NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

NegativeZeroZ · Post by **NegativeZeroZ** » 10 years ago

ZephyrBurst wrote:And without spoiling anything else, all the testers have said that the Gate 3 end boss is still the hardest in the game so far. (Up to chapter 10 content.)

Does Chapter 10 include the Black Rock of that game? Or not quite? I don't recall.

ZephyrBurst wrote:Death being a very very common thing in the game, I wanted something to give back to the player if they were constantly losing. I knew the player, during their deaths, would be getting a few kills here and there. If I didn't have the penalty for losing so high, it wouldn't be quite as bad, at least I thought. It does take the money you gained away, same with DT3 as you've seen.

Making failed runs not a complete waste was definitely a good decision, though I guess it feels like awesome points should have been the better boost. It's true that I was a higher level than normal throughout this run due to taking no damage for a good portion of it, but I was never on par with WhattayaBrian, who died all the time. Maybe I'm overestimating how many awesome points are actually lost when you die. Granted, I've never actually tried running the game "normally."

ZephyrBurst wrote:As for perfect clearing it 'legit', one of the requirements I have for releasing anything is beating it without taking damage. That said, back then there were... rules I didn't follow. If it was Distorted, I sorta skipped on by if I was touched once or twice. Terrible idea. But everything for Hard and below I've cleared perfectly... aside from the Shroud Lord on Hard.

The idea probably made sense back then, since the whole point of Distorted Mode was that it was Hardcore Mode before a major difficulty balance. People complained, so it was like, "Fine, you wanna torture yourself? The iron maiden's that way. Here's the key. Go have a grand ol' time or some crap."

That's insane to think though, beating the Shroud Lord with no damage. Did you test each phase of the boss individually? I still can't beat Phase 4 of the Shroud Lord in the boss room on anything higher than Veteran, due to the nerfed levels and equipment basically making my strategy completely worthless.

For Primary Memory, I'd assumed it was exempt from that "no damage" rule, since you auto-heal, and the whole point of the battle with the Artist was that the outcome depended on the battle between the two cyber-gods dictating your ability to deal with what the boss was throwing at you.

ZephyrBurst wrote:Going back to 2 paragraphs ago, having to beat Death without taking damage was... we'll not go there. I could consistently beat him, but I'd always take 1 or 2 hits due to fumbling or misjudging his telegraph. I've jumped into that upward swing more times than I can count.

I suck at my own game...

Segment 25 - Pew pew some more!

Disclaimer: Although I did recently make a video of me doing captures of all of Reimu's spell cards in Touhou 8, including Fantasy Heaven, that's a re-recording of replays that are over two years old, and even back then, Fantasy Heaven took me over 400 attempts. Despite all appearances to the contrary during the action platforming sections of Distorted Travesty, I suck at bullet hell. This is fact.

Disclaimer 2: In early 2013, RobinLSL will prove every statement I am about to make false.

Disclaimer 3: Two years later edit, OH MAN. The words you are about to read are for a tool-assisted video (that no longer exists) that was scraped together to make up for lost footage and stay on an arbitrary upload schedule, because two-years-younger me thought this stage was too luck-based to redo in a day. Well that's that. The link you may or may not have clicked yet is the legit run. TL;DR, I got much better at SHMUPs. Or is that "actually decent?" Yay video games.

Data Segment Entry

For this video, instead of blatantly doing stunts that are humanly impossible at normal speed, I tried to replicate my strategy during the legit run. The difference, obviously, is that I obliterate my old score and instead of ending the level with only one life, I have many left over. That shouldn't surprise anyone. What also shouldn't surprise anyone is that the stage itself is easy. It requires no bombs, and nets you plenty of graze for an extend on top of the ones you start with. I can do all of this consistently even without the slowdown.

The problem with this stage is the boss. Immediately we are greeted with an attack that, on all previous difficulties, posed no threat to anyone who's played Touhou before, on any level of difficulty. On Distorted, though, we have a bit of a problem, and that's going to be the pattern for most of the battle. The waves of bullets move too fast for you to weave through while in focused mode. They're also too slow to weave through in unfocused mode. In the video, you can see me twitching and switching, and I can't physically manage this at normal speed. What I try to do is weave through part of the attack and bomb the second half, though I usually die and use the bomb on top of that. Not dying here was the biggest "skill-based" deciding factor.

