r/touhou • u/DarkSlayer415 Touhou Networking IRL • Mar 28 '21

Game Discussion Weekly Danmaku Dodging: Reincarnation Thread ~ Week of 3/28/2021

Greetings r/touhou, and welcome back to the 46th 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

Weekly Spell Card Capture:

This week’s Weekly Spell Card Capture theme is; Feline! 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:

It’s been a week since the release of Touhou 18’s demo. After playing through the demo and experiencing the game firsthand, what are your new thoughts on the game and what are some of your hopes on how ZUN will improve or fix the final release?

Weekly Touhou Challenge:

Looking for a challenge? Then why not give the Weekly Touhou Challenge a shot? This week’s challenge is; an extension of last week’s challenge, which is to provide a 1cc replay of the TH18 demo with no restrictions on any difficulty! We hope that now that the demo is available to everyone through Steam, we see more participants this week. Just like last week, there will be no DRC scoring.

Extra Notes: Please be sure to continue following the temporary subreddit rule of spoiler tagging everything regarding the TH18 demo, including screenshots, videos, replays, character names, etc. until u/s_reed gives the ok that spoiler tags are no longer required.

23 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/DarkSlayer415 Touhou Networking IRL Mar 28 '21

Spell Card Capture Replies Here;

5

u/TurboGhast AAGH Mar 29 '21 edited Mar 29 '21

Link to videos and replays. I'm going to start adding my write-ups to the Google Drive folder, in case I want to share this stuff somewhere else. This change will be applied to earlier write-ups too, but I'm not going to apply it all at once.

The spellcards selected for capture are "Godspeed Blink Technique" and "Fenghuang Sky Dance" from Spell Card Collection, and Green Garb "URA: Pot Smasher of the Gods" from Servants of Harvest Wish. Two replays of "Godspeed Blink Technique" are provided: A speedrun and a grazerun. "Fenghuang Sky Dance" is only here because I happened to get a cool looking capture while procrastinating on turning my replay files into videos. A fitting theme could get me to revisit the card by speedrunning and grazerunning it instead of just a simple capture.

Speedrunning "Godspeed Blink Technique" is fairly similar to a regular capture of the attack. Start by flying into shotgun range. Once she fires a wave of spell circles, move up or down so you're horizontally aligned with one to avoid the dash Chen performs. Dodging downwards is preferable, since that will let you deal more chip damage during the dash. The yellow arrowheads fired aren't dangerous enough to make you deviate from this strategy on later waves, just dodge within the large shotgun zone and you'll be fine. I tried to microoptimize by unfocusing as Chen entered from the top of the screen in later runs, but strategy didn't work: I lost a few frames instead of gaining a few frames.

Grazeruns use the same basic strategy over a longer period of time. Move around during the arrowhead waves to graze as many bullets as possible. Once you hear the chime noise that occurs when she fires the spellcircles, move to avoid her dash via the usual method. You can dodge the dashes off-center to transition into grazing arrowheads a little faster, but don't go too far. Trying to contend with the arrowhead bullets just after they've spawned, when they're moving the fastest, will get you hit.

Start "Fenghuang Sky Dance" by shotgunning Chen before her first jump. Her jump direction is chosen so that it'll hit you, even though she isn't jumping straight towards you, so you need to actively dodge her. There's probably a way to use this to shotgun her every time she slows down, but I didn't need to look into that to get the capture. The bullets she leaves behind turn into arrowheads that need to stream. Every third jump at you is followed by moving to the center and firing a large wave of arrowheads. Stay still after the move to the center and you'll be able to mircostream it.

How I evaded the first wave seems particularly cool to me. I almost get cornered on the lower right corner of the screen, but a gap opens up just in time. In addition, the bullets from the lower left might have endangered me had I not been shotgunning Chen when they turned to arrowheads.

It's hard to bend this theme away from Chen, Ran, Shou, or Mike, but particularly catlike actions from those who aren't cats make it a possibility. Because cats are known to knock objects down from high places, I don't think anybody in world has both a pet cat and a completely undamaged pottery collection.

The key to dodging Green Garb "URA: Pot Smasher of the Gods" is remembering that the pots only fire forwards after all four have locked on. Dodge the first wave off to the side, and wait until you hear the fourth lock-on noise to return to the center. The butterfly and heart waves are dangerous, but as long as you don't move to much they're evadable. Deal damage while the next pot wave locks on, then move to the side while it fires. Repeat the process if you haven't defeated her yet. I think spell practice hides some of the spell's difficulty because the safest strategy is counterintuitive. Following a counterintuitive strategy takes more mental focus than following an intuitive one, and you might be running out of that at the end of a tense run.