H.C.Staff

It seems that over the course of the last half year, H.C.Staff has sort of morphed from an anime blog into some other kind of blog.

I, for one, welcome our new fairy overlords.

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Now that I’m on spring break, I put some time into trying to finally finish Mountain of Faith. Since I could sometimes clear Stage 4 without taking damage, and I could sometimes clear Stage 5 without taking damage, I figured all I had to do was get a good run where I clear both those stages with little or no damage, and have enough life to just bomb my way through the sixth and final stage.

I got that good run before too long, and got to Kanako, the Stage 6 boss, with 6 extra life.

I then proceeded to bomb my way through Kanako’s attacks one at a time. Miracle of Otensui was as difficult as advertised, but it folded to Hax Sign: Bomb Everything.

When I got to Kanako’s final spellcard, the titular “Mountain of Faith”, I discovered a number of distressing things.

Illustration: soine

First, once the card activated, my bombs were… suppressed. They didn’t even wipe the incoming bullets from a quarter of the screen.

Second, it seemed like when I bombed, Kanako became immune to damage for the duration of the bomb, taking no damage from the bomb itself or the bullets I hit her with during that time.

Third, once I had knocked out about half of Kanako’s lifebar, everything… sped up.

Needless to say, I died horribly.

It seems that Frein’s comment on an earlier post was true: Most of Mountain of Faith is not all that hard. It’s Kanako that’s hard.

Well, it seems like there’s no easy path to victory for me. I’m going to have to learn to beat that last spellcard the hard way. I still do think I have what it takes, but it’s going to be a struggle.

P.S. After I died, I dialed the difficulty down to Easy Mode for “revenge”. As you would expect, I took no damage until I reached Kanako, and I kicked her ass on the first try without having to use a continue. However, a no-continue clear on Easy Mode is not really something to be proud of…

One final assignment stands between me and spring break.

I have to turn this…

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So they were handing out the midterm grades last Wednesday, and the professor showed a bell curve of the scores with a low of 143 and a high of 190 (out of 200). I got my paper back and guess what, my group’s the 143. And we were docked points for the most stupid reason too: we had uploaded the files for submission, but forgot to include some of them in the final report. The group leader tried to appeal, but the professor was trying to teach us a lesson about negligence and the disasters it causes in real life engineering.

My groupmates are upset, but somehow it’s AWESOME that a project named Refrigerator Fairy has such a stupid grade for such a stupid reason. I was going to ask for the grade to be lowered to a more aesthetically pleasing 99, but then we wouldn’t have a passing grade and that would be trouble.

BAKA BAKA

Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen you before. I’m Remilia’s little sister, Flandre Scarlet. It’s been a while since Remi sent anyone down to the basement for me to play with.

You look scared. Remi must have told you that I’ve been sealed here for over 400 years because I’m unstable and destructive. That’s not true at all, trust me. Do I look like an unstable and destructive person to you? I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to play with you.

By “play” I mean “discuss concurrent programming concepts”. Yeah, being stuck down here in the basement with nothing but books and computers to play with has kind of made me an expert programmer.

Today I’ll tell you about this special system I developed called QED. It’s used to verify that concurrent programs work the way they should. In the outside world, a team of Turkish programmers developed this in a couple of years. My version of QED isn’t as robust as theirs, and it’s taken me over 10 years to develop. I blame hardware failure. The computers Sakuya sends down here for me to work with never last for very long before they break. It’s really annoying.

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During my no-damage clear of the first four stages of Mountain of Faith, I quickly realized something: the fact that bombs draw from your attack power, and therefore your attack power goes down whenever you bomb, is not meant to discourage you from bombing. In fact, it encourages you to bomb because you can refill easily from the power-up items dropped by enemies. It’s as if most enemies drop pieces of bomb for you to use.

If you want to capture all the spellcards, Mountain of Faith is harder than Imperishable Night. But if you want to just get through the stages without taking damage, Mountain of Faith is not that hard. Just learn the patterns enough to where you only need one bomb for each card, and bomb everything. You’ll get all your power back from enemy drops.

Mountain of Faith also makes it easier to collect those power items. When you’re focused, nearby power items will gravitate toward you. And when you’re not focused, you can collect all items on screen by flying above the “Item Get Border Line”, helpfully indicated for you at the start of the game. (You don’t even need to be at full power to use the Item Get Border Line, unlike in Imperishable Night.) Additionally, there is no difference in your attack between having 4 power and 5 (max) power, meaning when you bomb at 5 power, you don’t really sacrifice any power and just clear some space in your inventory to collect power items.

If you’re at 5 power, power items aren’t pieces of bombs, they just add to your score and (I’m assuming) count toward a new point of life. If you’re not playing for score, you should bomb to keep safe. Every time you take damage, a little more than three bombs worth of power are spawned near your character, so even if you depleted your power to nothing thanks to overbombing, you’re close to full again as soon as you get hit. The fact that there is no deathbomb window no longer matters, because you learn to bomb early and often.

I’ve managed no-damage clears of Mountain of Faith’s stage 4 and 5 in fewer than 50 tries, far less than the several hundred I’ve spent on the corresponding stages of Imperishable Night. Also, check out this survey, taken from the Toho fansite gensokyo.org. It counts people, from a set of 13,000 Toho players, and how hard of a difficulty at which they were able to complete various games in the series without using a continue.

Imperishable Night, which I cleared not too long ago, is the game that the most people have cleared on Normal or harder, but although it seems Mountain of Faith’s difficulty rises greatly at Hard and Lunatic, many people still manage to clear it on Normal. So to Sage, who says Imperishable Night is the only game he was able to clear without continuing, I say try Mountain of Faith, and bomb more.

Also, it seems that the high randomness of Phantasmagoria of Flower View (my first Toho game, and which I have to this day been unable to one-credit-clear on any level harder than Easy) is not a barrier for people who don’t rely on memory as much as I do, and that Subterranean Animism really is hell on earth.

You should already know who I am. In case you don’t, I am Aya Shameimaru, reporter, writer, editor, and publisher of Bunbunmaru, Gensokyo’s leading newspaper.

Today’s lecture is about privacy issues, which I run into on a daily basis as a journalist.

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