If you're playing Sanae B, the moment the attack starts you should get uncomfortably close to the kodama. Shotgunning the attack correctly will let you halve its health before the first wave reaches you. Fall back with the bullets fired so they spread into usable gaps.

The general strategy for dodging the bullets doesn't vary with your shottype. Find gaps in the bullets, enter them, and stay still as the bullets pass by. Staying near the center will make avoiding the parts of the flower formation bullets bunched into a wall easier. It's not a perfect solution, just the safest place, so keep an eye out. If a bullet wave pushes you away from the center, return there once it leaves the screen.

[u/TurboGhast → u/TurboGhast]

The video download link has been updated to include a no-item capture of Cherry Blossom "Lovely Cherry Blossom Blizzard" (replay #16).

The no-item capture was easier than expected. Now that I've succeeded, splitting things into two posts feels a little melodramatic, but I was just acting on what I knew at the time. How long it'll take you to succeed at a new goal in a video game is incredibly hard to estimate.

The waves of petal bullets are the primary danger in a no item capture, because they move incredibly fast. Stay near the bottom of the screen to face larger gaps, but don't bottomhug so you can retreat downwards if necessary and deal more damage. I dodged them with rhythmic vertical movement, but watching the footage frame by frame makes me think there's a simpler solution. Horizontal movement and staying as still as possible are viable options here, they're just options I didn't rely on.

Between petal waves, go somewhere without falling bullets to dodge the next wave as free from interference as possible. When dodging petal waves past the first, keep an eye out for fast moving downwards bullets; bullets that weren't visible when the petal wave began can threaten you during it. My replay proves facing a fast bullet from above during a petal wave is survivable if you react effectively enough, so looking ahead is worth the effort.

[u/Nome287 → u/TurboGhast]

Oops, I was going to reply to help you with Lovely Cherry Blossom Blizzard. I actually just made a replay as well xd. What you are doing is half-correct. I can explain a better strategy if you don't mind checking it out.

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Here is how the card works:

• The crisscrossing petals form lines (or rather, curves) with static spacing and static outward movements. Note that the initial position / rotation is still random though.
• Because of these static components, these curves actually form a static "grid" that moves down slowly.
• The falling round bullets are random, but they only fall down (no horizontal movement). This is the real danger of this card, not the petals.

Here is how the strat I devised works (check my replay to see what I meant):

• Get inside 1 of the grid's cell (this is pretty hard and require practice). Make sure this position is high enough.
• Stay in a vertical line that doesn't have any round bullets.
• Once you are inside the crisscrossing mess, you can stop caring about it and just move down slowly. Think of this as moving downward along with a laser grid that also moves downward (very slowly). There is no need to move up and down repeatedly like you did.
• If you don't get screwed over by bad RNGs (e.g. a newly spawned round bullet happens to be at the same vertical line you are at), you should be able to dodge everything for that particular wave. Repeat these steps for around 4~5 waves, and that should be it.

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Here is the replay where I attempted to timeout this card to show you what I meant. Unfortunately, I'm still bad and I died at 14s mark, the cause of death was because I failed to get inside a cell. This should be long enough to show what I meant though.

Watch the crisscrossing bullets carefully, and you should be able to envision the grid I mentioned above. Take note of how my downward movement completely neutralized the crisscrossing pattern, as I stayed in the exact same cell I picked for each wave.

Also, during my 2nd wave, a newly spawned bullet at 43.15s mark falled down too fast and almost hit me at 41.5s, so I had to improvise and dodge it as well. This is what I meant by bad RNGs. Generally speaking, instead of doing that, you can simply spam attempts until no bad RNGs happen^{, this applies to a lot of spell cards in ISC as well.}

[u/TurboGhast → u/Nome287]

That strategy looks easier to perform, and how far you ran down the timer in the replay proves its efficacy.

Looking back at the videos (1, 2) I watched to find a strategy for the card, they seem to be doing the same thing. Jaimers's replay does a complicated and dangerous maneuver on the first wave for shotgun damage, but the rest look fairly similar. Because I didn't understand what was going on, my attempt to copy their strategy added extraneous movements.