Touhou 17.5: Sunken Fossil World - Flandre Story 

Note in detective saori it stated flan can leave anytime she want she just stays cuz she get all she need at the mansion

Kasen: Overcomplicated plan (it somehow works???) Yukari: Master Villain plan (it works AND makes her look menacing) Okina: YEET THE NUKE AT 'EM.

I will say, Okina in this game makes Yukari look like a rank amateur when it comes to benevolent scheming. Okina used her doors to spread petroleum all over Gensokyo, so as to lure Reimu et al down to the Hell of Blood Pools, where they'd be unable to defeat Yuuma, so Okina could use THAT as bait to lure Flandre, the person who actually can defeat Yuuma, into Old Hell by giving her the chance to fight someone that not even Reimu could beat. incident solved hooray

I love how route B have Flandre fight against conventionally decently strong opponents, and route C is just next to an onsen, in the middle of a lake on a boat, and literally in the middle of a leaking Sanzu river. It doesn't even matter that her opponents are Murasa and Kutaka when she's practically drowning trying to fight them

....Ok this is literally an hour long and I need sleep time to snooze and watch it in the morning lol. Not a surprise given it's...all the fights, holy shit. Also yeah your thought about how each Sage handles a problem is so true. Okina was just like "fuck this, I'm just gonna hire the best assassin possible"

About Okina's motive for spreading the Petroleum: The goal was for rumors to spread about an undefeatable best. Otherwise, it was very likely that Flandre wouldn't have cared to go do it. Ultimately, Yuuma needed to be fought against someone who wouldn't care to negotiate with her, and who could negate her Absorption ability, I.e. Flandre.

Flandre is another one that's fun to play, although funnily enough, she got a big nerf down the line. Her spell card used to work a lot more differently before. That said, not enough down attack 3/10. If you space it correctly, that's her most damaging attack. Although it doesn't work on platforms, I think including Murasa's boat. Fun fact, if you lose 9 times in this story, next fight will be A Route Yuuma (which is just the first phase) no matter what. This, however, also applies to pausing and clicking Retry. So the speedrun for the A Route consists of just going in the tutorial, clicking Retry 9 times, finishing it, and then you go straight to Yuuma. It's so funny. Anyway, yeah I guess I expected every fight to be covered in one video...

So two things we've learned from this: first is that this is only the first of the layers of former hell to go berserk and that the others may lead to an incident sometime soon. The other is that Okuu and Flan get along really well.

Ah, lovely time to upload it. We get the advice to graze Reimu's balls, to destroy Yamame's balls, some lore weaving, Byakuren's assassins, Flandre going around and around beating people up... Honestly a very fun "ending". I take Yuuma's story to be more the "Extra" since it happens after all is said and done, just like regular Extras. And Flandre was literally the last and true resolver of this incident because she had to have incentive (beating an opponent no one else, not even Reimu, could) while being determined enough to not fall for Yuuma's silver tongue. You're almost getting to TH19!

Also, regarding Yamame's comment at 17:00, it's pretty funny if you consider that she's almost certainly talking about Zanmu

This route is basically the equivalent of discovering an ant hill inside your house and decide to solve it by launching a missile directly

Flandre solved the incident, Yuuma tied up the loose ends.

I love how Flandre's gameplay is just "whack everyone with a funny looking stick"

I guess the intended idea with flandre's time jumping is that okina was training her all throughout the incident, which is how she got to beat up both okuu and kutaka?

Flandre saves the day with exploding, bad apples. This sounds like a meme fanfiction but it's somehow canon.

21:46 And I was expecting her to say "blow up crying children" or something like that. I'm not sure which is worse.

25:37 And all it took was beating the s**t out of everyone you came across. XD

21:42 sumireko, please tell me you didn't teach that phrase to flandre.

39:21 - So they'll be drowning in their sorrows?

Really loved this story mode, and Flandre's conversation with Reimu in particular was great. However, unfortunately when I played on Switch, I had a HORRIBLE glitch. The mechanic of the final spell card was NOT working; any attempt to use the absorption feature would prematurely break the spell bar. This meant I had to just stand in the blood for as long as possible to build up the meter the slow way and let me tell you this spell gets REALLY intense when you are effectively timing out each phase. And yes the readability of all the bullets especially in phase 3 is atrocious at the best of times. I've had runs get so close and then I didn't see the tell for the blood beam so.... Whatever that glitch was, was fixed by now at least. Even on Switch I saw runs that had no issues. You did a great job of avoiding things here, but also, if you try to build up the apple and get hit at that time before it flies out, you have to gather the blood again....

