I thought MoF would be easy, but I'm struggling. Am I doing something wrong?

[MrL1193]

Hey all, longtime Touhou fan coming back from a break here. I was a somewhat active (albeit casual) Touhou player quite a few years ago. I had an account on the old forums, but I had quit playing by the time those forums went down, so I didn't bother re-registering my account--at least until now. Somehow or other, I was inspired to come back and try some of the games I hadn't played as much, so here I am again.

To give an idea of my skill level, when I used to play years ago, I was able to 1cc any game I tried on Normal with minimal practice. Once I got more familiar with the game, I would move up to Hard, and if I was feeling gutsy, I might spend some time routing out a way to bomb spam my way to a Lunatic 1cc. When I came back a couple weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was more or less at the same level as before, at least when it came to PCB, my most-played game. I got another Lunatic 1cc (this time with Sakuya B instead of Sakuya A), a surprisingly good Hard 1cc as Reimu A (with 5 extra lives in reserve) and an off-the-cuff Normal No Bombs 1cc as Marisa B. So I was feeling pretty good about myself when I decided to move on to MoF, a game I had barely touched before. I got a Normal 1cc as Reimu A within a few tries, and then I decided to switch over to Reimu B to try for a Hard 1cc.

Well... it hasn't been going well, to say the least. Everyone has always said that you can just bomb through everything in MoF, so I got a run past Stage 3 and started bombing. However, that quickly turned into a death spiral of more bombs and insufficient power to capture attacks I normally wouldn't struggle with. The stage portions from Stage 4 onward are a complete mess; it feels like if I don't have everything 100% memorized, I'll get caught out and forced to bomb, over and over again. And there are a fair number of lategame boss attacks (especially Sanae's) that I can only handle via strict routing, which doesn't work if the stage knocks me down to low power first. I made it to Kanako a couple times, but I failed the "easy" parts of her fight under pressure and didn't even get to Source of Rains, let alone Virtue of the Wind God.

The way everyone talks about MoF led me to believe that it would at least be easier than the other games I've played, such as SA, so I'm feeling rather confused and frustrated at the moment. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

[nintendonut888]

When people say MoF is easy to bomb through, it's a statement that comes with a lot of qualifications. The game gives you more bombs than any other game in the series, true, and said bombs are also quite powerful. However, using them in a way that pushes you below 3.00 power is quite risky, and if you start to fail it can be very hard to recover, for all the reasons you say. Not to mention, while bombs are very plentiful, lives are not, with only 8 total lives to work with, and so mistakes are punished hard. So while a skilled and knowledgeable player can bomb through pretty much every hard part of the game and not lose much, you can only do that if you're already proficient in all the other parts of the game so you have the bombs to spare.

So basically, you're not wrong in your assessment: MoF is a game that requires you to take things seriously and carefully gauge your resources, lest you accidentally ruin your entire run with one ill-timed bomb. An honest bit of advice is to consider in some cases whether it's better to risk a death outright than push yourself below the 3.00 power threshold. The amount of power you get back upon death is dependent on how much power you had before getting hit, and there are times it is better to just take a death if you can't easily get that power back afterwards. Try practicing the stages with the intent to try and bomb as little as possible, so that when you do a full run, you already know what you have to do. Treat the bombs as your margin of error. It is not the hardest game in the series, but it's far from the easiest either. Take it as seriously as the other games and learn the stages and you'll get there.

[MrL1193]

All right, thanks for confirming that I'm not crazy, at least. I'm currently trying to memorize Stage 4, and at least some of it is starting to make sense... although I still feel like I'm going to have to bomb at least 2 or 3 times before Aya just to be safe.

At the moment, there are still a lot of places throughout the game where I just don't know whether or not I'll be able to capture things. Aya's fight in particular feels like RNG central--sometimes I can capture everything, and other times, not a single thing goes my way. (Well, her opener is consistent at least, but I'm clumsy sometimes.) I'll have to try out that 3.00 rule of thumb and see how it feels.

I do find it a bit odd that MoF in particular has such a reputation for being bomb-to-win. PCB felt more generous to me because I could just spam safety bombs until I ran out and still have full power to try to tough out as many attacks as I could before dying. And from what I can recall, that's how Sakuya A ends up playing in DDC as well. I even had better luck with bomb spamming in SA, at least as Reimu C. I don't mind MoF actually being challenging; I just wonder why it got the reputation it did when pretty much every game in the series rewards you for not wasting resources.

[nintendonut888]

Memes, mostly. I've seen demo runs that show how you can bomb through pretty much every significantly challenging part of EoSD normal, but MoF's bomb system was both highly divergent from what came before and was very obvious to even the most casual player. Plus while most games from HSiFS onward have given you massive amounts of resources to balance their difficulty, MoF was much earlier in the series, during the so-called "golden age" that most fans are most familiar with. So it became a joke and a piece of common knowledge, even if IN and arguably PCB were more generous in practice.

