Which is the better Touhou shmup to play for score?

[Mischief Maker]

...Perfect Cherry Blossom or Imperishable Night?

[captpain]

Don't.

[gs68]

...Perfect Cherry Blossom or Imperishable Night?

You're a fucking idiot.

[njiska]

What a friendly bunch.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

...Perfect Cherry Blossom or Imperishable Night?

You're a fucking idiot.

Hehe I expected that response. If the OP would take some time to look at the other threads running atm he would see that now is not the time to be asking those sort of questions. It almost makes me think ur trolling

Im not too clued up on touhou but its worth checking out the touhou wika as itll tell u the best score of each game (plus possibly more)

Im sure a touhou player will tell me different but ild always thought with touhou been almost a boss rush theres not that much point in playing for score is there? (not that theres nothing stopping someone from doing so)

[Pulsewidth]

Both those Touhou games have scoring as complicated as anything by Cave, but they also have slow pacing and boring patterns. Try SA or UFO instead.

[Elixir]

For score, I think UFO has the most interesting scoring system available. For survival, MoF and SA are my favourites although they have really counter-intuitive scoring systems.

[CStarFlare]

IN is less frustrating, but PCB's system is deeper and its extra stage is better.

[lmagus]

wow, the hate in this forum really surprises me.

i understand people hate touhou because of the community, but the game itself is a decent shmup and if anyone's interested in playing it for score, even better.

people don't need to be aggressive just because they don't like X or Y game. you guys need to calm down.

it is just a game.

@ OP PCB has very good scoring mechanics, UFO is the hardest of them all and is good for scoring as well. I would recommend those two to you.

[Observer]

Touhou is taboo here. But, yeah, too much rage here (not just the thread, in general), you people need to go and sing the Death Smiles II hymn for the greater good. Happier spirits and up the irons!

Actually, if you wanna play something for score I would recommend Double Spoiler and Shoot the Bullet... There are several strategies on the cards to get a bunch of extra points.

On the "bigger" games, I think Embodiment of Scarlet Devil might do since it only involves grazing and picking point items at max value up there at the top of the screen. Or Mystic Square (with the PC-98 emu).

Mountain of Faith is like Mars Matrix (forgive me the VERY wild comparsion, people ) mostly because you have to chain items to keep your faith counter up. So you have to know when the enemies are coming to avoid fucking up your chain and losing a bunch of points. On the bright side, you can LOLbomb most patterns with your autumn "ring-o'-death" and don't even be punished since you get it all back during the stages.

SA is actually interesting as it forces you to graze in order to enable an auto-collect aura but be warned that ONE (1) death will screw you over big time (kinda like DoDonPachi) since it'll reset the point counter down there on the left.

UFO... I started playing it again not so long ago but I find it so damn cumbersome (and freaking blurry compared to the previous games, wtf). The strategies you can prepare to catch the damn ufos eclipse any sort of fun regarding the enemy attacks, which are all there to be cancelled quickly for tons of points more than anything else. And the wavey/snake-like lasers of Stage 5 are infuriating. I can't stand them. It's also a sign that ZUN is definitely running out of steam and you can't take it seriously anymore, not that the previous were any serious either but PCB/IN had a tiny 'serious business' aura and still look far better and clearer than the new ones. Or something like that.

[ncp]

You're a fucking idiot.

You're an angry nerd.



Mountain of Faith.

edit:

For survival, MoF and SA are my favourites although they have really counter-intuitive scoring systems.

How does MOF have a counter-intuitive scoring system? There are a few certain spots where bombing can increase your faith, but it's not necessary nor particularly important. SA I guess you could say is counter-intuitive in that you bomb for graze (and suicide on higher difficulties I think?), but I don't really see how that's counter-intuitive.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Touhou is taboo here. But, yeah, too much rage here (not just the thread, in general), you people need to go and sing the Death Smiles II hymn for the greater good. Happier spirits and up the irons!

its all my fault for starting that dumb fuckery thread, thought we could have a laugh but we all (me including) started raging at touhou tards (even if it is fun in a wicked way). I can sorta understand why the mods tend to lock any touhou / loli thread that pops up now and again.

[EPS21]

To answer OP's question: Depends on what you mean by "better." IN is quite complex, and boss fights are somewhat annoying to me since every other spellcard you basically have to alternate your shot types and stay in that type for the whole card duration. PCB on the other is straightforward, just straight up grazing and capturing spellcards with max bullets on screen, and the Cherry Bonus grazing thing is great, it lets you practice no focus grazing (worth more than focus grazing in that mode) with low risk of death since it acts as a shield as well.

If this is one of your first Touhou games to be played (which I'm guessing is true if you make a thread like this) Go with PCB and its graze-centric system, I've always felt ZUN's best games were just the ones that focused on pure grazing. SA is another great one in that regard.

The Touhou hate is quite amusing; you guys do realize this sites admin has built a very elaborate dedicated cab for IN right?

