Zircean

perfect little angel

what i lack in brains i more than make up for in speed



leon
@leon asked:

Do you have any rough difficulty ratings for the puzzle game 1CCs you've attempted? I'm wondering how more obscure ones like Bellumarot or Kasiori rank up.

oh man... so this is hard to tease out because as i mentioned in a post about a month ago you will build fundies and then at some point you can 1cc basically any new arcade puzzler in one session. but uhhh i guess we can try it

if tgm counts it goes at or near the top since that "1cc" usually takes a few months even if you don't make it to gm rank right away. we'll make that our 10/10. dtet joker mode might actually be slightly harder, but it's difficult for me to tell because i have way more experience with straight up tgm than dtet

petal crash on nightmare difficulty probably ends up up here, but since it came out after i was already playing the game for a few months it's difficult to say exactly. it seems that in general people were also playing for months before completing it. i guess i would put it kind of close to tgm1 gm, 8-9/10 or so

jewelry master death mode might go somewhere around here at like 6-7 or something but i can't evaluate it well either

magdrop3 probably goes around here also because of warp cpu shenanigans. dr. mario 64 s-hard story probably goes a little below that for similar reasons

there is a big gap after that

one group after the chasm would be stuff like:

  • money idol
  • kasiori
  • bellumarot expert
  • land maker
  • kollon arcade hard (aka ultimate block party)
  • star sweep bonus 2 mode
  • mixolumia impossible
  • takoron takomaster difficulty
  • pochinyaa

of these i think kasiori is likely the hardest, but mostly because its vs is kind of janky. in bellumarot sometimes quancy just decides you have to die. star sweep bonus 2 mode only shows up here instead of below because the cpu gets a huge damage boost and sometimes can kill you off tiny nonsense making it very inconsistent. kollon vs is just a mess. none of these are terribly bad though

then there is another group of stuff like

  • soldam sekiero
  • highlighters standard/giant
  • panepon s-hard
  • star sweep story/one player modes
  • cleopatra fortune
  • mixolumia marathon/intense
  • pnickies
  • puzzle fighter

im dire at cleo and i can still 1cc it so its probably the bottom of this group, with star sweep the next lowest. i never actually completed a 1cc of soldam sekiero but that's mostly because i wasn't terribly interested and was mainly running soldam mode instead—i ran sekiero maybe four times total and got to level 59 so i'm pretty comfy putting it in here

lumines basic is the lowest on my list because i cleared it on my third try

i legitimately don't remember where sen-know goes

probably i've forgotten something but that's what i can think of offhand


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in reply to @Zircean's post:

hello I enjoy puzzle games and 1ccs
I agree that tgm 999 (well, probably tap 999 right) is the high water mark for puzzle 1ccs

I'm bad at sekiero mode so I think you put it too low, but maybe I just don't know the trick to it. I've played for weeks and never got close, but I haven't watched anyone else play it.

Here's my thoughts on some not mentioned:
Most puzzle bobbles are extremely hard - both puzzle and vsAI. On normal mode they're "underneath the chasm", but I've never 1cced any of them on hard/another despite being a top 2p player. I think they're maybe vying for the top spot on the list.

Touhoumino on Lunatic is probably about as hard as a tap 999. Maybe it doesn't count.

Blocksum's a fun one. It maybe only goes in the panepon/puzzlefighter group, but it did take me a while to 1cc even though I have a number brain.

i've never even attempted any puzzle bobble 1ccs so i fully defer to your opinion on those ;) same for blocksum

sekiero is imo fine if you sandbag a little. none of the gimmicks are that insane and the speed doesn't get anywhere near soldam mode level 100+. its possible i still underrated it because of my experience with the latter though

tap master 999 is certainly harder than tgm1 999 and also something i have done so i probably should have put it here (dtet joker may still be harder but i don't trust my own evaluation of that), but i honestly don't remember spending a ton of time in between being able to clear the two. i think my problem was more just that i had shit grades in tap master for a long time

Panel De Pon stage 12 S-HARD requires basically as much APM as level-4 Mightdealer. A player who can 1CC Hard at will can play it for four minutes and literally never top out Cordelia.

Meanwhile Star Sweep arcade can be beaten with just 2-chains and doujikeshi >_>

i don't consider s-hard cordelia that hard to beat or to require even that much apm—i was pretty capable of taking her even in "the before time" so i am pretty confident mightdealer is in the next tier up. probably if you're having trouble
you are just trying to dump huge chains on her when huge chains are not really an effective strategy in general. additionally, even s-hard is level 6 iirc, which means someone could come into my room and shoot me dead and i would probably still not lose for another several minutes afterwards

star sweep is indeed very easy as far as a 1cc goes but that's really just the starting line for that game... for example the difference in score between my first one player mode 1cc and my current pb is something like a factor of four or five

You can see my playstyle in my sole 1CC of that difficulty https://youtu.be/uZNmDZhS40E?t=1562 I don't really consider this to be a "legitimate" win because, as you can see, I accomplish absolutely nothing for 2 minutes and then win by garbage chain RNG. That being said, it took about a week of solid practice to just get this far.