2:35 No, Yukari is the problem.

And now we're to the first of the two characters I've speedrun (Speedran?), specifically B route because fuck boat. Flan's neat, she controls pretty normally, but unlike the Yorigami sisters, she has a projectile, and also doesn't suck. I'm more experienced with 1.04 and earlier Flan, so an amount of my insight will be contrasting that with current patch Flan. Some general stuff first: aerial down attack's first input was and still is a good way to close distance while also doing an attack. Unfortunately, in 1.13 I believe, the second input now shoots a random shot instead of a single exploding crystal, with said exploding crystal being on a third input. The rushing projectiles -> exploding crystal was important for several fights in B route, including Yuuma who's fought on all routes, so that alone likely makes 1.14 Flan slower than 1.04 Flan. In 1.04 and before, Flandre's spell card had no cooldown period. As long as you had stamina, you could use it. The attack also work a little differently on hit, too. Instead of being one big hit that did damage based on water level prior to using it, it always shot out the same 5 crystals that her exploding crystal shot still does. Frequently a few of these crystals would miss, but while it was less reliable a tool, even the low end of its damage was higher than what you usually get out of her spell card now. If the previous change didn't make 1.14 Flan slower, this one definitely did. The fast strat for *many* cards involved spamming her card, and for a few fights, you'd even intentionally get hit to instantly refill stamina to spam it some more. Yamame is a prime example of this: for her first spell card, the fast strat was to intentionally use the card right where she'd come down at the end of a cycle, trading hits with her and refilling your stamina, which would have been almost empty at that point, to let you use it a couple more times while she was down. With only 2 passes back and forth, this was needed to 1 cycle her, and even with 3, it made it much easier. While 1.04 and prior Flandre spell card was *super* good, it wasn't always her fastest damage output. Two up attack inputs would result in a random spread shot which ultimately did slightly more damage than the spell card if they all hit. It wasn't as repeatable as the card used to be, but often starting with it was heavily preferred. Many fast strats would involve using the Laevateinn swing to break a barrier, hitting the opponent with all the spread shots, and then transitioning over to spell card spam. In at least 1 particular unfortunate situation, though, you do the spread shot *just* too far away to guarantee they all hit, and it *really* sucks when you lose good Reimu RNG on Flandre B1 to one of the shots going just barely over her head. The fastest Flandre B1 strat was never used for full speedruns, but it is likely the only way to get a 15 second time for the individual level run. (More on this stage later) Even with everything I've mentioned, though, Flandre's other attacks still had utility, which overall is why I enjoyed running her so much. They aren't quite as universally useful, but both her full melee combo and her grounded down attack saw some use in fast strats. Grounded down attack was occasionally a good way to get quick damage at the start of a phase if you gained control before the boss was vulnerable, and the full melee combo saw some use for finishing off phases when spell card spam + up swing & spread shot weren't quite enough, as it was faster than waiting for more stamina or going for a second up attack combo. Now, about that Flandre B1 thing... Currently, there are 3 people tied for first on the leaderboards; Immac, Kuroi_Tansan, and myself, all with 16 second times. Now, I wasn't exactly satisfied with that, when 1 second was over 5% of the run, so I did some frame counting. I was the fastest, Kuroi_Tansan was around a half second behind me IIRC, and Immac's time was... above 17 seconds. I double checked, counting again from the top. Same result. Now, there's a lot of screen freeze in this game, so I though "Maybe screen freeze time doesn't count towards it?" So I counted up the screen freeze frames, subtracted them from the final, and yeah! Now Immac's time was below 17 seconds like it should be! Kuroi_Tansan had done a longer screen freeze than I had, so a fair bit of time got shaved off there, making it much closer. And then I checked my time... 15 seconds 59 frames. So that wasn't right either. But I then used Cheat Engine to confirm that my calculations with the freeze frames should have been correct: 19 frames for long screen freezes, 9 for medium, and 5 for short. So what was going on? On a whim, I decided to run around, causing as few screen freezes as I could, for 20 minutes in a fight. IGT read 21 minutes, as I recall (Will go actually do my homework on this soon, and edit if I was wrong, lol. Been a bit.) So yeah, the timer's fast. lmao. This was kinda a lot before I even watch the video, oops. Will give thoughts on any individual fights when I get another free hour.