[Zetzumarshen]

I won't recommend UFO for scoring, because that means you'll have to learn that so many tight safespots, which isn't funny, for me at least. Pick a WR UFO replay at score.royalflare.net at any difficulty or any character and you'll see stage 3 boss has to be safespotted 4-5 times. And no extra life whatsoever if you're trying for the maxed score, because you have to convert any extra UFO into +1000 bonus point items, and 8x score at later part of the game. Forget to add the game need you to suicide to replenish your bomb stock, for scoring purpose again. On the bright side, if you're really that good on execution and not dying, you will have your score 4x higher than average person, implying your skill is that good.

SA is too much on restarting at stage 1 or 2, then bombing the rest.

EoSD requires suicides and finishing the game with no extra life or bomb, because grazing is so important in scoring, everyone is maxing the few second of invincibility from dying/bombing for graze point. Some people don't like it, but personally I like to balance survival and scoring.

IN and PCB both have a scoring system that involves boss milking, but not as hard as UFO. The difference is, with PCB, you'll find yourself less walking into an undodgeable wall. In IN, you have to make sure you've no-miss no-bomb entire game to maxed the score. PCB requires suicide to some extent for certain character for scoring, but different characters equals to different scoring strategy altogether.

MoF requires not dying and planning on stage route, and a good route usually relatively easy to execute. Relatively simple to score high in this game.

DS and StB are not my trades though, because I hate menus cutting in every time I failed. And I suck hard on them. Haven't tried Touhou PC-98 games for scoring to comment them.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

all this talk about scoring and touhou advanced play makes me want to play the games myself.

After ive finished with my current batch of shmups i really must play 2 or 3 of these. For touhou noobs who just wanna play for suvival im guessing that MOF is the best pick and STBullet is easier then its sequel DS?

Its a shame co-op shmups cant be played without lagg over the internet as i bet that VS shmup is allot of fun with someone to play against.

[ncp]

For touhou noobs who just wanna play for suvival im guessing that MOF is the best pick

MOF is the best pick for everything. UFO is also fun for survival but too frustrating for score. It would be 100000x better if the UFOs just instantly blew up when they timed out instead of having to destroy them. I really hate that aspect. You're balancing time against health and sometimes you go in to deal that bit of final damage to the UFO and it moves behind a fucking enemy blocking the shots and just flies off the screen. Damnit.

[Mischief Maker]

If this is one of your first Touhou games to be played (which I'm guessing is true if you make a thread like this)

The opposite, actually. Against conventional wisdom, it was my discovery of bullet hell games about 3 years ago that got me INTO shmups in a big way, whereas my previous experiences with R-Type and Gradius had left me cold toward shmups. Over this time I have gone nuts collecting freeware shmups and a few doujin imports and splashing out on an arcade stick. But while I have several dozen shmups at hand, I'm still not that good at them, better than I started, but not that great.

So I've decided to limit my shmup collection to three shmups for the near future and just focus on mastering these alone to up my skills. I have Blue Wish Resurrection plus, for the Cave-style shmup experience, Hellsinker, because it's freaking Hellsinker, and one Touhou shmup, since it was the PCB demo that got me into shmups in the first place.

My attitude toward the touhou shmups has been similar to my attitude toward Space Invaders Extreme 2. Yeah it's comparatively easy to survive, but that's missing the point.

I've been able to eliminate the other touhou shmups for various reasons, but I'm stuck on IN and PCB and I wanted some outside opinions on the scoring system to sway me. My own take is that IN looks better, and has a few boss patterns that really wow me, visually, but also has 2 bosses I hate (level 2 and 5). PCB doesn't have any bosses I hate, but none that wow me, however Phantasm mode looks like a better challenge than IN's extra mode.

I actually expected more like 7 angry knee-jerk response posts before the actual game analysis began. To everyone angry about the excessive praise Touhou gets, all I can say is hey, Freespace 2 was superior to the Wing Commander and X-Wing games in every way, but people will always say that Tie Fighter and Privateer were the best space sims of all time, God Hand was savaged by the gaming press while God of War and its QTE-happy copycats continue to speed the 3d brawler towards Dragon's Lair, Halo is the standard against which all FPSs will be judged for the forseable future, and Avatar's magical cat furries were the #1 draw in theaters last year.

