Perfect Cherry Blossom (Touhou Project 7, 2003) (New Thread)

[Momijitsuki]

It's easy enough to assume nothing but clears from you, but still I can never be sure!

[Zetzumarshen]

Yes, I'm sorry about that. And some of my run is still not a clear yet.

[Momijitsuki]

Please clarify, then. The gensokyo links both said 'cleared'.

[Zetzumarshen]

It has. I already edited my last submission >_>

[Momijitsuki]

Then there's no problem here. Carry on

[Heartbeam]

Hard:
Heartbeam - 2,052,952,680 - C - 0.343% - Reimu B
Replay

So much potential left for the last spell. As for the other plan I don't know why I suicided so early at the end. Could have saved a bomb.

[moozooh]

Awesome new scores!

For future reference, you can fill the comments of your Royalflare submissions like this:

残6-3 桜1,143,900

Where 残 are remaining lives/bombs and 桜 is CherryMax.

[Heartbeam]

Haha, thanks. That was the first consideration for filling out the comment box but didn't do so out of apathy (no really?). So silly to leave it blank looking back on the entries.

[Momijitsuki]

Updated.

[Pulsewidth]

Edit: Forgot to mention it's Lunatic difficulty

Pulsewidth - 613374040 - C - 0.082% - Sakuya A

http://replays.gensokyo.org/download.php?id=959

Posting a very old run. I don't play Touhou anymore so I'm not likely to improve this.

[Momijitsuki]

Updated.

[Heartbeam]

Hard
Heartbeam - 2,180,502,180 - C - 0.354% - Sakuya B
Replay

Crashed hard on the penultimate spell and lost two lives, not to mention entering that spell with the 1400 extend already picked up. Even entering the final spell with 119 power I shouldn't have resorted to bombing, first because it doesn't help practice for future runs and second because I have no idea of the timing to bomb.

I'm glad I did one more because the 2.011B run right before left me feeling a little sick.

[Momijitsuki]

I think you're the only one here who could feel sick about a 2.011B score. :V

Updated.

[Heartbeam]

Extra
Heartbeam - 1,207,762,520 - C - 0.175% - Reimu B
Replay

Anticipated a larger improvement from this, but it just reaffirms that I need to be more aggressive with grazing. The stage portion doesn't get tiring, yet. About 80% of the time getting through without any 'outstanding' mistakes, though this one had three minor infractions aside from the aggressiveness problem. It's a fun trip the entire way.

[Momijitsuki]

Updated.

[Heartbeam]

Lunatic
Heartbeam – 2,336,526,310 – C - 0.382% - Reimu B
Replay

The cycle gets old at this point. "Oh, I'm sorry for quitting again! But then I picked it up a week and a half ago and had this revelation I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. I had fun practicing new things, refined one strategy and forgot how to do another then relearned it, etc."

[moozooh]

The dodging on Chalk-White Russian Dolls was incredible. And a single surplus border on Lyrica's regular would have boosted you way past SET's #3 score on Royalflare. Your potential astounds me!

[Momijitsuki]

Your potential just makes me jealous.

Updated.

[Zetzumarshen]

Lunatic - Reimu B
.ASP - 2,394,346,080 - C - 0.160% - Replay

[moozooh]

Holy crap dude, you're in top-10 highest scorers ever for this game. o_0

[Heartbeam]

Lunatic
Heartbeam - 2,499,502,900 - C - 0.412% - Reimu B
Replay

Too many what-ifs to make up for that 500K, but who cares! It'll be a thing of the past.

For fun:



I decided to keep track of my progress to see what goes on these days.

First row for the times. So nearly eight hours over a four day period which is more than the usual time spent playing. Then again, nothing too productive comes out of those relaxed days.

Individual stage scores. Main interest is between the first and second scores. The second one went poorly most of the way, and the only reason it finished was because I thought, "Sure, why not." By the end of the post-Lily White spam it was 50K CherryMax behind the first run, and the stage four scores are self-explanatory. At the end of the run I figured there was nothing to lose and went ahead with the 80% Reflowering POC method. Missed two entire waves and suffered in items and a border for that, but finished without dying and scored an 18M spell bonus. The third run was 7K CherryMax behind the first at that same point.

Lastly, final moments. The first run failed Flowery Soul by way of border breaking, but the fact that the second run lagged so far behind initially and finished with only seven lives is still surprising. Last run was the standard 'border break POC' for 80% Reflowering, but without expending any bombs to pick up the first border.

Also created a list make a tally of retries all over the game. Won't get into specifics, but out of the 79 I managed to write down 62 of them were on stage one alone. You'd think that with all the practice from restarting stage one would be simpler, unless the player doesn't understand the entirety of the situation and is pretty left to the mercy of the random factors.

[ncp]

jesus christ

also .ASP's score wasn't updated

[Momijitsuki]

Eh? I have nooooo idea what you're talking about.

Everything's updated, sorry about the delay.

[Zetzumarshen]

Trailing

Lunatic - Reimu B
.ASP - 2,419,906,130 - C - 0.253% - Replay

[Momijitsuki]

Updated again.

[Heartbeam]

Phantasm
Heartbeam - 1,411,603,200 - C - 0.107% - Reimu B
Replay

Really, really not happy with how the stage turned out. Like, I should have restarted not even a minute into it because I broke a border right there, and a few other things later on. But to this date it's the only scoring run to have captured BoLaD, subsequently leading to a perfect battle. Figures.

