Touhou Makukasai FDF II / Perfect Sakura Fantastica

[marus]

Thanks! And yeah I actually like the Extra stage more too - I think the patterns are more fun to graze, and the Yukari+Lovecraftian aesthetic is way cooler than just Suika throwing rocks at you. But like you said more people seem to be playing Phantasm mode, so I wanted to see what kind of scores I could get. And the mode has been growing on me the more I play it.

Is there any world in which 11b is possible with good RNG and execution, or is the goal closer to 10.6-10.7b?

With the knowledge we have today I think the theoretical max is somewhere around 10.8 billion. But also I have a strong feeling there's still a lot about the game we don't know; even though more people are playing the game lately, it still hasn't been pushed nearly as hard as the mainline Touhou games for example.

A TAS could get 11 billion for sure just by grazing better. A big potential loss of points is that today all the players (including myself) just survive the nonspells but don't do any special grazing routes. In particular, Suika's non1, non3, and non5 are basically just a mess of bullets that shoot out from the center of the screen. If someone did a really deep analysis of how the nonspells work though and figured out safe(ish) ways to graze them more aggressively, that'd let you build your cherry bar up more before starting each border, and potentially put you over 11 billion. That said that person won't be me lol.

[marus]

No new score updates from me, but I have two cool pieces of news.

First, DASI just got a new Dengenkei Extra mode world record! His final score was 9,609,226,930 (twitter). Arcade loses 420 million points compared to the PC version due to the lower end-of-game bonus, so this would have surpassed 10 billion on PC! That's a really big Reimu score, especially considering it was done at a game center where you can't grind for restarts easily.

Second, about a year ago I ran into a weird bug that caused some of Yukari's patterns to glitch out in weird ways. Most interesting was that during her non4, all the bullets hitboxes despawned but still let you graze them. This, while incredibly silly, would obviously be really useful for score if it could be done consistently. Well, LYX got in touch with the dev team and they figured out the cause. Apparently it can happen if you end your border at the same time that a spellcard starts. They said it's a 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 chance of occurring - I don't know if they were being literal, but at minimum I assume it's a frame-perfect bug. It's really interesting to finally know what causes it, but I don't have any intentions of trying to recreate it. Even if someone found a setup, it would transform the game into something akin to the DDP Glitcho bug, which I'm not really a fan of.

[marus]

Touhou Makukasai Fantastic Danmaku Festival II
Phantasm Mode - 10,407,832,960 - marus-MPO - Youmu - ALL - replay
Twitch

I got a small PB today. This actually would have been WR but I got the bad RNG on Suika's sp4 again, and failed to capture that spellcard. I could have bailed on the border and just focused on capturing the spellcard (which would have been enough for WR), but I really want a PB where I actually land that level 3 border lol.

The other really big mistake I made was I accidentally finished Suika's non3 way too early, which hurt my cherry going into the next border. That border is worth a ton - I lost probably around 80-100 million points there (which might also have been enough for the WR, although just barely).

I can see why LYX said he got tired of grinding the RNG for this game lol. I think it's pretty negligible for scores below 10 billion, but once you start pushing the game to it's limit you really need the RNG to cooperate. That said I'm really close to getting a really good score! I just need a run where everything actually comes together.