The second attack is the biggest wildcard, and if I'm doing something wrong somewhere in this level, it's here. Those waves of bullets normally have gaps between them, so you can stream each wave and then shift to the other side of his line of fire. On Distorted, he has NO down time. I've explored the option of going in circles around him, but those large bullets always kill me, and going behind him just makes this phase last even longer. What I'm left with is basically slamming myself into the wall of bullets and hoping I get the "never tell me the odds" scenario. Somehow this manages to work more often than it seems like it should, but not nearly often enough to not be severely aggravating. Even with the slowdown, I die twice. The third attack is supposed to basically be free graze. It isn't too much of a problem, but I sometimes die once, because the bullets you actually have to worry about are random, and you can't actually even start to plan a route through them until they're 2/3 the screen length in your general direction.

The fourth attack is a complete non-issue and in spite of being higher on adrenaline than a hyperactive toddler on crack flying a kite on Mt. Everest when I actually managed to get here with 5 lives, I've never died to this attack even once. The last attack looks like it tries to be a homage to the final attack of Touhou 11 (a game Zephyr was uploading videos of for his channel about two years ago... coincidence? I think not) and if I'm brutally honest, it fails that attempt. The original spell card was much slower, and the bullets going in opposite directions from each other looked completely different. Because all the bullets move quickly and they all look the same, my eyes just flat-out stop seeing one of the two waves at times. This is where my adrenaline high really screwed me over, causing me to die an utterly ridiculous four times before I got down to my last life and some part of my stupid brain realized "oh, I guess victory wasn't guaranteed with five. Whoops. Fine, fine, I'll actually try now."

This calls back to the problem I had with King Mech before I magically found the solution of shoving an Earth Shift into the left wall. This stage takes four minutes per attempt, and when the chance of failure is so highly dictated by chance that my attempts at actually playing the game are all but futile, something doesn't feel right about it, especially since the difficulty curve of the danmaku stages did nothing like this to any other section than this boss, and the issues are very specific. It makes it feel... broken, somehow. Like the increase of difficulty to Distorted didn't translate properly in the game's code, or something, because really, it shouldn't be this hard. Or maybe everything works completely perfectly and I just suck ass at Touhou.

Who cares.

Segment 26 - Data Collector

Segment 27 - Shroud Lord

You skipped to this video, didn't you? I knew you would. You jerk. You know who you are!

Procured Meta Segue (...what is this even?)

The second half of Secured Data Segment is somewhat less friendly, with the new enemies. You really don't want to fight these guys while underleveled. Skipping them as I am, you may think that I hate them just as much as everybody else, but that's not the case. When I'm not worried about damage, I like the feeling of fighting an opposing force that's as tough as these guys. It's a struggle to win, each room of them that I pass is a small victory, and that's the whole appeal for me. Nobody should be surprised that in the room where I get ambushed and surrounded, I use Rave Mode, and also again at the final defenses. Avoiding those red rings before that battle is tougher than it looks.

Think and Act Fast might as well get its own paragraph because that's what's expected by this point. It's been edited since raocow played it, but not too much, and I've done both versions. Although I suppose making it through the room without using items is probably impressive to most people in its own right, this is actually a pretty terrible run by my usual play, mostly at the red rings. I heal afterwards, but I end up doing the next room with no damage somehow. Honestly, what can I objectively say about Think and Act Fast that hasn't been said already? I can disagree with the people who say it's fake difficulty, but whose opinion is really valid, a majority of somewhat inexperienced players, or one really experienced player whose experience comes from repeated runs of a game he probably likes just a bit too much? This room is hell on a blind run, and I'm hardly in any position to dispute that. I can only offer my perspective, which is that this room wasn't too hard during this run.

Shroud Lord

This is my fourth battle with the Shroud Lord on Distorted, and my second one on camera, so I wanted this one to be... special, somehow. You'll see what I mean. In terms of the actual gameplay, though, this battle is pretty objectively terrible. Everything goes completely wrong. I take a lot of damage, the moving platform isn't where it should be when I need it to, I forget to switch out my beads AGAIN, and at the start of the nightmarish fourth phase, I get hit with the shadow ball that heals the Shroud Lord. Game, set, match. Might as well start over.

