[PC] Maiden & Spell - Story Mode - EX1 The Maiden Spellbound - Very Hard Perfect Clear - 1,291,216 

Well Perfect in the sense that the game considers it a Perfect, which is just not dying.
New indie shmup released about a week ago. The game is mostly a versus shmup in the sense of Senko no Ronde or Acceleration of Suguri, but it also has a very good single player story mode.
Gameplay-wise it feels like a very simplified version of Senko but with a lot more focus on dodging, you don't have a healthbar and you only get a couple of hits before losing. One of the big things about this game is that it has rollback netcode.
The Maiden Spellbound is the first Extra stage in Story Mode basically. It's a very long boss fight with many different bullet patterns to dodge in the style of a Touhou boss. It's way harder than anything else in the Story mode before it.
For this stage you're locked into using the Hero of Frost character and the patterns are all designed around her moveset. Her i-frame dodge-roll in particular is expected to be used a lot.
The way lives work in this is that the cards in the top left represent your lives, and the hearts represent the hits you have left before you lose a life. Hearts get refilled after you beat a spellcard. If you lose all hearts during a spellcard you get sent back to the previous nonspell.
Let's talk about the movement. Remember how the early Touhou games had that super awful option where you would automatically focus if you were shooting? Yeah that's standard in this game.
In terms of movement there are basically three speeds, not shooting speed, shooting speed and focused speed. The focused speed is so slow you can barely move.
There is also a very long delay between moving from shot speed to no-shot speed.
It's all really weird and it took me quite a long time to get used to it. I'm aware this is probably for balancing purposes in the multiplayer, but holy moly does it kinda suck in the singleplayer.
Oh and Status Effects is also something this game has! Haven't seen that in a shmup since Frantically Forbidden Fruit. Granted they are implemented a lot better in this then they were in that game, but it's still quite annoying. There are a ton of different status effects, but the main ones that appear in this stage are:
- Paralyze: Freezes you in place for a second every three seconds or so.
- Slow: Your movement speed and all your actions plus projectiles are slowed down.
- Confuse: Breaks auto-aim, you have to manually aim by moving up and down.
- Toxic: Spawns random bubble bullets that spawn from the bottom of the screen and slowly rise up.
- Death Toll: Spawns a giant skull orb above you that slowly homes-in on you.
- Sheer Terror: Freezes you in place for like three seconds.
The first two spells are especially annoying because they inflict Paralyze. The second spell is like the absolute worst thing, but you can cheese it like I did so whatever I guess.
Scoring is just speedkilling and not getting hit. For survival you mostly want to speedkill anyway.
For speedkilling you want to maximize your short-bomb usage because it deals 450 damage each, so watch your cooldown timers. You also want to focus as much as possible because you do more damage while in focus. Dodge-rolling towards the boss and then dropping a bomb is a good way to increase your damage output.
Got hit a couple of times because the dodge-roll didn't come out. I think it has a bunch of start-up frames that I keep misjudging.
I guess it's possible to beat this stage without taking any damage. I feel like it will probably mostly come down to whether or not you can get past the third spellcard.
Buy the game on Steam here:
store.steampow...
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