Aug 25, 2022

World Record run performance of Touhou 18.5 by me

The game is very chaotic, and as such, it is very difficult to have consistent runs. But it is possible to make a good run by playing aggressively and being a little lucky.

You want to max out the Aunn cards and Byakuren cards first and foremost, and Futo cards if you possibly can, to make your magic circle as good as possible. Having Aya cards, life-giving cards and safety cards is also a good idea. In this run I picked the Tsukasa card because it has excellent synergy for survivability with the Megumu card.

You also want to have your first wave be the Flash fairy, which give huge amounts of gold when malleted. Of course that is very tedious to reroll constantly to get them, with no guarantee of even having a run, so any big-shooting fairy like the Kikyo fairy and the Narrow fairies work as well.

The ideal boss path is Eternity - Wakasagihime/Sekibanki - Kutaka - Reimu/Youmu - Clownpiece - Megumu - Momoyo. It is absolutely essential you fight Momoyo, because she more than doubles your score if played properly, and makes the most amount of money out of any boss available. If you don't get her, run may as well be dead. Additionally, Kutaka is a critical point of the run as well, because she gives so much more gold compared to the other possible bosses, and gives you about 5,000 gold overall. Otherwise, if you get any boss that isn't part of the ideal boss lineup, it's not run-killing by any means, but it is suboptimal. Overall, you want to look out for Kutaka and Momoyo for sure though.

You also want to increase your firepower so you can manage enemies during the stage better for gold gain, so Megumu's rice balls and Mamizou's Tanuki Companion are excellent choices for runs.

Managing your mallets is very much essential once you have a good run going. Each mallet takes approximately 9 seconds to recharge, so make sure to time each mallet appropriately with the boss timer to make the most of each pattern, and make sure to not time out any boss, otherwise your run dies.

Despite what seemed to be negative reception initially, I quickly grew to like the game, scoring it is surprisingly fun, and the card system arguably works even better here than it did in UM, and I feel like I am more consistent in this game than UM as well. The extra card variety adds a lot of flavor to the gameplay, and even with the RNG, there's a lot of things you can do here. The only lame part I would say is resetting for Momoyo who is at the very end of the run, and possibly the absence of replays (although you can record a full run video to circumvent that). Otherwise, very cool game that matched my expectations.