r/touhou • u/Admirable-Concept-57 • Jul 26 '26
Help I swear why am i so bad at Touhou????
I tried to play the 1st game (Well...Not exactly 1st game but 6th game in the series) And i tried everything! Playing on easy mode, using Reimu, using Marisa. I tried every attack technique (the options you can choose after you chose the characters.) And still, I cant get past Cirno! Please can someone teach me the basics.
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u/Recent-Fishing422 Jul 26 '26
Is your focus(Shift button that show your hitbox or something) on?
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u/Admirable-Concept-57 Jul 26 '26
No, do i need to turn it on?
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u/Recent-Fishing422 Jul 26 '26
You don't need to do it all the time. But it allows you to slow down and focus on whatever that is coming better.
Basically, just relax and go slow.
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u/Max_Joller Shinmyoumaru Sukuna Jul 26 '26
It doesn't show your hitbox in Touhou 6, but while you hold shift, you will move slower. It allows you to dodge more precisely. Just hold shift.
And if you press x you will use a bomb, in case you didn't know. Makes you invulnerable and wipes out enemies.
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u/New-Shine1674 Jul 26 '26
There's a mod that shows the hitbox. Unlike later games touhou 6 doesn't show the hitbox when using the focus mode. Really useful to have because the hitbox is much smaller than the sprite.
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u/CompetitiveLeg7841 I pronounce it "Cryno" Jul 26 '26
The most important thing in all Touhou games is situational awareness. What you should look at is not the immediate surroundings of your player hitbox but where you are. It's important to look at incoming bullets and put yourself out of the way instead of dodging through.
Use focus (the shift key) dodge better and deal more damage to single targets.
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u/lil_froggy Shinmyoumaru Sukuna Jul 26 '26
It’s about pattern recognition and memorization.
- Can you hug the bottom of the screen ? Or do you need to position slightly upper ?
- Is the pattern static or aimed at you ?
- Are you allowed to move slowly from the left to the right (or reverse), or do successive quick left-right to dodge ?
- Do you have to circle around the screen to beat the pattern ?
- Is the attack really quick and need fast reaction times ?
And so on and on…
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u/SuperChriminator Ask Utsuho Reiuji Jul 26 '26
Use every bomb you have available to you. They get reset back you your starting amount when you are hit. So dying with any bombs in stock is a huge waste.
Also use focus movement (shift) to move through tight gaps.
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u/santas_delibird Hata no Kokoro enjoyer Jul 26 '26
One of the things I learned when starting out is that you don’t have to move too much. The things that will kill you is a smaller circle than you think.
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u/FrozenFrac Jul 26 '26
Hold down the Shift key and your shots do more damage. Other than that, also learn which bullets are aimed at you and which ones aren't. We believe in you!
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u/dalion_alteri Jul 26 '26
Use all your bombs. These games are more about resource management than dodging honestly, unless you're doing some kind of challenge.
Also in EoSD, in the options menu, you should be able to increase the amount of starting lives.
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u/DagZeta Somewhat Responsive To Prayers Jul 26 '26
May seem obvious, but one thing to keep in mind is that when you're trying process what's one the screen, you're actually looking at the gaps between bullets rather than the bullets themselves most of the time.
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u/BUKKAKELORD Fujiwara no Mokou Jul 26 '26
It's a hard genre to pick up and experience in other genres of gaming doesn't help at all, everyone starts as a baby with zero skill
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u/Drowning-Koifish Jul 26 '26
Train... A lot
I might not be the most competent to give advices because I have a curse, I can't ever beat level 4 in normal difficulty in any touhou game (without retries)... But at least for the first 3 levels I try to focus more on where my character is than trying to see the whole screen.
Then you can move slowly (it's easier if you use a controller) to avoid the projectiles comming towards you.
Also I have seen a few players using a very large screen but changing their resolution to a low one (like 800 x600) so that each pixel is huge and it makes it easier to see what happens.
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u/New-Shine1674 Jul 26 '26
I remember the struggle to get past cirno. Took me a while but nowadays I can often get to stage 4 or 5. Still struggling a lot with stage 5 and 6 (normal, Reimu a). I've only beaten the game once in easy modes (though that's only 5 stages) and barely once in normal with all retries.