The reason why this is one of my favorite boss fights for this run is that everything I've said before about "absolutely never EVER let this happen or you're screwed" happens. I improvise, I struggle, and I salvage it. Every joke I'd made, every time I ever laughed at the possibility of the Shroud Lord giving me a hard time was completely upturned by this fight. Instead of old hat, we've been given something interesting for what most people consider the true final boss. I could have restarted for a better fight, but I still had over 50% of my allotted damage for Primary Memory alone, which pretty much puts the S Rank in a bag inside of another bag. How could I pass this up?

ZephyrBurst · Post by **ZephyrBurst** » 10 years ago

NegativeZeroZ wrote:Does Chapter 10 include the Black Rock of that game? Or not quite? I don't recall.

Yes. I say that mainly due to its parallel to Black Rock in that it picks up the story, though in DT3's case, it arcs it in a different direction and introduces (finally) the antagonist. It doesn't quite have the difficulty spike that Black Rock does, but it's way more involving.

NegativeZeroZ wrote:That's insane to think though, beating the Shroud Lord with no damage. Did you test each phase of the boss individually? I still can't beat Phase 4 of the Shroud Lord in the boss room on anything higher than Veteran, due to the nerfed levels and equipment basically making my strategy completely worthless.

I've beaten the Shroud Lord with no damage all the way through on Hard. Phase 4 can be trivialized by using Zephyr to deal with the crystal bombs. As for the lasers, I've never had a set up mixed with his life steal or ground fire that I couldn't double dash through. Once I take the hands out, with heavy use of either Water Barrier or Blast Shield, (which is sometimes more energy efficient than Water Barrier) I keep my energy for either Water Blast which deals ass loads of damage if he's crippled, or I'll use Up+WoA, but instead of spamming them, I'll only let about 4-5 out so the damage to spirit usage is kept higher.

NegativeZeroZ wrote:For Primary Memory, I'd assumed it was exempt from that "no damage" rule, since you auto-heal, and the whole point of the battle with the Artist was that the outcome depended on the battle between the two cyber-gods dictating your ability to deal with what the boss was throwing at you.

It was indeed kept out of the no damage rule. Well only the war room and the Artist fight. Mecha Guardian still had to follow that rule. A super easy way to take out the second half is to keep your combo going. What ever you do, don't let it break, then once he's on his 2nd life bar, spam Kudeku.

So there was something else I was gonna say in response to your Data Segment run, but all I can remember at the moment is that impressive speed run through the room just past the Data Collector. (Well the room past the first encounter with the Sentries.) All around, your handle on that level was really good. It may have been all about speed running through it, but without damage in that first half, that was nice.

Edit: One of them was I noticed you looked at the unused music files for DT3 as I heard with the Shroud Lord. Those will be used later, I just never took them out of the folder when compressing everything.

NegativeZeroZ · Post by **NegativeZeroZ** » 10 years ago

ZephyrBurst wrote:so the damage to spirit usage is kept higher

So the incentives not to spam were in place way before DT2? I should have expected that.

ZephyrBurst wrote:It was indeed kept out of the no damage rule. Well only the war room and the Artist fight. Mecha Guardian still had to follow that rule. A super easy way to take out the second half is to keep your combo going. What ever you do, don't let it break, then once he's on his 2nd life bar, spam Kudeku.

Yeah, I hinted at a Mega Buster/Kudeku strategy ages ago, but I forgot that I didn't actually use it.

ZephyrBurst wrote:One of them was I noticed you looked at the unused music files for DT3 as I heard with the Shroud Lord. Those will be used later, I just never took them out of the folder when compressing everything.

That one kind of has a story behind it.

DT3 Spoilers

The Shroud Lord's laugh and death cry were just the Shrouds' sound bytes with edited pitch to make them sound like they came from a larger, more intimidating enemy. I actually made those files myself. When the Shroud Lord appeared, it just felt like it needed a sound effect. =P

Segment 28 - Mecha Guardian

Primary Memory

When watching raocow play through the game, this was the level that convinced me to play it myself. Specifically the battle with Hexor's Army. If the Shroud Lord had been the final boss, I'd have probably never picked it up. This level showed me that Zephyr knew what he was doing. Secured Data Segment wouldn't have the same feel as a true final dungeon. I'd mentioned the sentry enemies and how they make every battle feel like a struggle, and an adequate payoff to that struggle could never be given or expressed to the player through a cutscene. After the player went through hell in the previous dungeon, the player gets to unleash hell in the final area.

