Touhou 15 - Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom - Perfect Stage 5 - Lunatic

Описание: LoLK stage 5 on lunatic, without dying or bombing, using Sanae.

A fairly difficult stage, one of the harder stage 5s in the series, but part of that difficulty is for a bad reason. Clownpiece is a mostly enjoyable fight, but the stage portion made this the most frustrating stage perfect I've ever done. With a homing shot, the stage portion is long and trivial, i.e. mind-numbingly boring, aside from a couple of chapters.

Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 7 consist entirely of weak fairies from both sides of the screen, which the homing shots almost trivialise. The occasional fairy slips through and can shoot, but that is rarely an issue. You're idle a lot of the time.

Chapter 3 is the same but with a few big laser fairies that make things slightly more interesting, but not by much.

Chapter 4 is brain dead tap streaming (or literally 2 taps as Sanae).

Chapter 6 is the hardest chapter in the stage portion, but in a somewhat unfair way. The gaps in the lasers are small and leave you with little room to dodge. Bad RNG on the stars can make this impossible; in one case I got walled by a whole 2 stars. They moved vertically and formed a horizontal line that trapped me between the lasers on the first fairy. Some stars also have stop-start movement where they change their angle and speed suddenly, which can happen around the height that the lasers spawn from. And obviously, a bullet suddenly changing paths slightly in front of you isn't particularly fair. Neither of these things cause problems in most runs though, generally I'll get some spooky but manageable dodging, like in this run.

Chapter 8 would probably be interesting as any other character, but as Sanae it's static and becomes this really simple and boring route.

Chapter 9 is streaming. There's a lot of random little stars around though, which make things fairly difficult. I got mediocre RNG here and had more stars than usual after doing the restream; it usually isn't this bad.

Overall, I'd say the only interesting chapters in this stage are 6 and 9. The rest are really dull. It's also one of the longest main game stage portions in the series. As a result, it was a slow and tedious grind to get runs to Clownpiece, and it was incredibly frustrating to die along the way.

In contrast, Clownpiece is a decent boss. Most of her difficulty lies in her first 2 nons, which involve dodging fairly fast stars in a narrow gap between lasers. They're a little annoying though, because they're affected by Clownpiece's height, especially the 2nd non. You get less time to react when she's low, but on the 2nd non the stars are faster (even less time to react) and the laser gap gets smaller since the lasers are angled. I got godly RNG on this run since Clownpiece stayed high for the entire non. The rest of the fight isn't too challenging, although the 2nd and 3rd spells can be problematic (the latter only because Sanae can't speedkill it; it's free for some other characters).

Most of the frustration with this stage came from the 4 minute grind just to get 1 attempt at those challenging nons. I had 3 perfect Clownpiece fights before I got this run. Skipping to Clownpiece was far more enjoyable since if I died, there was less time invested in the run and after restarting I'd immediately be on an interesting attack. And that's why I'd say part of the difficulty is for a bad reason. Having to do the stage portion each attempt adds a lot of time and essentially felt like padding.

Using a non-homing shot might've made things more interesting but it wouldn't make much difference in the first half of the stage. It would also make chapters 7 and 9 highly RNG dependent. It's basically just trading one problem for another.