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V-NEO

Start Your Touhou Career on Easy Mode! Don't Trust the Bunnies!

"EASY MODO???" never say this in front of a person who plays touhou, or even anyone who takes bullet hells seriously. say, would you be pissed too if someone mocked you for starting with the easy stuff first when you only just started? you would be. if you already say shit like this or afraid of being mocked, here's why it's worth it to start in easy mode.

YOU LEARN FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS FASTER

chances are, you may not know what skills are considered fundamental to touhou or bullet hells in general, but they are there, just that it may not seem obvious.

of course, this also means they're universal, so you can spend time learning one bullet hell game, and your skills can be transferred to another. you may already figured this out if you frequently play fighting games.

while this is not all of them, some skills include:

  • reading
    • how you manage your viewing area to analyze patterns and figure out how to deal with them
  • resource management
    • how and when you use your bombs, when you pop hypers, etc.
  • movement technique
    • shmups generally don't have multiple movement options besides the basic "press key, move in that key's direction." this is just more so methods to nullify patterns with movement and how clean your movement is
  • routing
    • your planned series of actions throughout the entire game; doesn't necessarily have to be a single route, can be a flowchart or similar in case of mistakes.

now, easy mode generally has a greatly reduced bullet density and speed compared to normal mode. in some games, it may even skip entire endboss spells like byakuren's superhuman spell and murasa's survival final, where both of them are present on normal and higher difficulties.

however, the big thing about nerfed bullet counts and speed is that it allows for your reading skills to develop more smoothly. even on normal mode, some patterns can be overwhelming to a new player, regardless of what stage it is.

take yuyukos first spell in ten desires. between easy and normal respectively, the red butterfly subpattern is completely absent at the former. screenshots are taken from the THWiki, which is linked right here.

yuyuko's first spell in TD on easy yuyuko's first spell in TD on normal

as a new player, the easy mode version should be more comprehensible, as the normal mode version technically has two patterns to deal with.

if you're curious on how each subpattern behaves, the blue subpattern is static, starting off with rotating for a while then letting go, alternating between left and right across waves. the red subpattern also rotates for a while, then aims straight to the player.

furthermore, the normal mode version demands streaming, a technique where you tap extremely little to a direction to make most aimed bullets miss you. this is also done repeatedly. this is absent in the easy version, so the reading demands are lower and even lower for movement. thus, the routing demands are lower for easy.

as a side note, it's possible to gain trance and skip this entire pattern! this timestamp starts at the beginning of the run. spell 1 starts at 1:51 of the video.

YOU LEARN GAME-SPECIFIC GIMMICKS FASTER

as expected from the increased room for error on easy, you'll be given room to understand any game-specific gimmicks and mechanics without the fear of making a mistake and getting punished badly.

to start, UFO is a great game to start on easy, especially if you have prior fundamental skills already and don't want to be overwhelmed by its patterns while trying to understand the summoning gimmick. to briefly explain the importance of summoning, it's essentially your primary method of getting resources and cashing out for score. without it, survival gets much harder, as the only times you get resources not from UFOs are beating most midbosses and endboses, and nueball on stage 4 depending on your performance.

another one is TD, as discussed here already. it has a trance gimmick. it's basically the touhou's take on the shmup hyper mechanic: you build the meter, depicted as three spirits and a skeleton head on the bottom left, by shooting down enemies and collecting the white and blue spirits. activating it massively increases your damage and makes you invincible until it runs out. another major component of this is doubling the amount of resources gained by picking up life and bomb pieces while it's active. interestingly, TD has generally less threatening patterns than the average game in the series, so this some of this game's patterns on easy lack a lot of density.

for both games, staying on easy after understanding the gimmick also allows you to route them too, as both games require well-thought out routing and using the reduced demands of easy mode allows you to practice your ability to make a route without having to do way more work than starting on normal difficulty

YOU STILL GET THE GOOD ENDING AND EXTRA STAGE IF YOU 1CC

this is a huge deal if you don't like bullet hell gameplay that much but you care about the writing. as such, if you wanna get the games over with, play this difficulty. however, the only games that don't give you the good ending on easy are LLS, EoSD (this one ends at stage 5! i know this by experience!), and MoF.

also, extra stages can be unlocked by 1CCing on easy starting from DDC. this is good for unlocking more content quicker.

MANY PLAYERS STARTED ON EASY AND REACHED TOP LEVEL GAMEPLAY

i can even say it for myself. i started my touhou journey on normal but eventually it got overwhelming. switching to easy has made the learning curve much smoother for me.

CLOSING

in short, easy mode lowers the demands for you to complete the game, so learning from zero is more bearable. also, its a good choice if you just wanna view the maingame content quickly and unlock extra sooner. and you dont need to be ashamed since many top-level players have started on this difficulty and later achieved high levels of plays.

...don't trust the lunarians next time.