[marumuju]

For what it is worth, I've struggled with MoF for months. I really like the game, but sure do feel that it is more difficult than for example UDoALG. I've completed multiple character routes of that on Normal, but haven't got through MoF even on Easy (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)

[nintendonut888]

For what it is worth, I've struggled with MoF for months. I really like the game, but sure do feel that it is more difficult than for example UDoALG. I've completed multiple character routes of that on Normal, but haven't got through MoF even on Easy (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)

This is another thing that's often understated: MoF has one of the most unbalanced difficulty levels in the series, particularly when it comes to Kanako. Kanako has attacks that are actually harder on normal than they are on lunatic, such as her second non-spell and third spell card, which is replaced by a different and I would say overall easier spell card on hard/lunatic. Her final spell card on easy is also notoriously difficult, about equal in difficulty to the hard mode version of the attack and much harder than it is on normal. While lunatic is undeniably the hardest difficulty mode, the lower difficulties have some surprisingly nasty stuff sprinkled in.

[MrL1193]

Update: After a couple days of practicing, memorizing stages, and figuring out the best spots to bomb, I managed to get the 1cc with 3 extra lives in reserve. It didn't even feel like a particularly good run; I started messing up as early as Stage 3, where I took not one but two dumb deaths to Nitori (greeded for her midboss spell and died at the last second, then clipped a corner on her second boss nonspell). Aya was a bit mean with her RNG too, and I forgot most of my route for Stage 5 and had to bomb repeatedly. Fortunately, I managed to make up for it by clutching out a few spells I normally would have considered bombing (including capturing Aya's last spell at low power). Nerves didn't get me this time on Kanako's fight, so I reached Virtue of the Wind God with 4 extra lives and over 4 power, and easily closed it out from there.

I think I'll move on to UFO now. I've somehow never played any of the games where Sanae is playable, so that should be interesting. I've heard UFO is a bit nasty, but Normal can't be that bad... can it?

[Branneg Xy]

Update: After a couple days of practicing, memorizing stages, and figuring out the best spots to bomb, I managed to get the 1cc with 3 extra lives in reserve. It didn't even feel like a particularly good run; I started messing up as early as Stage 3, where I took not one but two dumb deaths to Nitori (greeded for her midboss spell and died at the last second, then clipped a corner on her second boss nonspell). Aya was a bit mean with her RNG too, and I forgot most of my route for Stage 5 and had to bomb repeatedly. Fortunately, I managed to make up for it by clutching out a few spells I normally would have considered bombing (including capturing Aya's last spell at low power). Nerves didn't get me this time on Kanako's fight, so I reached Virtue of the Wind God with 4 extra lives and over 4 power, and easily closed it out from there.

I think I'll move on to UFO now. I've somehow never played any of the games where Sanae is playable, so that should be interesting. I've heard UFO is a bit nasty, but Normal can't be that bad... can it?

About Mountain of Faith/Touhou 10.Glad that your hard work and application of "nintendonut888"'s expert player analysis and advices.

About UFO/Touhou 12 be prepared,though I have known and verified only indirectly but truthfully ,to come back here again for your impressions,experience,and of course other ("nintentonut888" so far) useful advices...
...because  it is sincerely and definitely  the hardest of overall difficulty of Touhou,  together with Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom/Touhou 11-Legacy mode,- of  "all the Main Danmaku Games",save for particular instances and/or subjectivity and/or mods ("Ultra or  Difficulty) "compared to the the other games of the Touhou series".
Added final note...as a "limited compensation" for the difficulty of UFO over LoLK,the difficulty spike and curves are "more straight-forward and stable for UFO than LoLK".

[williewillus]

I think I'll move on to UFO now. I've somehow never played any of the games where Sanae is playable, so that should be interesting. I've heard UFO is a bit nasty, but Normal can't be that bad... can it?

It's pretty challenging because of the power loss and UFO's being another thing to think about. I'd go for all greens and bomb through everything with frog Sanae.

[Karisa]

So basically, you're not wrong in your assessment: MoF is a game that requires you to take things seriously and carefully gauge your resources, lest you accidentally ruin your entire run with one ill-timed bomb. An honest bit of advice is to consider in some cases whether it's better to risk a death outright than push yourself below the 3.00 power threshold. The amount of power you get back upon death is dependent on how much power you had before getting hit, and there are times it is better to just take a death if you can't easily get that power back afterwards.

A little late clarification: when you die in MoF, you lose 3.20 power (can't go below 0.00), then 3.20 worth of power items spawn. This means you'll never be below 3 power after a death, as long as you collect all the dropped items.

SA's system is more complicated, since you always drop to 0.00 power, then 7 power items spawn (a mixture of large and small), where the number of large power items depends on your old power and your remaining life count.

[nintendonut888]

Aah you're right, my mistake. I was mixing up SA's far harsher system with MoF. That's embarrassing, thank you for the clarification.

