Touhou 东方雪莲华 ~ Abyss Soul Lotus - Perfect Extra Stage (ExNNNN)

A clear of the Extra stage without dying, bombing, getting hit and switching characters.
Technically speaking switching characters gives you a slight advantage, but it doesn't really matter much. I added that because I didn't need it.

Extra stage time.
Cool boss with a lot of fun patterns. Not too terribly hard but maybe that's just because Reimu homing is kind of overpowered in this.

For the midboss you can kind of do the same thing every time.
The third spell looks annoying, but you have so much time to find Waldo that it really doesn't matter.

Tricky patterns on the boss are spell 1, 2, 5, 8, 9 and 10.
Nonspells 6 and 7 can also be tricky.

Spell 1: Pretty tricky but once you get used to the weird curving it gets a lot easier.
Spell 2: The random lasers at the start are AWFUL. It was so awful they patched it to add warning lines, but it's still kind of a gacha moment. If you do enough damage you can skip the second wave of lasers. The card takes no damage during lasers so skipping it helps a lot.
Spell 5: This gave me a lot of trouble for the longest time, until I realized that if you position yourself between two rocks you're safe from everything that happens between waves. You only have to move up and down to avoid the curvy lasers.
Spell 6: This one looks impressive but it's entirely static.
Spell 7: Your meter gets drained depending on how many butterflies are left at the end. The initial burst of RNG at the start can be bad sometimes.
Spell 8: This spell gets pretty scary because Reimu homing sucks at killing the big fireballs, which makes it easy to get walled. But if you do the same thing every time it somehow works.
Spell 9: The first three phases of this survival sucks because the random lasers from spell 2 make a reappearance and RNG on phase 3 can be rather bad. Phase 2 is also tricky to dodge.
Spell 10: Final. This looks easy but it can be rather treacherous with the rocks. The rocks also hide the bullets so they can sneak up on you. I believe the bullets are static though so memo where they are even when you can't see them. Last phase is a visual challenge, it's not too bad but it's easy to choke and the hitboxes are massive.

Nonspell 6 can be scary if you get bad RNG from the sides.
Nonspell 7 is kind of like Pristine Lunacy Light.
Nonspell 8 looks scary but it's static and easy.

The stage section doesn't exist.

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Another ludicrously high-quality Chinese Touhou fangame just dropped.
China is absolutely cracked when it comes to these fangames.

东方雪莲华, no relation to the celebrity Vtuber of the same name, was made by the same team that developed Shining Shooting Star. It took approximately 7 years for them to make the game, with the first demo releasing in 2018.

This is also one of the first fangames made in Unity afaik, which means you can do things like run the game at 120 FPS and get buttery smooth controls, because game logic isn't tied to framerate like stupid engines.

System and mechanics:
https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Abyss_...

Game is quite good, patterns are fun to dodge and stage design has a good flow. I especially like the part in stage 4 where it makes you go all around the screen.
The system also feels pretty thought-out and is fun to engage with. Chaining juicy cancels together is very satisfying. Planning around the chain timer and the multiplier bonus you get from character switching also adds a lot of depth to the routing.

Probably what sets this game apart the most is the timer.
You have a 24 minute timer to beat the game. However this will run out long before the game actually ends. And when the timer runs out you will be unable to get any more meter, essentially making you walking dead. You have to collect fragments to slow down the timer, while avoiding getting hit and dying as that takes off a big chunk of your time.

The game doesn't have a traditional bomb system, instead you fill up a meter by collecting fragments you get from bullet cancels.
This has three layers and getting hit eats one of these layers. Which means you can get hit quite a lot in this game and not die, so long as you don't get hit too many times in a row.
This system makes the game quite forgiving while still being challenging for score as you're constantly consuming meter for that.
You're far more likely to run out of time before running out of lives though, which is interesting. You basically need to do some scoring to actually survive.

Shoutouts to Eradrazil for gifting me the game. Thank you!

Buy the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/10...

00:00 - Intro
00:28 - Stage Section First Half
01:36 - Midboss
02:42 - Stage Section Second Half
03:39 - Extra Boss

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