50:20 Man, it looks like she's cleaving right through the lamb's head.

27:17 This is the first time I hear that part of the BGM. Guess all pre-fights with Okuu never last long enough for the violin to kick in.

16:59 Kishin of old? Will we *EVER* see what a Kishin looks like? Or will they all be part of the "Important Characters Who Never Show Up" club that Tenma and Tsukuyomi belong to?

2:21 She's so cute when she jumps in joy.

16:18 While Okina goes all "Reimu, yes.".

That boss at the end, crazy! It's also easy to see why Flan won the Popularity Poll in 2022, isn't it. (=^_^=)

17:31 Either she has some of her big sister's arrogance, or vampires truly ARE superior to Kishins. Which WOULD explain WHY the only named Kishin failed so badly to take out Seiga.

47:28 Considering how WaHH established that she *DOESN'T* have an endless supply of needles, I'm pretty sure she REALLY doesn't want to fight her again.

Anyone notice the shape that Flandre uses for Scarlet Nihility? Feel like there's some significance here....

2:37 It worked so well that Yukari decided to try it out.

31:37 Maybe she went for Routes A & B, fought Yuuma, got the normal ending, then went through Route C and got the true ending?

0:25 The return of her bat form. As it turns out, her bat form having normal bat wings wasn't an odd early fluke.

27:12 And Patchy will be all "Why is my Royal Flare not as effective anymore?".

21:13 Considering how the most recent _Detective Satori_ chapter has show how she REALLY hates it when people mess with the Underground...

2:24 And she has some girls set up *specifically* to keep others in line, or at least tell them what to do.

38:53 Or C) Okina's doors can go send you to the past. 38:59 Took the words right out of my mouth, editor. Guess we must think alike.

The day everyone rejoiced.

I miss when Flandre could use her spellcard freely, but she's still fun to use. Her melee attack just fell so good.

45:48 I'd say either around SSiB or WaHH.

Didn't know tutorial for Flandre exist.

I see Flan and Okuu had a great playdate. That's cute! Almost as cute as it is concerning...

And one last video before we get to HBM Flandre is actually pretty fun, but I generally prefer her 1.04 version compared to now Her Up attack was really good, if not the easiest to use and her C attack was actually pretty strong Although tbf, the water mechanic wasn't a mechanic at all back then for her (you have to REALLY try to get even close to maxing out that water gauge) so I guess it's a fair change, though I'm not sure why they changed the Up Attack But overall, she's a pretty fun character to play as Next up is Yuuma's story Last I played it, it wasn't translated so the dialogue will finally be new to me It did make for an... interesting event in the fangame discord "DEVOUR ME!!!" I'll be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of how Yuuma plays Iirc, I got like Murasa vibes from her movement? Very slow walking, her horizontal movement is an awkward double jump/dash Her attacks are pretty slow, and not nearly as strong as Murasa's to make up for it Her absorption is also maybe the worst in the game, which is... why? She has the highest range of absorption to be sure, but the water actually has to reach her mouth before it absorbs, and that takes longer than you might think Despite all my complaints though, she's not the worst character to play as, she's still fairly strong Spamming Up Attack and Down Attack over and over gives her insane I-frames, which you might need considering the final boss loves spamming projectiles everywhere Anyways, that's it After that video it's time for your favorite character to shine Mega

1:01:16 Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing.

49:40 That's rich coming from the one who looks like a little girl. Come to think of it, what IS Yuuma's size, anyway? Is she Reimu's size, Marisa's size or Flan's size?

Yiiipeee ❤

I would like to point out that based on the respective routes, this implies that Kutaka is more powerful than Kanako or Utsuho.

how did komachi didn't even included in this incident since the bottom of sanzu was drilled

Admidettly i havent finished the game after murasa cuz her gameplay proved to be dificult but.... ONE HOUR??? Geez flandre you got all the privileges after being absent for 20 years huh?

30:21 Did she respawn from that explosion?

I wonder, how many times has Flan had the opportunity to all out before this?

Smug Flan is best Flan.

“Weak to water” if I throw a cup of water on Flandre will she die

Wait...I don't...hear anything?