Uploaded July 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago

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Replay: maribelhearn.com/replays/royalflare/th16/th16_ud0447.rpy
The Narumi picture on the side is drawn by るう. Pixiv: pixiv.net/member.php?id=10349996

I have been working on this game since late May, as I wanted to play it for the Dodging Rain Competition (DRC) and go for a 6 billion clear. Then after I succeeded at that, I decided 6 billion wasn't good enough :D
The score and point item value (PIV) splits shown in the top left are my sum of bests, and for this game the realistic potential is about 400 million under in my experience.
7b is quite hard and took me significant practice and grinding effort; for me personally it felt harder than TD Lunatic Marisa 3.2b. 6b is relatively easy, much easier than 7b, and I got it pretty quickly all things considered.
I really enjoyed scoring this game, more than I initially expected. I think it's actually very fun! I'm very happy with the run also; only a few deaths and all of them were acceptable, there was no stupidity in the run. The scoring was satisfactory, there were minor losses all over but those are pretty much inevitable.

In Stage 1 and 2, you want to increase your PIV as much and as early as you can. In order to do so, you raise your season level, ideally all the way to level 6, and then release to cancel as many bullets as you can. In some situations a level 5 or even level 4 can be worth it. The primary way of doing this is through grazing, which awards you season items, and killing enemies awards you season items as well. Aya's bomb is very nice for it since you can place it outside of the graze point, so it doesn't kill the enemy, and you can even aim it left or right (if you use it standing still, the bomb will, too, and if you use it while moving left or right, so will the bomb), and combined with her fast movement, allowing her to cancel many bullets in a release, it makes her the best shottype for scoring. Autumn/Fall season is used for its ability to dash through bullets and cancel many of them per release, which makes it score much higher than other seasons; the only difficulty Autumn does not score the highest on is Easy, since there are not enough bullets to make it worth it.

By Nemuno's second spell, my PIV is so high that it is no longer worth it to increase the season level to raise it by a lot per release, so from that point onwards, I will spam releases and use as many of them as possible; for raw score, the season level is irrelevant; a release always gives you the same amount of score per cancelled bullet. Stages 3 to 6 therefore consist of simply trying to cancel as many bullets as possible for a lot of raw score, which is a simple concept but is a lot harder than it looks. It's easy to accidentally ram enemies and die, or die in between two releases because you ended up in a bad position when your release ended, die because you got the duration of the release wrong and thought you could dash through bullets for longer, die because you did not yet refill to level 1 and thus have no release, die because you underestimated the cooldown time after a release, and so on. In Stage 1 and 2, suicides are used in order to raise the season level and get new bombs, but from Nemuno's second spell onward, dying is bad for score, as it makes you miss a release as well as lose power, and power items at max power are point items in this game; deaths cost you at least 30 million each, more depending on how valuable the missed release was.

Why do I sometimes wait after a release and not just continue doing it immediately? That's because of the aforementioned cooldown time. After a release, you cannot use another release again for a short while, and the cooldown is longer the higher your season level was when you released. After a level 1, you can pretty much immediately release again, but levels 2 to 6 have waiting time even after the release sound effect finishes. While getting used to scoring the game, I would die many times because of the cooldown, ramming into bullets because I thought I could release.

If you have any questions about this game, the strategy used in this run or the score system in general, ask away! :)

Stage 1 0:07 Eternity Larva 2:16
Stage 2 4:01 Nemuno Sakata 6:08
Stage 3 8:27 Aunn Komano 10:58
Stage 4 14:28 Narumi Yatadera 17:20
Stage 5 20:20 Mai Teireida & Satono Nishida 22:56
Stage 6 25:40 Okina Matara 26:59

Thanks for watching!