And unleash hell I do, literally. Rave Mode + Wildfire obliterates everything, but most importantly the Sagyms (the chicken walker laser things). After doing a lap around the room with that, I do another lap of the room, this time more slowly, and I let the Shrouds do most of the work. In doing that, I get through the war zone with no damage. I also show how the long run is meant to be done, because the rest of the game is easy and I have ostensibly nothing better to do with my afternoon game time, since with over 40% of my allotted damage left over for the Artist and Omega Metroid alone, it's only going to take one attempt, assuming I don't die to the timer. Which is a good investment in terms of damage, since each run of that entire end sequence past the last save point takes about 20 minutes, making it the biggest time-waster in terms of punishment for failure, by quite a ridiculous margin.

Mecha Guardian

As Zephyr said, the best strategy is to take your sweet time on the first phase and build up a huge-ass combo to obliterate the second half with Kudeku so you don't have to deal with the enemies. I'm in a hurry to end, so I use Hurricane Dash instead, which is probably the second-best, but I really don't have to care at this point, since my S Rank is all but guaranteed.

The Mega Buster takes away your ability to cripple the sentries, but assuming you're max level (why not?) you still have one more powerful weapon against the flying sentries specifically, that being also the Hurricane Dash, which just reinforces my laziness. I don't really care what the rest of the enemies do as long as those guys aren't shooting me in the back. Ignoring them for too long seems to trigger Mecha Guardian to blow you away from him, but a little bull-headed stubbornness on the player's part and he gives up.

Segment 29 - The Artist

The Artist

Meet the reason why I spent half the game's length doing perfect runs, instead of starting with the "no healing spells" rule from the beginning and keeping it throughout. Even restricting healing to restore points only is not a guarantee that you'll have enough damage left over to beat this guy. Once you're at that point, you have to re-start from your last backup save (you... DID keep backup saves, right? RIGHT?!) or attempt the impossible and learn to perfect clear a battle that will spit in your face for trying to do it without damage. If you want my personal recommendation, do yourself a favor and don't ruin this battle for yourself. It's one of the best boss fights, and one of the most impressive feats in terms of game design.

Think about it in terms of what it is. You're just a puppet in this fight, and so is the Artist. Jeremy and Hexor are the real fighters here, and will in no uncertain terms be complete dictators over who is playing offense, who is playing defense, who is taking damage, who is winning, who can dodge attacks, who can heal and who will die. It's a battle of cheating, hax and XBox-Live-worthy trash talk. This could have been executed HORRIBLY. This boss could have been an absolute cluster f-bomb and a total disappointment after the battle with Hexor's Army. There is so much potential for this idea to completely fall flat on its face that it's amazing to me personally that it went over with so much success.

With that said, this battle is unfair, but still not so difficult that you should die. As long as you give a token attempt not to die, you shouldn't. Your health auto-regens and if that's not enough, your spirit regen is also pretty badass. Only normal physical attacks will hurt the Artist, so just whack away at him. The Strawberry, Blueberry and Bacon muffins are pretty low on the priority list, since they're easily dealt with. Depending on your preference, I'd say go for either the Banana Nut and Coconut (the ones up top that shoot lines of slow-moving bullets) or the Almond and Refried (the ones nearest the floor). After destroying two muffins, Hexor will develop a habit of keeping you on the floor, so destroying the ones down there first might be a good idea, but the ones on top are hilariously efficient at disrupting your attempts to platform, so it really is mostly a preference thing. I hate the slow-moving bullets, so I get rid of those first.

The Bacon Muffin should definitely be last, because despite being at the most unreachable place when the platforms are on the ground, its projectiles move very fast, and are the least threatening during the bit with the spinning lasers. After getting rid of all the MagMuffins, the Artist is easy to deal with using good old-fashioned spam. He has no cripple point and neither do any of the muffins, so don't bother. The muffins all have different weaknesses though. Hopefully you remembered that this battle forces you to use a Rave Mode, and you didn't accidentally get here with 20 used so far.

