Sunday 3 July 2022

A3, Usatei and Kanbu

I had a great feast that night, but I couldn't resist to try the new maps...


One Thursday I entered the arcade to try those new Nostalgia songs and suddenly the DDR cab looked a bit different...it wrote DDR A3.

The update came sooner than expected.

They seem to have read what I wrote last time with A3 comes with many challenging maps. Happy angel is a nice refreshment to an old song, Zektbach's ZETA gets a 17 which should have been an 18 but oh well. We get Reiwa as the newest bullshit 18 after NGO and DEAD END groove radar remix...they are mostly fun to play with though. More importantly they contain a much wider spectrum of technicalities which allow players to grind particular skills. 


量子の海のリントヴルム is surely the highlight of the batch (or perhaps sdvx players would be more  excited with Black Emperor but it looks like a standard 18 and not that gimmicky comparing to its sdvx maps). BPM 140(280) with nonstop streams throughout, 834 notes in like 105 seconds with 1/6s and jumps in between. Adding all these together such difficulty is nowhere else to be seen at the same level -- you get those jumps mixed in streams in the two Possessions, but those are intermittent. You have consecutive jumps in Tohoku evolved csp and Fascination eternal love mix, but it's only a short section for Tohoku and it's the hardest bit for Fascination eternal love mix with nothing much else. 

After trying that for the first time (in my second credit of the day, very unusual -- following my standard schedule 18 only happens from the 5th credit) I would say that its exhaustion level is very similar to Paranoia revolution challenge which is a 19. I failed both of them in earlier attempts in a similar way: your brain is still functioning but your legs are not responding anymore despite your greatest effort. 

The good news however, is that this is a 140 song. With 400+ notes hitting to fast on my first try, I believe that I can save my stamina if played without panicking. Those jumps are fearsome but most of them are skippable if you just want a pass. Clearing the map should be just a matter of time with proper study on the map...plus a lot of luck.

Oh the avenger map is also hard, but the IX treatment should do it well.

*

Still it's very surprising to see two all time Touhou classics in A3 -- Usatei and overdrive aka Kanbu. Remember the time when we had all of them mapped by DJPop? That's probably the best time of Touhou (perhaps also the best time of Osu).

The country ranking taken recently...but still with a bunch of familiar names.

We had great remixes from IOSYS, silverforest, REDALiCE, EastNewSound, Sound Holic, Cool&Create...many of which never surpassed by more recent mixes. It doesn't mean that we don't have great touhou circles anymore. We have like *checks osu song list which is basically frozen since 2013* senya, felt, Alstroemeria Records *runs out of big circle because he always go for unpopular instrumental stuffs* and the list goes on and on as can be seen from the TLMC updates every Reitaisei and Comiket.

Touhou is still a promising doujin brand and will still be around for a very long time. It is just somehow stagnant under the ever shifting Internet/doujin environment...but that is a topic for another day.

Back to the maps themselves. Both Usatei and Overdrive are known to have offbeat vocal sections and there are always arguments on how to map those. 

Overdrive's mainly fine as the map followed basic beats in that section...and they even put what happened in the video into the real map! The map was marked 100~200 so I didn't expect an acceleration but I knew immediately what's going on. Credits to whoever decided to put that in :3

Usatei is a bit more controversial because they really tried to fit random notes under 1/12 scale to fit the vocal. Do you call that bullshit mapping? I personally think that to be alright...only that you should stay consistent, just as how we treat osu maps. The only problem is the transition from vocal to the x xxx x melodic reference at 1:02 or combo 243. Percussion made a quintuplet 1 beat earlier but if you are following the vocal then that is totally unexpected as you may take that as whatever weird stuff from the vocal.

To indicate the transition in a clear way ideally there should be a short break between the vocal and the instrumental references but there isn't one here unless you extend the break from combo 238. The problem here is if you were referencing to those random vocals anything could be possible whenever vocal fits, so the notes after the break themselves do not indicate a clear shift of reference. 

Instead we need notes that follow the new references in a clear way as an indication. As such the triplet (243-245) is deemed weird to me...I personally prefer a quintuplet right there or x xxx x to fit the coming melodic pattern.

...I hope my modding sense is still around...

But at the end I am so grateful to have those Touhou songs added to the game and I am certainly expecting more. How about a lv18 challenge on Marisa?

No comments:

Post a Comment