Sonntag, 27. Dezember 2015

Adventures of the past, adventures of the present and adventures of the future

2015 is almost over and I haven't made an entry for nine months now. So let's write an entry about what happened this year, what happens now and what I want to happen next year:

First of all, 2015 was mostly uneventful as far as my Touhou career goes. Playing Imperishable Night extra carried over into the year and it wasn't until March that I got a score of 3 billion. My last blog entry is about that particular run. Afterwards I tried to relearn Imperishable Night normal but ended up dropping it quickly due to my desire to play extra more, after all. But just as I had made the decision to play extra again, my computer broke and I ended up not playing at all during the summer (somewhere from late June to the beginning of October). Ever since I started again, I played extra and improved my everything on it.

That brings us to the present: I am playing the extra stage as we speak trying to reach 3.1 billion. Of course, this strongly implies beating ASL but that is not the goal itself. My plan is to get a NMNB full milk with decent numbers across the board. That sort of thing should translate into a score of a high 3.12 billion and above. But here is where I say that I am not sure I can grind out the NMNB part. I'm pretty horrible at dodging and the last non spell is very close to the end of the run with me having done some difficult things at that point. The room for error increased a lot because I included milks I didn't do before (adding three minutes of dodging to a run that used to be 18 minutes long) so random deaths happen more often than they used to. There is also the fact that my capture rates on some of the spells are somewhat mediocre so getting them all right in the same run is going to require tons of resets or a lucky run. With all that in mind I can safely say that I assume that this is going to take longer than it did for me to initially reach 3 billion (going from 2.9 to 3 took me half a year).

Let's move on to the future. I already have some categories in mind that I want to play after I'm done with Imperishable Night extra. In fact, I have two categories I want to try and play after. The first one is Perfect Cherry Blossom phantasm with ReimuB. It looks pretty fun and it doesn't seem like it has a difficulty spike as large as Imperishable Night extra or Perfect Cherry Blossom extra have (Honest Man's Death/Imperishable Shooting for the former and Blue Oni Red Oni/Shikigami "Chen" for the latter are just completely retarded in terms of difficulty compared to the remaining stage if you want to do them well). Seeing how I have never looked into the category before, I don't know how far I want to take it. Certainly it's going to be quite difficult seeing how it's Perfect Cherry Blossom.

The other category I want to try out is Great Fairy Wars extra. This is something I have been wanting to do for a while but I've always just gone back to Imperishable Night extra instead of learning something new. Out of the three categories listed on this entry, this is most likely going to be the toughest for me. To begin with, I am not familiar with the typo of milking you do in that game. There is no graze milking and that's what I'm used to so this new type of milking (which is just as active, if not more) will likely be difficult to get used to. Not least because I actually have to dodge for it. Most extras don't have a lot of difficult dodging. Outside of Great Fairy Wars, the most difficult dodging is probably either Flandre's Q.E.D or Mokou last non spell. Neither are attacks you milk in any way whereas against Marisa you have to dodge difficult patterns for a long time. Moreover, there is a lot of RNG in involved with the freezing mechanic which isn't something very common for graze patterns. Again: I am not familiar at all with this category so just like with phantasm, I am not sure how high I want my score to be.

Most likely I will play Perfect Cherry Blossom before Great Fairy Wars. This isn't set is stone just yet as there is likely going to be a lot of time before I can start something new but my preferences seem to make me want to play Perfect Cherry Blossom first. But for now, it's all about Imperishable Night extra.