Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers - Lunatic Sakuya No Deaths No Bombs No Cards
250Michael blessed this run :3
Touhou 18 is quite a difficult LNNN to do!
It's a category that has some really tricky RNG patterns intermingled with precise stage routes, and there aren't many moments to breathe. Enemies in this game are very tanky, if you can't use ability cards to up your damage. On top of that, UM doesn't have shot types which cover all the bases to be a comfortable LNN shot either; they all have serious weaknesses and require a lot of effort to get consistent with throughout the game.
Likely the best shots for LNNN are Reimu and Sakuya. Reimu is very much a jack of all trades, master of none. She does decent on bosses and can trivialize a lot of stage sections, but has a few situations where she is just a bit too weak to kill things before they become exhausting. Sakuya is especially good at bosses, as she has the highest focus damage and this allows her to do speedkills that make the other shot types envious. However, Sakuya is very finnicky, as all of her nofocus movement affects your knife aim in some way. This often means that you need to do patterns almost entirely focused if you want to actually make use of your good DPS, as any nofocus would deviate the angles of your knives. With a good amount of practice, she becomes a very satisfying and decently powerful shot to play though, and it makes in my opinion for a very fun and challenging Lunatic No Deaths/Bombs run.
Whilst I don't want to give a breakdown of every stage, I want to mention two of them:
Stage 4 in this game is an absolute menace. Luckily, Sakuya is quite good at the boss, but the stage remains an absolute RNG hell. I'd say it's possibly the hardest stage in any Windows Touhou mainline game.
The tradeoff is that Stage 6 is quite simple. Most of the stage consists of routing, and whatever bad RNG might occur is not that hard to mitigate. If stage 6 was as difficult as the rest of the game, it would definitely be up there with EoSD, UFO and LoLK in terms of LNNN difficulty, though it's very close to it regardless.
Anyways, I might still explore the other shot types a bit in this game as I am still enjoying it ^^
Replay file: http://replay.lunarcast.net/replay/th18_ud3565.rpy
Twitch highlight: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1303268886 (will add it to youtube soon too)
My twitch: http://twitch.tv/Yatsuzume/collections
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yatsuzume
Alternate channel (for the worst of shitposts): https://www.youtube.com/user/Detonexploder