Touhou 16 東方天空璋 ～ Hidden Star in Four Seasons - Perfect Extra Stage (NMNBNR)

The Extra stage done without dying, using a bomb or using releases.

Time for the Extra stage this time. According to the plot so far, now it's time for the real fight with the final boss at her full power. The true battle, with Shin Okina, the True Last Boss!
...except the boss is way and way easier than in the main game.

This Extra stage has a special gimmick this time, instead of the normal subshots, you get a subshot that shoots behind you for this stage. The stage is thus designed around making use of that subshot by having a lot of enemies and attacks come from behind you. The buttshot is also really powerful, so you should use it over your normal shot whenever you can. Reimu might have a tiny bit of an advantage here, since her normal shot can also shoot behind her. Just a tiny bit.

The first half of the stage consists of aggressive grazing and POC’ing to quickly power up your subshot. The backshot is useful for destroying the orbs while being on top of the screen to POC all the items. You can also supergraze the first shot of the big fairies to get a bunch of season items at once.

The midboss consists of three spellcards and you can speedkill pointblank the first two by sitting on top of the boss and letting your backshot do a ton of damage. The speedkill on the second spell is a tiny bit luck-based, so make sure you get max options before the spell starts to do the most damage. The final spell is basically just a copy of their nonspells made into a spell. It’s completely static though, so luckily you can just memo it. The rest of the stage is pretty straight-forward.

The boss itself is not really that hard. All of the nonspells are mostly trivial but you shouldn’t underestimate them, since you can get a nasty wave it you get a bad overlap or if the boss is low on the screen. For the spells I’m not sure if this was intentional but almost every spellcard gives you the opportunity to sit on the boss for extra damage with the backshot. If you abuse this the spells will end quite quickly. For the cage spell with the green lines you want to make sure you end the spell when you have room to move up, or else you’ll get rammed by the boss when the spell ends.

I’m not sure what is up with the survival, it feels like something that belongs in Easy mode. The gaps between the bullets is way too big and there is hardly anything going on, you spend most of the time just standing still. You shouldn’t have any trouble on this, but you should take caution of the second bullet line from the bottom, since it can pointblank you if you’re not careful.
The final phase of the final spell is a bit scary, but you shouldn’t have any trouble if you just stay as far away from the boss as possible.

Overall I think the Extra stage is alright. The gimmick is neat and it allows for some unusual strategies that you normally can’t do. I do think the stage is a bit too easy and it does have some dull moments like the survival and the part right after the midboss where you just stand still for a while. Also having basically the same nonspell 10 times in a row isn’t exactly the height of creativity. Apparently you can also safespot every single nonspell on top of the boss, so that’s going to be fun for scorerunners I assume. I’m sure some people will also be disappointed that the final boss gets reused and that they’re not getting a new character for the Extra stage. The Extra stage theme is quite good though, I think it’s my favorite song from the game.

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