Touhou Dengenkei Perfect Sakura Fantastica - Phantasm WR Attempt Fail! 8.89 Billion

0:00 - Intro
1:16 - Start of run

So, Seattle's local big arcade collector guy announced that he stopping meetings in order to move his machines to a new location, meaning I'd only have one more day to attend. So I figured, what better way to close out 2024 than to torture myself by grinding for a world record? I didn't get it, but I had a fun time anyways and managed to get a new PB at least! The owner even moved his EXA to a candy cab with a CRT, which was a lot of fun to play on. This was my first time playing Touhou on a CRT, and it was a really cool experience!

The Phantasm Youmu WR as of the time of this video is 9,279,617,050, held by JAP. There's definitely room for the record to go up - my PC version score would be about 10.40 billion when converted to EXA scoring. But playing in an arcade is much more stressful compared to playing at home; no quick restarts means runs take longer, and you're playing on a different setup from what you're used to, and arcades get super loud. Plus I'm lucky that the operator sets everything to free play, but if this was a real arcade then I'd be paying 100 yen for each restart. On the other hand, playing shmups with other people is always a fun experience, so I try to make it out to events anytime I'm available.

Compared to the PC version, the scoring in the EXA port is pretty much identical, at least in the Extra and Phantasm modes. The only difference is that the EXA version gives you much less lives, but for really high scores you want to no-miss anyways so the only thing this affects is the end-of-game bonus. Assuming you don't lose any lives or bombs, the EXA version will score exactly 360,000,000 points less than the same run performed on the PC version. One other funny difference is that character dialogue auto advances in the EXA version. This makes setting up the safespot on Suika's "Night Parade of the Millions" spellcard more difficult, since you have less time to line yourself up.

Note that the above only applies to Extra and Phantasm modes. There's more differences in the Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic modes which make scores between EXA and PC incompatible. The biggest difference is EXA requires more cherry to start a border. Additionally a couple spellcards behave slightly differently, and in Lunatic mode you start with max power.

I might try and go for the record again in the future once Gamecenter meetups start up again. That said, I only get to attend every once-in-a-while and I usually like to play other games while I'm there too (seriously the amount of cabs available is insane). Plus I felt kind of bad hogging the EXA setup, haha. Admittedly, going for the EXA WR is kind of an arbitrary goal since the EXA and PC games are basically the same scoring-wise, but this is the only arcade game I realistically have a chance of getting a record in, so it'd be cool if I can pull it off someday!

Big thanks to Gamecenter for letting me play and helping me setup the stream! If you're in the Pacific Northwest area and are interested in arcade games, be sure to follow them on Twitter and/or Discord for news about future events!
https://x.com/100_Yen_Life/
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