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.