Actually, I'll admit my comparison of raw APM is probably a mistake… having 2 dimensions of movement in Panel compared to 1 in Idol complicates the meaning a good deal. Idol does need more "raw" APM, but Panel needs a lot more "purposeful" APM to accomplish basic stuff, like the rhythm of dragging one panel horizontally multiple spaces.

i think when people talk about "not having enough apm" in panel their problem is not usually that they can't press the buttons fast enough, but actually that they are often hesitating and not doing anything for large portions of time while they are thinking. money idol is to some extent similar but it does also e.g. lack DAS so it has other problems on top of that

panel does have a bit of an issue where learning to chain is often not obvious for people (it wasn't for me either when i first picked it up as a child!) but i'm not sure money idol avoids this problem either... i simply had a lot more puzzle experience rolling into money idol

one thing i will say watching your video though is that once you develop your ability to do even not particularly long (x4-x5?) freeform chains a little more you will start to wonder why you ever had a problem. for me personally it only took fussing around with planet puzzle league's hint system for a little bit before things started clicking enough, and there are resources around if you need them

I just tried several attempts of s-hard before you replied, and what I'd completely forgot is how unwieldy this game's DAS is - the cursor just rockets into the stratosphere when you hold down any direction for more than a few frames. I think that's what I really mean by a lack of APM - being able to do things quickly without A) frequently misinputting, and B) constantly slowing down to compensate for A.

One of the attempts did get to Thanatos on 1CC pace, though, which I guess wounds my overall argument for this thing's difficulty.

panepon sure does make you tap a lot but DAS is still useful going wall to wall or from the top of the screen to the bottom (but not usually the other way around, lol). and as mentioned money idol just straight up doesn't have it

the thing about panel is that the long road to actually being a Good Panel Player (i wouldn't consider myself one) is basically the process of learning how to organize your field such that (1) you never really get caught out in the wrong part of your board, (2) you never have to go all over the place to find a solve or something, (3) you always have easily available defensive options, and (4) you can always weave together stop time so that you can do all this while constantly under threat of level 10's one frame of health disappearing on you. it's really, really hard! it's also something you can completely avoid if you only play the single player content

Here's a followup… I want to say thanks for your advice about going for 5x chains… it does seem to be effective, and I do understand a good deal of active chain motions from watching speedruns. Unfortunately, I tried s-hard for the following 7 hours after this comment, and even with a renewed focus on chains, made no progress in my consistency. The same things would happen: I'd get off a 4x, 5x, or two 3x, then I'd lose the lead trying to clear 7 lines of garbage and downstack - or I'd just lose the chain, the garbage clear, or followup combos to colour-conflicts or misinputs. The only times I really succeeded was when I got a 6x or higher by RNG, or got two 5x in a row without being topped out. I really don't have faith I'll ever be able to "wonder how I ever had a problem" with this difficulty without dedicating weeks and weeks of training to it.

In the end, I thought to myself, "This is going nowhere. I'm miserable. I could easily, easily get another 1CC of Pochi & Nyaa Neo-Geo on maximum difficulty instead of doing this." So I did that and felt better.

Sorry for how bellyaching this sounds, but I do think the execution barrier for Panel is being badly underrated. I played this game a lot before my 1CC and I still have never been able to consistently move the cursor or avoid double-swaps except when slowing to a crawl on lower difficulties, and I still consistently get colour-conflicts out of nowhere. I do think the 1CC itself is not too hard due to just garbage chains, but for me personally it's definitely closer to Pochi in terms of needing to closely practice and understand how to fight.

it is, ultimately, a very subjective matter, so i wouldn't be worried if you don't agree with my placements here

that being said if you want more pochinyaa you might want to check out the puzzle wednesday community. we've run a number of brackets for it and you can find people to play there

One other thing to consider is that Panel's story mode has more fights that are much closer together in difficulty than most arcade games. Idol only really begins at Eldylabor, and even Petal Crash nightmare is mostly just waiting for Lilibri. Meanwhile, the difference between Cordelia and even Seren isn't really that high.

this is something i'll account for if games tend to be high variance. petal crash is actually notably extremely low variance, and even on nightmare it's higher but not like... a lot higher. despite this it still took tinwild, who was world #3 at the time and had been playing for months, an entire week of focused grinding to produce the first 1cc in that mode. (an aside: for someone trying to notch their first, the nightmare wall is usually arlet)

panel is a higher variance game, though i don't know that i would call it "high variance" per se unless both players have trouble topping their opponent out. in addition if you 1cc s-hard and march into panel attack you will be ranked copper, whereas in other games like pochinyaa it is not uncommon for even the relatively good and invested players not to have pulled off a 1cc yet

as far as i've seen, games like kollon and bellumarot are much higher variance and this is one reason why they ended up where they did though

of course this list is all subjective and one of the reasons i am loath to be specific about a lot of it is that i started a lot of these games at different points in my puzzle career and that makes them very hard to compare

This post is relevant to my interests - I've been collecting arcade 1ccs and I'm very curious to find new attainable puzzle game clears, or tricks to try. Several of these are on my "I think I could probably do that someday?" list, like Cleopatra Fortune and Pnickies and Money Idol Exchanger.

I can confirm Sen-Know vs mode is an easy 1cc - I watched part of a Puzzle Wednesday VOD, learned how to make chains with elbow blocks, and got a clear in a couple of hours after just a few tries.

one thing i'll note is that the more of them you do, the easier they all tend to get going forward. puzzle game fundies exist even if they're more abstract than fighting game fundies. and really you can do all of them, though some take much more commitment than others, but e.g. tgm1 was one of the earliest 1ccs i had on this list

thanks for checking out our vods though! hopefully you find some more games you like in there