Touhou: Mythical Mirror | Normal 1cc, Cirno and Suwako (Default Resources) 【東方 結界幻想録 鏡】
The Sonic 06 of Touhou STG... this is also the sequel to danmaq's Concealed the Conclusion. The music slaps hard, and the artwork is very cute, but all that potential gets thrown out the window due to how unpolished and unfair this game is. This run is the first clear online that uses default resources (because this game is that stupid) and doesn't use external focus autofire (the game becomes pathetic with autofire). Hard mode might be barely doable, but other people who have played this game and I can definitely say that Lunatic mode is impossible to 1cc with default resources and no autofire.
When Normal mode is harder than your average Lunatic, you know there's something funny going on. You only have 4 lives to work with throughout the run, one from the stage 3 midboss and the other from the stage 5 midboss. Some patterns are outright undodgeable even on this mode, so make sure to route your bombs if you ever play this game. This game may have the worst hitboxes I've seen in a traditional Touhou-styled fangame, but especially the amulet and mentos bullets, sometimes it'll look like you literally die to air.
This game is riddled with bugs as well, the most annoying one is the one where you stop in place while moving diagonally up against the sides of the screens which makes bottomdragging impossible to do (this actually gets me killed on the final boss' 3rd non in this run). Sometimes, boss patterns can continue to stay on screen even after shooting down the current healthbar, this can cause some nasty pattern overlaps (which equals impossible dodging a lot of the time). Another big one is sometimes you can still die if you land a successful deathbomb, with the bomb playing out like normal, always preemptively bomb if possible to avoid this.
I chose Cirno and Suwako because Cirno has an insanely fast unfocus speed and has a powerful bomb, great for macroing around a lot of the weird stuff this game throws at you. Suwako has great firepower, the best thing to do with her is to point-blank the boss and mash the focus button to combine her shots with Cirno's to do big damage. Personally, I do struggle using this shot a bit because of the ridiculous high focus speed, it seriously feels like playing as Reimu in the official games while doing a No-Focus run, half of my deaths in this run are due to me not having good control over the focus speed.
This game just makes me sad seeing all the good things go to waste, but I at least had a little bit of fun screwing around on Normal mode and going for this low-effort clear.