[Nokia] Touhou 東方神魔談 ~ The Ancient Square - Extra Mode Clear (No-Miss)
372Extra is pretty crazy in this, it feels harder than Hard mode in the normal game at times.
MarisaB is the powerhouse of this game.
She seems to do the most damage and is the most useful for this stage since bombs don't help here.
Power is still a huge problem, but it's a little better in this than the main game.
A lot more drops in general with occasional big power dumps. The boss also drops 25 power per spellcard now instead of just 15.
Trying to get to max power is still a huge hurdle though, with hits taking a long time to recover.
Stage section is pretty nuts, those big fairies are crazed and pretty much require you to speedkill to stop them from shooting. You also have to do some pretty risky stuff to try and gather power.
It's possible to get to the midboss with level 3 power but it's really hard.
Midboss itself is not too bad but the last spell is really hard and can do some real crazy walls.
The boss isn't too bad but it has some real nasty attacks:
- First nonspell is a Junko circle that requires you to read the gaps in advance to quickly slip through them before they close.
- First spell is very easy to get walled on, the hitbox on those round bullets is HUGE.
- 5th spell is complete nonsense. I just try to power through it with autobombs and speedkill it (I think autobombs give the boss less i-frames).
- For the 7th spell the only winning move is not to play, I just time it out in the corners. Interestingly tmeouts still count as captures in this game.
- The survival is a somewhat random moving snake that charges at you at certain intervals. Another snake gets added at 30 and 10 seconds left. The last 10 seconds are crazy and I'm not really sure how you do it.
The final is pretty easy. Though the last phase can be tricky.
Some really silly dodges in this one.
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Also known as Touhou Shinmadan, The Ancient Square is a freeware i-mode Touhou fangame that was preserved last December.
Originally a homebrew that came out in 2010 on one of those old Nokia flipphones. Made to push the hardware to its absolute limits and it's crazy what they did with this.
It has 6 stages, an extra stage, multiple characters, a different stage 4 boss based on shottype, practice modes, the works. Kinda insane.
The music is also quite good, and made by the same guy that did the music for Touhou Fanmade Virtual Autography.
To make this actually playable on a phone, some changes were made to the mechanics.
Shot and focus is now a toggle and there is a weak autobomb.
System is basically Touhou 11, beating a pattern without dying gives you a life piece, collect 5 for an extra life. Bombs are power-based as well, each one consumes 1 power level.
No particularly unique scoring mechanics in this except that power items at max power raise the PIV. For the rest it's the standard score items, graze and spellcard bonuses. The PIV is in the bottom-right corner of the screen for some reason.
Since emulation for this platform is not exactly popular, the emulator is kinda jank.
You can only play this in a tiny window, so I had to use a custom Lossless Scaling profile to make it fullscreen.
Also not sure if it's the emulation, but there is a slight freeze every time a sound effect overlaps with another, and this has a high chance of also messing up the music. Pausing and unpausing fixes the music, but you can imagine that this makes playing and recording kinda annoying.
The solution I came up with was playing with only the music and manually adding in every single sound effect in post.
Luckily the game doesn't have that many sound effects...
I probably missed a popcorn explosion here or there but hey, let's make this a viewer challenge!
See if you can spot any sound effects I missed and tell me in the comments below!
Game page:
https://womohide.turubeotoshi.com/SHI...
Download the game here:
https://mega.nz/folder/RnlVDYDS#sHrSe... (tohoSINMA)
In the download there are two more Java Touhou games but these are very much not of the scale of this game.
Emulator setup guide:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i...
00:00 - Intro
00:18 - Stage
04:10 - Boss
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