[Exarion]

exarion - 286312320 - C - 1.03% - Sakuya A

Much better than my previous score

[Heartbeam]

Easy
Heartbeam - 1,536,870,530 C - 0.317% - Reimu B
Replay

Normal
Heartbeam - 1,857,781,320 - C - 0.339% - Reimu B
Replay

HEY, WHAT IF--

A bit on the mediocre side. Some stuff I didn't expect to fail (Phantom Dinning, why!), and if everything put out a satisfactory result then it should have pushed 1.9B. And then it goes to all these annoying tricks I don't want to attempt. Easy suffers from the same problem.

Tonight's fascination and rambling is...stage practice! All those tangible counts are great. And you get to try your best and there's no pressure, and they look so spiffy on replays.

Anyway, stage practice scoring. I want to say that EoSD's stages being pretty much independent of one another is amazing. Just, great. You don't have to do any conversions because of variable item values or carrying over a UFO token or some value of Cherry+. You can replicate the scores right through stage practice. I wouldn't want that anywhere else, though. So PCB optimal stage scoring doesn't always convert well to a full run thanks to everything cherry related. Cherry+, cherry item value, CherryMax (okay, that's just aesthetics). Some of them I don't sit down for to figure out if it's worth it to die here, or let the border run its course. I'll just come back later and surprise myself with something better. Now the results so far under Reimu-B. I've forgotten how most of these went.

Now with links. For some of them. Like the cyan ones.

Easy


Stage Four
Pretty lost on how to do the stage portion for this. A random run, basically, bumping up the previous score of 332M or something. I know I could squeeze out a higher spell bonus from Phantom Dinning, and there's that up-close grazing method for Prism Concerto.

Stage Six
Flowery Soul can be better, Repository of Hirokawa can be better, I can do that stupid laser grazing for Lost Soul's Village, and this one had a death to Sumizome Perfect Blossom. Beginning sort of sucks because you're better off hitting the POC without bombs, so you're trying not to catch any of the items that fall below in the beginning, but it's easy to hit something when gunning for the POC at that point.

Normal


Stage Five
I remember being happy with this, so it probably won't move so easily. Actually, I put up a 169M perfect on the uploader and I can't find this one, so I'll have to revisit it and see what's up. Oh, right. I've yet to graze the midboss spell.

Stage Six
Again, same improvements that can be made to stage six Easy. Didn't die this time. I don't have a great plan established for the beginning so the score is pretty jumpy after the bomb depleting the CherryMax in the middle of collection. I want to think that Sakuya-B can do 420M, but the heavy cost of her bomb makes it iffy. But this other run laying around tells me there was a squandered 417M, and I know that's without the other improvements.

Hard


Stage One
Okay, I actually tried to score for this but I didn't try too hard. There's a bit to do.

Stage Five
I don't remember what I did for this, but I'll be visiting it soon without watching the old one. I don't think I tested out the bomb for some parts.

Stage Six
Oh yes, this one can hit 450M. Definitely. Only tried it once with the successful 50% POC method, and I definitely caught some items below the POC.

Lunatic


Stage Two
I think .ASP did 89M for this in a random attempt and brought up 90M+. Haven't reviewed the stage scoring recently.

Stage Three
This stage is so good. Main hurdle for the latest score produced was trying to supergraze Alice's second appearance (teal phase is hard to get the hang of). One of the runs succeeded (albeit haphazardly) with that section, and this is what came out. I can't believe how awful it is. It can at least go for 175M.

Stage Four
520M with some extra effort during Live Poltergeist. Border breaks come into question with this one. Pretty fun because you can spend those loads of bombs to take out everything. Sakuya-B could do some numbers for the CherryMax with her bomb in the beginning. I wonder what her score can go for.

After finding the run...it's bad all over. The beginning has seen better grazing. Now a question I have is downing Lily White fast enough to get one more set of bonus enemies. Up to this point it was treading carefully with the shot to not activate the border right after downing her, but I don't see why breaking it after the screen flood wouldn't properly set the next one. I think the route would be to set off a focused bomb or even the unfocused, then have a clear shot at her as she moves up with the red/blue spam. Or proceed as usual but with rapid focus.

Stage Five
Most recent stage scoring attempt. And I used to think 232M was as far as it could go...how times change. This one can push for 245M. I liked how the grazing count in the beginning turned out. It could obviously go further if I held off the shooting more, but I still like the current result.

Stage Six
Huge gap to fill. After seeing a run from .ASP this one can go for at least 520M. Who knows where Sakuya-B will end up.


Fuck why are some of these runs so cheaply done? Why was I ever happy with them?


184M for stage five Normal. So much for being difficult to move.

[moozooh]

Who knows where Sakuya-B will end up.

Most likely 555–560 million, possibly more. The best I've seen is 551M by AM, and that can still be improved by using bombs more efficiently in the beginning (procuring another border is not out of the question), as well as implementing HS参謀's newer grazing techniques for the spells.

[Heartbeam]

Normal
Heartbeam - 1,880,805,720 - C - 0.318% - Reimu B
Replay

All right, stopping here. Less troublesome and a fraction of the time to produce than the previous run because we have spirit now! I've developed some debilitating fear for the blue/purple waves of Resurrection Butterfly. Spell bonus is taking a hit.

234.5M for stage five Hard. Cool! I had a blast doing this one with the attractive graze sounds on the midboss spell, like the ching of a cash register. I don't remember the upper bullet bonuses for Delusion of Enlightenment, but it probably took a hit. Should have grazed one more wave and a partial of the one following that for the midboss spell, but I didn't for some reason. And it needs harder grazing throughout. 237M.