My Girls in PoDD ~ 3/20/2023
So I was playing Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream to refresh myself on the game and the characters, and I have a fun Chiyuri fact to share! Playing as her in PoDD on Lunatic mode is considered the hardest 1cc in all of Touhou by far. PoDD is already one of the hardest games to clear, but Chiyuri makes the game so hard it's completely ridiculous.
The main reason for this is that most of Chiyuri's boss attacks spam a specific type of white snowball bullets en masse, which are fast but unique in the sense that, if you shoot them, they're reflected onto the other screen for the opponent to deal with... and the AI has no trouble reflecting all of those right back in your face. You really need to be on the ball and immediately reflect them back, hope that they hit an on-screen obstacle before they hit you, or just die.
Apart from her boss attack, Chiyuri is also one of the fastest characters in a game requiring huge amounts of precision and lacks a "focus" feature allowing you to slow down at all, and her level 1 attack is glitched in such a way that you can't use your bombs or hyper until a few seconds after the animation ends.
She is borderline nonfunctional. I love her.
Considering the AI of PoDD seems to just be "if (getHit) then (don't)" with a random chance for error that gets smaller the higher you set your difficulty and what stage you're on, Lunatic difficulty Yumemi's chance to make a mistake is... set to 0%. Yumemi is a beast. Whether she gets hit or not is entirely up to her, and she can dodge pretty much everything. That fight can sometimes last for like 10 minutes, because she just. Doesn't feel like getting hit.
Lunatic Yumemi is considered by most to be the hardest final boss in a Touhou game. Her bullets are too fast, the gaps in between them are too small, and she's summoning crosses everywhere. It's really really hard! I've never actually beaten her on Lunatic... Not without a little help from playing as Yumemi, that is.
Player Yumemi, too, is completely broken, and is generally the only way people can beat Lunatic Yumemi. Her boss summon attacks are insanely powerful, and her level 2 and 3 spells can wall the AI easily when there's lots of crosses blocking their movement options (this is almost always the case).
The only thing that can beat a Yumemi is another Yumemi. I love her also.
There's something endlessly charming about the disparity between these two. The hopelessly outclassed assistant and the overpowered professor... There's something romantic about that, right? I mean, you can totally see why Chiyuri admires Yumemi so much, you know?! Ah, my Yumechiyu is showing...
Here is a video of PoDD's VS mode with two AI players, featuring Lunatic Yumemi against another Lunatic Yumemi. This video is 10 minutes long. You don't have to watch it.