Shikigami no Shiro EX 式神の城EX - Sayo - ALL - 1.789.487.870

Описание: #shmup #STG #式神の城
Pheww, this has to be one the most tense first 1CCs I've ever had as a shmup player lol. But it was really fun, and clutch as hell. Also streamed live (   / m_knight_jul   with VOD here : https://www.twitch.tv/videos/99270747... ) so it was all the more exciting!

In Shikigami no Shiro 1 (which EX is one port of), the most lucrative scoring location is the 5-1 boss's second phase. Since the game's timer is global instead of per-stage or per-boss, you can accumulate a lot of seconds when going into it by speedrunning the waves and bosses before 5-1 so you can milk the laser-emitting crystals as long as possible.

I previously cleared the game with Kuga some years ago, but never really tried my hand at this milk, and only tried to score outside of it, using the tension multiplier and shikigami when killing enemies and bosses. But since several other players (AlvaLynsis, Ec2151, Mishi, Rezardi, maybe others I've forgotten) have taken a liking to this game and explored it more with different characters, I felt motivated to play this game again alongside them, but with Sayo.

Sayo is...not easy to use, but pretty fun. Her shikigami is a spinning bird, not unlike Batu's spinning spear in 3, but you have a slightly smaller range to compensate for the lack of charging requirement.

The early stages were a mixed bag with some decent boss kills and some scoring going on here and there, but I was getting starved for resources way earlier that planned, starting from 3-2, all the way to the 5-1 boss.

In order to score well with Sayo you have to put yourself very close to danger due to her shiki's limited range, and doing the milk with her is no walk in the park either. The first issue is that the vertical position of the crystals is random, so you can get harder configurations for no fault of your own. The other problem is that in order to properly destroy the crystals before they disappear, you have to cancel and resummon the shikigami, as to hit the crystals with the bird while it start expanding outwards. A fully deployed bird will not damage close crystals efficiently and also risks damaging the boss herself too much. The slowdown makes the timing for this maneuver harder to gauge.

My experience with the milk is rather limited and it really shows here : while it is not free, usually you can be more relaxed when finally getting to this point because the scoring opportunities will refill your lives and give you some sorely needed resources. However, I just kept dying and staying close to Game Over. Through the course of this milk, I managed to learn it a bit better and the later part was more consistent and efficient, to the point where I was back to 3 lives. That said, I completely fucked up the transition to 5-2, and lost 2 lives (putting me back to 1 again) while trying to finish off the boss.

That meant I had to do the rest of the game, with two very challenging fights back-to-back, with no life left, while hoping to get one extend if the next one isn't too far away.

5-2 boss is something I practiced before so I had some sort of strat going in, and enough bombs to bypass the hard patterns. It is a very difficult fight with Kuga but Sayo packs a lot more power and she is able to bypass several pattens and phases by simply damaging the boss fast enough. Besides, I even got an extend at the end of the fight. 5-3 with Sayo was completely new to me, so I mostly played it really safe with the few resources I had. The only risky thing I did (which I instantly paid the price for) was trying to use the shikigami on the very final phase, not realizing the fireballs spawn before the destroyable skulls. The ending was thus very very tense, with me completely out of resources being chased by invincible Oni skulls. But I pulled it off!

Getting that clear was really really satisfying because of all the odds stacked against me (because of my own mistakes) and how many ups and downs the run went through. A real rollercoaster of emotions lol. There was no way I could have made it any more tense for me or the viewers haha.

This game is fun, I'd like to improve the score some more, especially since my milk and my speedrunning therough earlier stages were very perfectible.

Played on PC, recorded with OBS Studio.