Got achievement “Subterranean Animism Normal 1CC”!
Illustration: Mashiro
Conventional wisdom holds that Orin is the bottleneck when it comes to 1CC’ing SA: she is supposedly harder than the final boss Utsuho. But that has not been my experience: Utsuho just wipes the floor with me, even with a lot of practice. I have a mental weakness against spellcards that move in opposite directions.
So I decided to just get good enough at passing Orin to give me enough lives to bomb past Utsuho. And that’s what I did. After a day’s worth of practice on Stage 5, I returned to the story mode and gave Orin a reasonably savage beating – no damage taken, minimal bombing, and three spellcards captured – passing her with 8 lives, which was more than enough to take down Utsuho.
Remember when I was struggling with easy mode? If I had known that all I had to do to clear normal was keep practicing for five months, I could have avoided a lot of shame and despair.