Log

2026/1/2: 1.5hrs. Initial playthrough. Initial impressions: Early stages no problem, stages 4/5 need routing. Final boss is hard, don’t seem to do much damage and hard patterns.
2026/1/4: 4hrs. Watched Neon Dagger’s guide for strategy ideas. First 3 stages in decent shape. Stage 4 extend fairly reliable. Able to beat final boss with 4 lives (total 3 miss) - Garra with 3 lives (2 miss).
2026/1/5: 3hrs. Stage 3 and 4 routing. Stage 4 semi-reliable for 1 miss, no miss seems possible. Bit of stage 5 experimentation.
2026/1/6: 2hrs: Stage 4 and 5 routing. 5.1 seems doable with no-miss. 5.2 seems very doable for no-miss, needs better routing. Final boss practice - getting more reliable.
2026/1/7: 2hrs. Stage 4/5/6 practice. Cleared from 5.2 assuming 2miss.
2025/1/8:
- 1hr. Early stage practice, locking in 1/2. 3 OK but needs consistency. 5.1 and 5.2 getting better. Final boss practice for consistency strats - purple spreads from left are a problem.
- 2-3hrs. JB 5th practice. Seems better for stages, still OK on bosses. Big benefit is easier micrododging. Overall seems easier for clear for my play style.
2025/1/9:
- Using JB, clear from stage 4 assuming no miss.

2025/1/10: Few hrs practice, then full run attempts. Initial attempts died early in stage 1/2/3. 1cc on first attempt that passed stage 4. Total time: 25hrs.

Pretty hard game for me, but had a lot of fun learning and practicing it. Took about 25hrs to get the clear. Spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the last few stages and final boss, and coming up with strategies to get more consistent. I did watch a few other clear videos for ideas, but unlike most of my harder CAVE clears I didn't closely follow a guide or existing route. It was a good experience to work through the game and find strategies that worked for me. 

00:00 Stage 1: Straightforward stage, not much routing except pointblanking the series of big enemies that are functionally the midboss. Boss is pretty easy on this route. 
02:35 Stage 2: Stage is easy and doesn't require much routing. Midboss can be tricky if you let it live, so pointblank it to try and kill it fast. Boss is not too bad and can be no-bombed, but OK to use half a bomb meter if necessary - should have 200 gold bars at that point so will get a recharge next stage. 
06:21 Stage 3: Slightly tricky stage, needs a bit of routing especially in the second half. Boss is not hard once you learn its patterns, and the final pattern can be bombed to reach the counterstop to get a recharge next stage. Took a dumb death here but recovered by no-missing stage 4.
09:12 Stage 4: Hard stage, needs good routing and on-the-fly decision making because the behavior of the little flying pod guys is pretty random. I also struggled with the big plane enemy at 09:37. The movement I used is my best attempt to make it more predictable. Boss is also quite hard - most of its patterns are dense and random and don't seem to be manipulatable, so you just have to micrododge everything. Staying on the lower right seems to be the safest. Try to get a counterstop at the boss to get a recharge next stage.
13:09 Stage 5.1: Hard stage again. The big tank at 13:36 can be killed pretty safely  by staying below it and making sure to clear out a few popcorn from the side. The second set of tanks at 14:33 can be bombed to fill the gold counter. Don't have a very safe strategy to deal with them without using resources. Usual boss strategy is to circle around until health is low enough to be finished off with a bomb. This run I didn't have enough bomb so had to kill it straight-up, which I've actually never done before even in practice.
16:54 Stage 5.2: Stage is not too bad with a bit of routing, or can be bomb-spammed if you can get a counterstop since restocking bomb is easy. I find it hard to get a counterstop under normal circumstances though, so aim to just get through the stage normally (ideally with some bomb meter left). I reached the final boss with 4 lives which is exactly on-route. The final boss is very hard with a lot of randomness. The first half (Venus) can overlay a few different patterns on top of each other randomly. Best advice I have is to try and identify "good" patterns and dodge through them, moving up through the pattern to not get cornered. Identify "bad" patterns and bomb if necessary. Bomb is not super damaging in this phase so you'll just have to dodge a good bit of it. The second half (Garra) is hard - learn the patterns and it should be doable with two lives and liberal pointblank bombing. Some of the phases (like the 2nd) die really fast to bomb, but others don't seem to take much bomb damage - experiment to figure out good bomb points. If you can reach the penultimate "meteor" pattern with 2 lives and full bomb, it's almost a guaranteed kill.  

With my route, I budgeted 2 deaths before reaching the final boss to give a reasonable clear chance. The final boss is very doable in 3 lives, but still needs a good amount of dodging. 

Initially I used Yusuke, but found that I kept getting sniped by popcorn. I tried JB to see if the extra screen coverage would help (it did) and also found that I was able to micrododge more consistently with JB due to his slightly slower move speed. 

This game feels more raw and primitive compared to other CAVE games I've played, but not in a bad way. It demands a lot of straight-up fundamental pattern reading and dodging, and good routing only helps to a certain extent. It has a lot of randomness, so it doesn't seem possible to hard-route away a lot of the dodging. The bigger hitbox means you have to be more sure of your dodges. There also don't seem to be enough resources to bomb through many hard parts.

Log

TODO