[Yoiyami Dancers] Eternity Larva Scenario - Hard 1cc

This game is essentially Necrodancer if it were a bullet hell shoot em up instead of a roguelike. See description for more information.
Game starts at 1:05. I included the opening cutscene because I like it.

I don't normally play Touhou fangames, but this one had such an interesting mechanic that I had to try it. Movement is similar to necrodancer - you can only make steps following the beat. Your character, all bullets and all enemies move in lockstep. You can move orthogonally or diagonally. You also attack when moving left or right.
There are two additional keys you can press. The charge button (default Z) keeps you in place for one beat, then moves you two steps on the next beat (along with a charged attack if moving horizontally). The item button (default X) uses your currently held item. For Eternity Larva this consumes collected power to upgrade either power, hp, or one of your shot types.

There are currently two characters in this game, Rumia and Eternity Larva. Each character corresponds to a completely different set of stages and bosses. So they're different "campaigns"
rather than merely different characters. I enjoy Eternity Larva's stages and mechanics more, so I'm playing as her.

The soundtrack is great, the art is (very) cute, and the mechanics itself are extremely fun to play. It plays differently from a regular bullet hell, because you have to constantly think about your parity (with respect to the bullets) so that you can "jump" through them. It's very easy to get yourself trapped if you aren't thinking multiple steps ahead and end up stuck on the wrong parity. I think it's fun as the game keeps you constantly thinking.

In terms of boss design, I think most of the boss patterns are quite creative and very fun to dodge. I particularly like the stage 3 (clownpiece) boss fight. Many of them are tricky to figure out but are quite satisfying to execute once you figure them out. A lot of them however aren't very intuitive on the first playthrough, and required me to go into stage practice to figure out how they work before I could actually dodge them. A lot of boss patterns get far easier after you learn a specific movement sequence. I hope for a reduced reliance on memorizing static patterns in future scenarios.

I could go into detail about each boss' patterns, with strategies and my personal thoughts, but that would probably make the description too long.

I'm not too fond of the design of some of the stages. I feel like a lot of the enemy movements' (in particular the bunnies and dogs) are very unpredictable, and because you only attack forward, it makes it very annoying to chase them around, especially as they can move two steps vertically per beat. It feels like I am required to memorize their movements to kill them.

Regarding strategy, my immediate priority is a lv.3 wide shot, as it can hit all rows at once. I try to get it before the midboss of the first stage. I reset if this midboss escapes, because its powerups are useful to snowball the rest of the stage. After that, I focus only on upgrading power and pick up further wide shot upgrades if I miss the cycle for the power up.

Killing enemies is very important in the stages, because otherwise the stage can snowball against you pretty hard. If you don't kill enemies in time, they quickly flood the screen with bullets, making it difficult for you to move around, and you also miss out on powerups, so you won't be able to kill the next batch of enemies in time either and the cycle repeats. In addition, Eternity Larva's powerups tend to snowball pretty hard. There is no cap in power, and an upgraded wide shot can get overpowered very quickly. As long as you can keep up with killing enemies in the early stages to collect powerups, you quickly gain enough power to easily wipe all enemies from the screen with a couple of wide shots, which gives you even more powerups.

Overall, the stages feel like a constant arms race where you are constantly chasing powerups to keep up with the enemies' increasing stats. I would prefer if powerups didn't scale this significantly, and if there was a cap in power similar to the mainline Touhou games. I would also prefer if your character didn't have that much hp. For now it seems like it's better to tank hits and focus on killing enemies for powerups rather than prioritize dodging bullets (though if you don't dodge bullets you can still die pretty quickly).

I have not tried lunatic yet. I may try it someday.

Yoiyami Dancers on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/19...