Part 26: Ah, Gods and Mortals on the Grounds of the Divine Lake (L)
The only thing I absolutely need to do pre-battle is redistribute my shells to people with Strike.
There's nothing new with the stage beyond general AI buffs.
On the other hand, Kanako is absolutely not messing around anymore. Lunatic gives her attributes huge buffs all around, and like any good Super she has access to Strike, Guard, and Grit.
Though as usual, casting Guard is gated behind low health in the AI's protocols. Most of the time Kanako will only cast Grit, which is much less annoying.
Marisa is completely useless against Suwako, so she can just blow all of her MP on Master Sparking Kanako six feet under. Alice too.
While Suwako has buffed attributes too, the main difficulty change is that she spawns underwater. Her Small size, S Rank in water, access to the Focus spirit, and the fact that on Hard/Lunatic she starts with Predict active all combine to make her an absolute bitch to hit. And if that weren't bad enough, she has Fury too so she could care less about Support Defense.
Thankfully she still doesn't hit that hard.
My usual strategy is to surround her then wait for her SP to deplete. Once she goes a turn without casting Focus,
everyone loads on as many accuracy boosting spirits as they can and try to take down her first two lifebars in one turn. This isn't as hard as it sounds, as even people without Strike can still trigger Strike'd Support Attacks.
Hilariously, Koa took down the first lifebar at a 35% chance.
Komachi is very helpful here. As I alluded to earlier, her finisher does more damage to enemies underwater. She may have skipped out being useful against Nitori, but at least she can help with Suwako!
...On Hard/Lunatic!
Mokou grabs the kill. It's pretty important that she gets a shell by the way; as you'd expect, her fire attacks are all very weak underwater. And as A Character With Strike, that is kind of a problem!
Theoretically Marisa would deserve a shell too to help her lasers, but Marisa is A Character Without Strike. Barring ridiculous grinding anyway.
Unfortunately, at this point I realized I screwed up. See, the game defaults to Kanako if you time the dual spell out. The only way to fight Suwako last is thus to defeat her, and this is pretty hard since she moves all the way to the left side of the screen! What I should have done was lure her over there back when she originally spawned so my units wouldn't have to move far, but now I basically have to bum rush everyone over while weathering Kanako's attacks. And even then I only get one turn to attack. Faced between restarting and just saving, I picked the latter.
Also I needed to record Mountain of Faith's animation.
Komachi's PS comes in handy here.
As does having useless units sacrifice their turns to bomb away danmaku.
A ton of save scumming later, Sakuya and Marisa (who was shot down immediately afterwards) landed two 7%'s, doing just enough damage that Mokou and Meiling's last Strikes finished Suwako off.
quote:
You did better than I expected again. You're better than I thought.
So you've finally figured out how strong we are!
We've made it this far, so you better not call us weak!
Indeed, with that much power gathering faith should be simple for you. But faith without respect for the gods is meaningless.
Well aren't you stubborn. Sorry, but I don't see you guys doing well either.
Yeah, your way of doing things is busted from the start. Gensokyo doesn't need people as stiff as you.
That seems accurate. All you want is faith, but you demand tribute, instate rules and swagger about. It's pitiful to be so concerned with your image.
In the outside world, you lost your faith... that's what that shrine maiden said.
So you abandoned the outside world to move to Gensokyo...
Of course, if anybody gets too rowdy, I exterminate them!
quote:
Scourge Sign "Lord Mishaguji"
Fuck Lord Mishaguji. This pain in the ass spell can't be timed out, and every turn it slices 30% MP/SP from anyone in its field. And since she also moves to the top of the field, whoever you send to attack her is going to have to endure a few turns of that drain too. If you have Koa around (or even just kept a handle on your MP usage) the MP drain isn't much of a problem, but nothing can be done about the loss of SP.
On Lunatic, there's really no way around this spell but suiciding and save scumming. It's not nearly as bad on Normal (I think the drain rate is -15%?), but then this entire chapter is defanged on Normal.
If you're curious, Mountain of Faith is also much tougher since Kanako is a lot harder to take down now. I'd still rather face her than Suwako though.
Anyway, my aces in the hole are Reimu and Sakuya; at WP level 5, Fantasy Seal has a 56% hit rate at point blank, while Sakuya's World has a 36% with Meiling nearby and is ammo based so it doesn't have to worry about the danmaku. Private Square helps too, though at only a 35% activation rate it's annoying to trigger along with a hit.
Neither of those help on turns where Suwako casts Focus though.
After getting Suwako down halfway I glanced at Komachi and realized she still had one Strike left. This... actually wouldn't have changed my strategy at all, since if I got her in close enough for Support Attacks, the danmaku would have drained her SP away.
After something like 14 resets, the suffering finally ended with a miraculous 10% Ascension Kick.
quote:
quote:
W-We won... That was an incredible spellcard, but somehow we made it through!
So what now, god of Moriya? Wanna keep the danmaku flying?
Only lost two people. Not bad for my first try in a long while.
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The game has been paused. Please take a break. ...With the incident resolved, Youkai Mountain and the Moriuya Shrine have completely reconciled. I, along with everyone else, enjoy an unforgettable time. Thanks to this danmaku battle, the bonds between humans, youkais, and now even gods have deepened... Now then, please have fun playing Chapter 24 of Fantasy Maiden Wars P: "Danmaku Chugfest"!