Touhou 束方嘘時空 ～ Fools Rush In - Lunatic No-Miss Clear (Ellen)
113A 1cc of this is a forced no-miss.
Okay a clear with a non-fast character this time.
Ellen is incredibly slow, but she can make up for it with insane damage.
Her level 1 just obliterates everything, and you can spam it incredibly fast.
Downside of a slow character is that it takes much longer to reach the boss, which greatly increases the chances of everything snowballing out of control. You also can't make many mistakes, once the opponent catches up to you, you usually already lost.
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Touhou Fools Rush In is a remake of Touhou 3 that was released back in 2017 by Jynx.
Jynx is mostly known nowadays for the Len'en series, but before that he was pretty famous for releasing videos of remakes of the PC-98 Touhou games. This used to be a yearly event every April Fools. He never released any of those remakes though, except for this one.
That being said this game is still kind of a beta and never really got finished.
It only has the bare minimum of features completed and the game is completely jacked in terms of balance, only 3 out of 9 characters can really beat the game. The game also has a lot of concepts that sound good on paper but don't seem to work well in practice.
The game was mostly used by Jynx as a bonus to promote his arrange album that he released back then. In order to actually get more than two tracks to play in the game you had to actually buy the arrange album and put its music in the game folder. Game is free but the music is not.
The game uses a pretty unique system that mixes the gameplay of the Phantasmagoria games with the racing element of Raizing's Kingdom Grand Prix.
The goal is to reach the finish line and beat the boss before the other player. Each character has different racing speeds and you get stalled whenever a midboss is on screen or when you get hit. Unlike Kingdom Grand Prix though, you don't race faster by moving up the screen.
There is health in this, but HP recovers so quickly that it's basically impossible to die from getting hit.
New mechanics in this are the power meter and the midboss radar.
The meter on the left represents your power meter and it goes up for killing enemies and using charges, you lose a chunk of power when you get hit. I think it's a pretty neat way of fixing the problem that the original PoDD had where the most optimal survival strat was to just never shoot at all.
The midboss radar is the circle at the bottom of the screen and the dot indicates where random midboss encounters are, when these dots turn red the encounter gets triggered. You want to hug the opposite side of the screen they're on to "push" these midbosses away before they get triggered. That being said you can hug the side they're on and still have enough time to push them away before they trigger. The right side is safer than the left because it's easier to get rammed from behind by a popcorn on the left.
The racing and midboss radar seem interesting, but the implementation seems a lot to be desired.
For the radar it mostly just makes you stay to the side of the screen all game, and the racing speed just makes the slower characters super unviable.
The trick to winning is to only use level 4 charges in stages to reflect midbosses back and then spam level 2 charges during the boss to cancel bullets while sneaking in level 1's to do more damage.
Basically every time there is a midboss on your screen, you're losing. You want to get rid of these asap. Luckily the AI didn't read the manual about the midboss radar and will not make conscious attempts to avoid encounters.
Things can spiral out of the control REALLY fast, and suddenly you get endless waves of impossible spam. You have to make sure you don't make too many waves too fast.
Troublesome bosses:
Marisa - Insane laser spam that can easily wall you over and over.
Kana - Hard because she has the fastest racing speed. If you get hit too much you might not be able to catch up.
Chiyuri - See Marisa.
Yumemi - Yumemi has the slowest racing speed but she has an INSANELY jacked boss. It's actually possible to die here from getting hit too much because level 2's don't protect you from the cross spam.
Also yeah this game had a fanmade English patch, which is absolutely wild to me.
Download the game here:
https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/15082
Buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp here:
https://tricknostalgie.bandcamp.com/album/3
In order to get the music to play in the game, download the music as ogg files from Bandcamp and rename the files in this manner: https://i.imgur.com/ZHweXR7.png
English patch:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Op_7zbbTG9-fUTIrfUPZXT1NqGe9Vdds
Intro: 00:00
Stage 1 - Reimu Hakurei : 00:26
Stage 2 - Kotohime : 03:09
Stage 3 - Mima : 06:32
Stage 4 - Marisa Kirisame : 09:21
Stage 5 - Rikako: 12:45
Stage 6 - Kana Anaberal: 15:58
Stage 7 - Ellen: 19:07
Stage 8 - Chiyuri Kitashirakawa : 22:22
Stage 9 - Yumemi Okazaki : 25:35