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evilisk-played · 4 years

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Labyrinthine December Part 7: We Recruit Kanako

Yay! A new character! I can’t wait to- oh my god is that 164 unused bonus points? Why do new characters have to work like this? Why?

I finally began my trek into Floor 21. There’s not much to talk about honestly; the floor is pretty simple “explore and survive” fare (no confusing progression puzzles involving switches or teleporters).

The enemies aren’t really worth talking about tbh. After completing the game, I immediately tested the new floor’s enemies and the enemies are harder than Floor 20, while offering worse / similar amounts of EXP (which is weird). This was immediately after completing the game; now that I’ve cleared some of the early postgame stuff, these ‘hard’ mooks are mostly a cakewalk. Only two enemy types are worth mentioning; the fast butterfly that can inflict PSN and PAR, and the grim reaper type that can inflict DTH. But they’re hardly the only enemy types in the game capable of PAR’ing and then DTH’ing your party so just make sure you have protection.

As for events, I finally recruited my first postgame character and... could it be? I think it is...! It is the fabled CLD nuke only heard of in legend! (Seriously, why was there no CLD nuke in the base game anyway???)

More seriously, we picked up Kanako without a hassle, then explored the rest of the dungeon. There was some boss that wasn’t worth fighting (they were a white recolour of the generic knight enemy) so I didn’t fight it. Then I moved up to Floor 22... Only to discover I hadn’t saved when I defeated Maribel V1 again. Whoops!

Anyway, at this point I finally decided it was time to actually allocate those remaining bonus points.

Here’s how it went:

Rumia: After giving her a long hard look, I finally realized what bugged me about this character... her SPD stat makes zero sense. I compared her SPD and her contemporaries in this area were characters like Tenshi and Yuugi, characters who are *powerhouses* in terms of stats. Except for her excellent MYS resistance, Rumia has zero reason to be as fast as Tenshi (while not being nearly as tanky as her) so I figured SPD is what she needs. I’ve also decided that Rumia is permanently gonna be using some items (like Holy Win) so that her survivability isn’t godawful.

I still hate how this character works, but at least Rumia can be a character type that makes sense (mediocre attacker with average SPD) instead of being this bizarro character who is as slow as Tenshi yet not nearly as survivable as her.

Sanae: This character was probably the second hardest to figure out. I’ll admit to not using most of the characters in this list (it’s *the* reason why statting them is so hard for me in the first place), but Sanae is the hardest because she’s the character I’ve used the lease in all of LoT. I’ve tried all the early game characters (since I’ve replayed / attempted to complete this game so many times) and I’ve caught on to how busted the later comers are, but Sanae? Sanae was always in that awkward section of the game that I always ended up dropping out of. By the time I’d gotten far enough to actually reach her, I was set on not using her because my mindset was stuck as “okay, we’re going to actually push through to the end of this game, this time”. This is how became “most unused character in all of LoT for me”.

In the end, I ended up boosting her HP and her MND. This was purely to give her parity to the other healers (Reimu, Eirin and Minoriko all have *way* more HP than her... and that’s with the better MND too). I’m gonna try to build her up to be more of an MND tank (because I’m unoriginal and every single character I can use for defensive buffs WILL be used for that role only).

Yuyuko: I upped her MND. I was considering turning her into the SPI nuke but I realized her SPD is a serious hindrance to this goal. I think, since she is so damn slow, and since I’m going to be using her for her high DTH rate and ATB drain rather than her raw MAG stat, making her tanky makes more sense. Also helps that I’m still lacking in MND tanks (aside from Patchy).

Kaguya: The real SPI nuke is right here. Kaguya might not be *as* nukey as Yuyuko is, but given how much more versatile she is *and* how much faster she is, she is far more practical to my purposes as one. Anyway, I bumped up both her MAG and MND; I’m basically allotting her bonus points like how I used to do for Patchouli (before I realized she was too slow / she was much better off as an MND tank rather than an attacker)

Mokou: After worrying about her forever, I finally gave up and just dumped her bonus points into MAG. While I love Mokou normally, she seems like trash in this game. There is almost nothing unique about her; oh so she’s one of those tanky MAG attackers? You mean like Alice, Eirin and Kanako? She’s got a strong FIR spell? Great for you, now get in line behind Yuugi, Alice, Flandre and Patchy. Oh she can debuff? ...Actually I won’t even mention the debuff. That debuff is terrible. Debuffer characters in general are made obsolete by Komachi, but Mokou’s debuff is terribad even by those standards.

I’ve given up on trying to make her viable and have instead delegated Mokou to “dungeon sweeping” duties

Iku: I dumped all her points into MND. For most of the game, I built her as a MAG / MND attacker but after actually reading up how to use her on the Touhou Wiki, it seems like she’d be better as a pure MND tank. It’s not like she’s a bad attacker; she can do crazy damage when she’s self-buffed herself. But it’s kind of weird I’ve had this double standard where I’ll up Iku’s damage for no reason, while with Ran I’ll only boost her defensive stats and SP (even though she’s arguably the better attacker). So yeah, I’m gonna build them up similarly now since my usage of both characters is literally “bring onto field, buff other characters”.

Reisen: I just dumped all her points into MAG. I still have no idea what I’m doing with this character, I’m hoping that we run into a fight where the Grand Patriots Elixir + Discarder combo is actually useful though.

Alice: I’m bumping her MAG and SPD. I don’t have enough “pure” MAG attackers anyway. Like Reisen, I’m also not sure how to use her, though with Alice it’s a matter of “the formulas on all her attacks confuse me”.

Kanako: I had to do a lot of research on this and... I actually couldn’t decide on what her role should be yet. The wiki is saying she can be a good nuke, a good tank or a good ‘dungeon janitor’ though trying for all three at once is probably not a good idea. Yet all I can think at this point is “how the heck can I decide without trying this character out?”

I ended up comparing the other 6 nuke characters. The other nukes are: Nitori (Non-Elemental) Marisa (MYS), Kaguya (SPI), Suika (WND), Suwako (NTR) and Yuugi (FIR). I could typically categorize these as either “offense” and “support”.

Marisa and Suwako are glass cannons / pure offense, while Kaguya, Suika and Yuugi all offer some support potential. Nitori sits in the middle ground, where she can be a nuke (with her cannon) or she can play decent support (with her camouflage. So with this all in mind...

- Support - - - - - - - - - - Offense -

- - - - - - - - - - Nitori - - - - - - - - - -

- Suika - - - - - - - - - - - - Suwako -

- Kaguya - - - - - - - - - - - Marisa -

- Yuugi - - - - - - - - - - - - - ? ? ? -

Kanako would be a pretty easy fit on to the offense scale wouldn’t it?

...Still, I couldn’t exactly commit to a role for a character I hadn’t even tested yet. All I could do for now is dump all her points into MAG so that her MAG stat (the stat she relies on most for damage) was at least on parity with the other nukes. She went from 14k to 21k MAG which is pretty nice. As far as the nukes go, Yuugi is the leader (at 25k), everyone else is around the 20k, and Nitori trails behind at 18k (though this isn’t as bad as it sounds; her non-elemental nuke means she gets way better damage than you’d expect).

Anyway, with Kanako done, I *finally* statted all my characters (this is something I haven’t been able to make up my mind on for months now). I’m pretty hype to try out Kanako and her fabled CLD nuke.

#labyrinthine december #labyrinth of touhou

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