Touhou 20 東方錦上京 ~ Fossilized Wonders - Perfect Stage 4 Lunatic (LNNNN) (ReimuG1)
267A clear of stage 4 Lunatic without deaths, bombs, hypers, hyper breaks and equipment that cancels bullets. Basically making it as pure as possible to just bullet dodging and not getting hit.
Crazy game, crazy hard stages.
Very fun though, easily the best Touhou in 10 years.
Stage 4 is unique in that is has four different variants depending on the color of your main story stone. What changes is the kind of revenge bullets the small pyramid enemies shoot and what the second phase of the midboss is.
For green the enemies shoot a bunch of random360 bullets, not too bad but the midboss pattern is probably the worst of them all. Insane casino luck check but at least with Reimu DPS it only lasts literally 3 seconds.
The boss is tricky but easier than the stage if you time some well-placed Wonder Stone cancels.
Without hypers to rely on, Wonder Stones now become your best friend, as they're the only source of bullet cancels remaining. For this reason managing the pyramid gauge becomes very important, as you want Wonder Stones to spawn at the most lucrative moments.
Managing this is quite hard though since there are so many variables in the system and chaining is a little unreliable. What's also jank is that Wonder Stones can spawn on the exact opposite side of the screen that you want them to be on, or they can just hide behind a boss or enemy and become unhittable. The game can really clown on you if it feels like it.
Equipment for this run:
G1 Main stone for no benefits (only gives extra bomb pieces).
R1 Unfocus.
G1 Focus.
B1 Passive (more DPS for unfocus shot).
G1 focus is extremely versatile and damaging. You can place them anywhere you want and if you plant them on top of bosses in a way that all four options hit at once you just melt their healthbars.
Reimu's Red1 unfocus is actually insanely good. Combined with the blue1 passive it does the most DPS in the game if most needles hit the enemy (bosses have smaller hitboxes so Green1 focus is still better here). It being so powerful also makes it really easy to shoot down Wonder Stones, and the faster you shoot these down the sooner the next one spawns, which just gives you more screen cancels in return.
DPS helps so, so much for this stage. It makes the part with the falling stones significantly easier and speedkilling the small pyramids is also really important. If you let these guys live for too long they just fill the screen with bullets.
The section right before the midboss is kinda annoying since the pyramid in the middle can just randomly spawn a bullet on top of you.
For the midboss you can dodge the first phase in the corner. Don't try dodging in the center as you'll just get walled.
The second phase is just hoping you'll get lucky in the 3 seconds you actually have to dodge it. But there is also a neat strategy here with how Wonder Stones actually interact with bosses and midbosses. You see when you beat a midboss, the Wonder Stone immediately blows up, so having one around during the midboss immediately clears all bullets on screen as soon as you beat said midboss. It clears up all the remaining junk bullets you'd otherwise have to dodge. And on something like this that's actually really huge.
I want to enter the boss with about 40~50% Pyramid gauge, and I adjust my gauge in the section after the midboss. You can pacifist the last stage section to maintain your gauge.
I use visual cues from Reimu's portrait to adjust my positioning for the G1 focus to hit the boss with all four options. This is harder than it looks as it's somewhat pixel perfect.
If done well you can melt non1 and the first spell. Which is good as the first spell is easily her hardest.
For spell 2 and 4 I want to time a Wonder Stone to get a cancel as that makes these two significantly easier. You can stall on non 2 or spell 3 if you get there with too little gauge. During bosses the gauge automatically fills over time.
I actually made a mistake on the last spell by killing the wonder stone too early.
You want to kill it as soon as the boss shoots her second wave. That way you can end the spell before anything hard happens, as the difficulty comes from overlapping waves.
The nonspells are generally not that bad but they can get kinda dumb if the boss moves down the screen too much. Better to seek refuge in the corners when that happens.
It's kinda funny how much more useful the unfocus variant of R1 is over the focus one. A lot of assist stones are also bugged in that they don't actually add DPS to the focus shots, which is wacky.
For the real DPS and assist numbers check out the community spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1emMlV0WZm8PMhGVFe9mPiH7aSixZrGB7VYtGpLFlhLQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Get the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3671710/Touhou_Kinjoukyou__Fossilized_Wonders/
00:00 - Stage
02:53 - Boss
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