Segment 30 - Final Result

This video is disappointing to me on many levels. Even with the Trap Bead equipped, I default to laziness and item-spam my way through this to ensure that I meet the time limit, because dying to the time limit WILL cause me to fail at this point, and poses the only real threat. Even if I'd spammed ALL my items, the amount of damage I could take without penalty still exceeds even that. I end with about 11,740 damage left over. I also have 270 actual hits left over, which was never even a thing since where do you honestly take sub-200 damage on Distorted Mode?

With the S Rank run over, I'd like to thank the following people:

raocow - Without his LP of DT1, I would not know about this game, and without his videos, my daily dose of motivation would be a lot smaller. Lest anyone think the point of this was to 1-up the cow of all raos, that was not my intention while producing this or the original Shroud Lord video. I only mention raocow with regards to that video because of his comment on the video about the boomerang spam. The purpose of this run was not "oh raocow you silly neener look this game isn't hard." Lest you forget, I cut out tons and tons of demos. Also, raocow is STILL and forever will be the best video game.

slaix223 and WhattayaBrian - Both for the same reason. Without their videos of the Hardcore and Distorted modes respectively, I probably would not have been inspired to try them for myself. After "Dante Must Die" mode in Devil May Cry (the first game, which I did in fact beat on that setting), I'm somewhat more leery of difficulty modes that openly advertise themselves as walking the line between difficult and unfair, especially with regards to freeware and fan-made games. At some point I forgot whose strategy I borrowed for what boss, but I took a lot of their strategies and advice to heart, especially the ones before Fourth Wall Crusher. I got the ideas for Dark Mind and King Mech in moments of fridge brilliance, but that's just two bosses. You guys make great videos and this run wouldn't have happened without some comparing-notes process.

Jaimers91 - For the Flame Instigator exploit. I'm not sure if you intended for anyone but Zephyr to see that, but, well... =P Without that exploit, my no-damage streak would probably have been a lot shorter (less than half as long) and without this touch of laziness on my part, Flame Instigator would have demotivated me from continuing the streak, and I might have encountered problems with the Artist without an obvious backup save to choose from. That would have been a disaster. Crisis averted due to hilarious bugs, though.

Slit08 - I'm sure I've probably read his general advice here and there, particularly in the thread for raocow's DT1 LP and the DT Help Thread. I'm not sure what to specifically thank him for other than being cool I guess. =P I suspect he was in no small part responsible for raocow finding the game, though, so he's probably part of the reason I found this game, let alone became decent.

ZephyrBurst - Obviously for making the game, and for giving me the S Rank requirements when he had every right not to. My estimates for the damage requirements were pretty spot-on, but my estimates on Items and Rave Mode in particular were way off (about 15 or less for Rave Mode, and 10 or less for items--with Turbo Smoothies counting as 3 each) so without that information, I might have failed, or not been confident enough to have attempted the run in the first place. I'd also like to thank him for being a pretty cool guy. I've had some conversations with him on the blog and via email about the DT series and game design in general, which is pretty nifty, and I hope those continue as DT3 grows and he hopefully moves on with other projects after the DT series reaches conclusion. You make good games Zephyr, and I see the potential for improvement, just through the fact that you're eager for feedback, even if it's not all positive. You strive to improve and you can admit when you might not have made the best design choice, a trait that a lot of other game devs tragically lack, and I wish you luck and hope you keep at it.

NegativeZeroZ · Post by **NegativeZeroZ** » 10 years ago

One more little patch-up before the thread gets too dusty: a glitch-less battle with Flame Instigator, since WhattayaBrian asked so nicely. =) It also shows how to do the exploit proper, since I jump-cut last time expecting it to take a while.

As for anyone who wasn't sure what the S Rank bonus was, I'll just leave this here.

Slit08 · Post by **Slit08** » 10 years ago

This was a super well made walkthrough for DT. I enjoyed it a lot. Very well played. I hope that one day you will make a walkthrough of DT 3 as well. :) Maybe not a no damage run or something like that but just a nice walkthrough of this game.
Also thanks a lot for the kind words in the description for the final part here. I appreciate that a lot. :)
Also raocow IS the best video game. Fact!!

raocow's talkhaus

NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

Re: NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

Re: NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

Re: NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

Re: NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty

Re: NegativeZeroZ S Ranks Distorted Travesty