[MrL1193]

Thank you again for the help with beating MoF. Now that I've had a bit of time to cool off, looking back, I like the game quite a lot. It feels a bit "rougher" to me than some of the other entries (e.g. in terms of bugs), but I like a lot of the characters and music, and it has a good buildup to its finale. I don't think anything will ever top PCB in my heart (1st game bias and all that), but MoF is certainly up there, along with a few others.

Anyway, if anyone's still curious about what I've been up to, I finally finished a run of UFO. The game certainly lived up to its reputation--perhaps a bit too well, in fact. I actually needed quite a few attempts just to get a Normal 1cc. Unfortunately, I felt like it was mostly difficult in unenjoyable ways. The bosses themselves didn't really feel harder than in other games once I'd had a chance to see what they were doing, and the stages weren't necessarily hard to survive... but, of course, there's that accursed UFO gimmick. I get that the idea was to make the stages more than just footnotes to the bosses, but I feel like the gimmick is overly distracting and ultimately overbearing. I don't find it very enjoyable to die from smacking into random bullets as I'm chasing a UFO only to accidentally touch a blue one anyway as opposed to dying because the bullet patterns are actually difficult. Oh, and the big hit to Power after every death is a major pain too. I was probably making it worse for myself in that regard by using Sanae B, but it still felt overly harsh. It all added up to make the game feel very frustrating, and not all that enjoyable to 1cc, unfortunately.

I do still like playing the individual levels, but as of right now, I'm not even sure I want to bother going for a Hard 1cc. Definitely not my favorite Touhou game, although it still had some neat moments. Murasa was probably my favorite boss; all her attacks felt like a fair challenge. Shou and Byakuren had a few too many "Think fast!"-type attacks for my liking, and I personally didn't feel like Byakuren's final attack was as epic as the likes of Resurrection Butterfly, Virtue of the Wind God, or even the easy-but-flashy Subterranean Sun.

With that, I've finally done a 1cc of every Touhou game I physically own (6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14). I'd like to play the newer ones at some point too. Does anyone know if there's still a feasible way to get physical copies of the games these days? I used to just order them from Amazon, but it doesn't seem like they're available there any more. I know most of the games are available on Steam now, but it would be nice if I could at least fill that space on my shelf where Ten Desires should go.

[williewillus]

Does anyone know if there's still a feasible way to get physical copies of the games these days?

I use akiba hobby for the Hifuu CD's, and looks like the games are available too.

Unfortunately, since they're imports, it's going to be quite expensive.

[nintendonut888]

Importing is pretty much your only option. As someone who went to Japan last year, it was pretty rare even there to find physical copies of official games in nerd shops, so the expensive import route is pretty much your only hope if you want to own them physically.

[MrL1193]

I use akiba hobby for the Hifuu CD's, and looks like the games are available too.

Unfortunately, since they're imports, it's going to be quite expensive.

Ah, hm... that's unfortunate. But then again, I remember paying around $30 per game back when I ordered them on Amazon, too, so it's not really that different now, I guess. (And I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of the older games.) The shipping for just one game would be double the price of the game itself, but it looks like adding more games to the order doesn't increase the shipping cost by very much. So I guess if I pick a few to order all at once, the per-game price won't be as bad. Thanks again for the help, guys.

[nintendonut888]

As an addendum, while this won't help you find a physical copy, if owning the games DRM-free is a concern beyond collecting the physical discs, DLsite has every game from Ten Desires onward available for purchase as no-strings-attached downloads.

https://www.dlsite.com/home-touch/circle/profile/=/maker_id/RG46179.html

[MrL1193]

That is part of the reason I wanted physical copies, yes, so I'm glad to hear that there's another, less expensive way to actually own the games. Thank you once again! I still want a physical copy of Ten Desires, but it's good to know that I won't have to pay too much for the rest of the newer games.

[williewillus]

As an addendum, while this won't help you find a physical copy, if owning the games DRM-free is a concern beyond collecting the physical discs, DLsite has every game from Ten Desires onward available for purchase as no-strings-attached downloads.

https://www.dlsite.com/home-touch/circle/profile/=/maker_id/RG46179.html

Oh nice, I didn't know they kept on doing this. I thought it was just a one off for DDC for some reason. I'll probably switch to buying from here instead of Steam to avoid DRM. Though iirc dlsite tends to get the new games slower than Steam?

[nintendonut888]

Yes, I want to say dlsite got UDoALG within a month, but that's a month you could be spending playing UDoALG the slightly less ideal way, you know?

[Branneg Xy]

These links,and especiaally the users-gamers through (also@) YouTube, playthroughs could hopefully be helpful...

Touhou 12 - Undefined Fantastic Object Normal 1cc Guide

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pkbI9Ftrv18

Touhou Danmakufu: UFO Boss Rush || Extra Mode Clear
 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zTdTCwLiwUY