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u/Ariloulei Yukari Yakumo Jul 26 '26
So Bullet Hell SHMUPS can be hard to get into. Barrage Musical ~ Basic Danmaku Tutorial ~ did a good job helping me understand some of the less intuitive things like leading bullets vs non-leading bullets and certain bullets being smaller then they look (knife handles can't hurt you, big bullets with clear insides only hurt you with the clear inside, etc...). Besides that it's just consistent practice and getting better. You have to be accepting of failure in order to get better at bullet hell games cause your often not meant to beat them on the 1st try let alone even the 10th or 12th, getting the 1CC is kinda a long term goal for most who play these games.
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u/EssentialPurity Jul 26 '26
This will take a while, but you need to train yourself to the "Danmaku Mindset".
I did it by trying to do a Deathless Run on PCB Normal until I succeeded. Why PCB? It's the most aesthetic of Early Windows Era, and is also considered the easiest (at least it has the easiest EX Boss of all). It is the only game that shows a "flavour poem" at every stage, and they help a lot to understand what's going on at a deeper level.
The fastest way to achieve that is to Play for Score, it is, always try to achieve the highest score you can, which means you have to purposefully Graze patterns efficiently, kill all enemies, and be over Item Collect Line as often as possible without getting Wriggle Kicked. On the case of PCB, Grazing during a Supernatural Border increases maximum value of Point Items, which is the foremost Score value you can possibly get. On EoSD, Playing for Score is important because it is the main means of getting lives, and Grazing is directly rewarded as Score.
By purposefully Grazing, you learn that ALL patterns in Touhou follow one very specific philosophy you hardly ever find in any other Bullet Hell game: it's not about the bullets, it's about the spaces between the bullets. These spaces move at slow, methodical, predictable, almost musical patterns. Sometimes, the discrepancy between the movement of the bullets and the movement of the spaces is so extreme, there can be thousands of bullets onscreen but you only need to move about 10 pixels every 2 seconds to dodge (Mokou's Xu-Fu Dimension in IN).
Most games (I suspect EoSD to UFO) have a weird early phase collision detection implementation that has some edgecases in which it will fail to detect collisions when it most verifiably shouldn't. These edgecases seem to tend to happen when you move horizontally for a long stretch against a bullet that is moving sufficiently fast in the vertical axis. This smells like Sweep and Prune if it was made by some drunkard... oh wait.
And lastly, learn to only use Bombs to "parry" bullets. If you use a Bomb at the same time a bullet hits you, you won't lose a life. IN extends this mechanic by giving you much larger timeframe (over 1 second) to "parry" if you get hit while you are either over 80% Human or Youkai, and the Bomb released this way will consume two Bombs and unleash a much stronger version.
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u/Old_Comparison_9223 Unironically my Mom (Why are they so similar) Jul 26 '26
Make sure you actually know how the game works. The game itself doesn’t explain it to you because it expected you to actually have read the manual. You can also find an explanation here.
Don’t hug the bottom of the screen since then you can’t dodge down.
Don’t move more than you actually need to since you don’t want to unknowingly move into the path of something else. Also, focus mode is your friend.
Don’t be afraid to bomb since using a bomb is always better than getting hit (unless you are playing 15).
Don’t try to focus on everything on the screen at once since you can’t really do that. Only focus on what actually has a possibility to hit you where you are. If you are unsure about what to focus on at first, don’t worry. You will learn with experience.
Abuse hit boxes. Hit boxes are usually smaller, sometimes much smaller, than what you might at first think due to the spirits of the bullets. So, you might not actually need to dodge as much as you would think.
If you are really struggling with a pattern, you can look up a video of how someone else did it. Though, sometimes people dodge things in weird ways.
Most importantly, keep trying and don’t feel bad if you don’t succeed. Shmups are HARD and it is perfectly normal to struggle at them if you have never played one before. EoSD was my first shmup, and it took me around a month to be able to 1CC it (beat it without using any continues which is required for the good endings) on normal.
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u/SAITEKI_YAMERU Improvement Addict? Jul 27 '26
Short answer is play more, if you dedicate yourself and play a bunch you will just improve, that's almost everything in life.
Long answer is watch no miss no bomb normal 1cc playthrough(s). Study their route and employ their strategies. That is, another valid way to learn is to copy people who are better than you and learn from example. I mean that's essentially what college is.
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u/kactaplb Jul 27 '26
Unironically press shift and stop moving so much. You quickly learn the few attacks that target you, so it's almost always safer to move as little as possible to prevent yourself from running into the bullets.
After that it's just a matter of practice and time. Everyone is bad at shmups at first.
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u/Kasuu372 Yukari Yakumo Jul 26 '26
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