Double Dealing Character Extra Stage
47"Damn you Point of Collection and your fun and difficult dichotomy."
A video of me stringing and tooling my way through the musical extra stage of Double Dealing Character.
Link to Me vs. Raiko Horikawa:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWsMe7TOas
Double Dealing Character is the 14th installment of the Touhou Project, a franchise of gimmicks with danmaku shooters elements. The perpetrator of this attempt against good ol' non-disguised difficulty is a madman that goes by the name of ZUN. He is a programmer that aspire to world domination via gimmicky gameplay.
But seriously, let me tell you a little about the game itself now that I played through it. Double Dealing Character is VERY gimmicky. Many of the bosses has a spell or two (or three) that have a gimmick. The fifth boss, Kijin Seija, has the horrible, horrible gimmick of flipping the screen and therefore your controller. The final boss, Sukuna Shinmyoumaru, has a spell that increases your hitbox. Granted, those are the worst offenders, but they still are pretty bad. Nonetheless, the game is incredibly fun. I enjoyed it much more than both UFO and TD, which are the two games for which I was already part of the fandom when they were released. And this extra stage, while harder, is in my opinion on par with Mamizou's and Koishi's, which I find my favorites.
The stage itself is very challenging and I cannot stress enough (unless you are a god) how important it is for you to collect life pieces. YOU MUST COLLECT BOMBS. YOU MUST COLLECT LIVES. YOU MUST BOMB TO COLLECT THEM. As refresher, you collect these pieces by going above the point of collection and collecting a certain number of items. Collect enough items and you get a bomb piece. Collect more than enough items and you get a life piece. Collect enough bomb pieces and eventually a life piece will be dropped instead.
The Ex-stage music is... ok. Is good, but after Last Remote and Ruse Rain, the competition is rough. I mean, we are talking about Last ******* Remote and Ruse ******* Rain. The music does its job to set the stage for the Ex-boss. And holy shit that Ex-boss. But that is another video.
Unless you want to show your madz danmaku skillz (with all those 'z's), you will want to bomb in this stage in order to gain the 2.0 multiplier when collecting items. Most of the stage can be simply beaten by streaming and simple dodging, but unless you take big risks going for those 2.0 multiplier, you will be severely lacking in the Ex-boss and the Mid-Exbosses.
Talking about Midbosses, Benben and Yatsuhashi, the stage 4 bosses, serve this time as the Ex-stage midbosses. The last 4th boss to hold that honor was Patchouli Knowledge. Their nonspell is easy since you can nuke Benben quick enough. But their two spells are Patchouli's Royal Flare level of hard.
I don't have much else to say. The Exboss... I cannot wait to post that :)
For more info the Touhou Project, visit the wiki:
http://www.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Touhou_Wiki