[shadowbringer]

I think I don't have enough experience to play the Touhou games for score (decently), but (if my little experience counts), I've found myself restarting a lot on SA stage 1 (because I "need" to stay close to the fairies which shoot DNA-like streams and usually mess up in one of them), and am not good enough to properly bomb+graze Parsee's bullet ring pattern (this means, bombing and then entering her as she shoots. It's easy for me to graze so little, that I could consider my run ruined there.).

since both my grazing abilities and my memorization are bad, and there are no ways to learn the highscorers' game plan ( which doesn't involve only doing well on bosses, but doing things along the stages that I'd likely never figure on my own ) other than watching replays (I mean, the game plan in them might change, and it's quite strict), I have LLS and PoFV ( which I've replayed more ) as my favorites, because in LLS, you can bomb in order to double the value of collected point items, and in PoFV, you must have a good timing to keep your chain, but in exchange, it's very rewarding (for me) to see all these yellow scores over the screen (the color for the chained bullets/enemies change gradually from white to yellow, depending on the current chain value), and to use the stage fairies to cancel masses of bullets. (playing for survival involves resetting your chain in order to be able to re-summon bosses through chain score, while playing for score involves trying to keep your chain while occasionally surviving against the AI's summoned bosses or the occasional Lily fairy, which appears on both halves of the screen)

I found myself raging while trying to play DS for score (lots of deaths, and lots of restarts caused by sub-par photo shots).. and since I can't ignore score, until I'm satisfied enough in my runs (outside StB and DS) until I'm far enough in the game, so that dying later doesn't make me restart the game right away.. I haven't unlocked the game's other character yet.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I would say its not so much the games but the sort of fans touhou attracts and for all the wrong reasons, I think ppl get so mad with the touhou tards that a bit of the hate rubs off onto the games themselves.

As for youre idea about limiting yourself to a few shmups for a while is very commendable, infact its sorta what im doing atm with a handfull of mame games (god i love DDP but collecing those bees is the death of me lol). That way i can concentrate on 1CCing a shmup or 2 with allot of pratice. As unfortunatly im not as skilled as most shmuppers here who can 1CC many shmups very quickly without too much pratice of memorsation. I have to work for my 1CCs.

If your playing Blue Wish Ressurrection Plus i would also play the harder to 1CC BWR aswell, although plus is a better game for scoring. Also i would recomend Kamui if you want to spend abit of time playing for score it can be allot of fun. Also well worth spending an extended amount of time with is Cho Ren Sha, Zen-Ichi and Exceed 3rd Black Package (Exceed is a fun and quite easy game to play if you bother to memorise it properlly, Infact im gonna start a high score thread on this forum in the next few days)

[cj iwakura]

You'd think the biggest shmup forum on the net would be less juvenile.



PCB is much easier, IMO, but IN has more depth.

I also got into Touhou after the fact. My earliest shmup was MUSHA, and I still enjoy the series. People let a weird fanbase get them way too bent out of shape.

Enjoy the game for what it is. I happen to like bullet hells though(see signature), so to each their own.

[Van_Artic]

i'd say PCB and UFO

[nZero]

Imperishable Night has one of the more flexible scoring systems out of all of the Windows touhou games, it feels like. It's the only one that's really managed to grab me, anyway. PCB is more straightforward overall but it can be pretty strict about border timing.

You're a fucking idiot.

Lighten up, Francis.

You'd think the biggest shmup forum on the net would be less juvenile.

Yeah, you would think.

[A_Civilian]

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil feels more traditional (get items at top of screen, graze, spell card bonuses and the occasional "bomb here for lots of points") if you're into that.

Perfect Cherry Blossom's "Supernatural Border" system seems simple enough, but having to time when to activate it and milking as much as possible to make it activate more often while trying not to die on the other hand...(though I haven't played this one "professionally" enough to say anything about it...)

Imperishable Night seems more player-friendly regarding survival...but aside from the time bonus thing, I don't have a clue about serious scoring.

As for the older ones, I've only got Story of Eastern Wonderland (and Highly Responsive to Prayers, but that doesn't count) under my "sort of seriously played" list. For that one, the toughest part is probably the beginning where you need might need to balance point items with power items, but after reaching full power, collect lots of everything (except bullets).

I haven't played the other ones "professionally" enough to say anything about them.

[gs68]

You'd think the biggest shmup forum on the net would be less juvenile.

Pfft, the forum has nothing on Shmups IRC.

[Enhasa]

Lol, did any of you guys click on the link in gs68's sig? His most recent update is about his Imperishable Night progress. Clearly a Touhou hater.

Actually I only posted cuz of one thing. Since it says Ayanami, I thought you were Ayanami, but I guess maybe you're not? Please confirm so I can sleep easy at night. PS his avatar is way way better than yours

[gs68]

No I'm not.

[Jockel]

"Which is the better Touhou shmup to play for score?"
is like "Which is the better STD to catch?"

[cj iwakura]

Just out of morbid curiosity, what DOES this board have against Touhou?


Don't say it's the girl thing. Hell, look at Deathsmiles; and this board absolutely froths at the mouth over Cave.

[lmagus]

I'm guessing it's the fan base and their lack of knowledge/retarded comments over any shmups other than Touhou.

[cj iwakura]

That I can understand.

Still, taken on its own merits, the Touhou games are genuinely fun, and have some beautiful bullet patterns.

The graphics in the later games are pretty impressive, especially for what's essentially a fanmade game. (Music isn't half bad either, but that's subjective)