TPDP Shard of Dreams True Ending FAQ

TPDP Shard of Dreams True Ending FAQ
Last updated 5 February 2017
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Q: So what is TPDP (Touhou Puppet Dance Performance) anyway?
A: TPDP is a Touhou fangame that serves as a spiritual successor to the "Touhou Puppet Play" series of Pokemon ROM hacks which are essentially Pokemon games with the Pokemon themselves replaced by dolls/puppets of Touhou characters. This time it's a standalone game, with very similar mechanics to Gen 6 in Pokemon, but with some nice improvements (namely custom EV spreads, fully visible IVs and HMs replaced by key items)

Q: And the "Shard of Dreams" bit?
A: An expansion to the original TPDP was released at the start of 2016 with new puppets and new story elements. In particular, a new plotline that occurs after you beat the main story was added, featuring some of the characters who didn't appear in the original game. "True Ending" refers to beating both the main story and this postgame story and seeing the second set of credits.

Q: Where can I get it? Is it available in English?
A: If you visit http://thpp.supersanctuary.net/forum/index.php?board=12.0 you can find information about how to buy the game (and the expansion) and how to get the currently available English patches. I won't utterly condemn piracy but I'm not going to help you with it in chat and you may find you have problems getting the translation to work on a pirated copy.

Q: If the game has an English patch then why are you playing in Japanese almost every time you stream?
A: Because the English patch has longer in-battle text compared to the Japanese version. In-battle text is set to always advance at 1 frame per character, so the English patch is just slower for speedruns.

Q: So what is the speedrun like?
A: The speedrun is surprisingly fun and quite short for a "modern" Pokemon-esque game owing to its lack of overdone cutscenes and its out-of-battle text mechanics. You still have to reset over good luck to some degree, but one of the most notorious parts (resetting over starter stats & nature) is a complete non-issue as every starter in TPDP has fixed IVs and there is simple RNG manipulation for the nature. Unfortunately the expansion is more RNG heavy than the original, but the added content and new challenges make it worth at least playing for a while.

Q: Why not just run a real Pokemon game instead?
A: For reasons mostly stated before - this run is short and cuts out a lot of the annoying stuff from main series Pokemon runs. It is also a PC game so no extra capture hardware is needed. I also started doing the run at a point in time where the route was not fully optimized, so optimizing it and trying out new things has been a fun challenge - routing is my favourite part of Pokemon speedrunning.

Q: What Touhou characters/Puppets are used during the run?
A: Shizuha (using the new Extra style) is the main. Her base form is a rather average Grass-type physical attacker, but Grass (Nature) types in this game aren't quite as awful as they are in Pokemon so she copes well enough. When she "evolves" at level 30 she becomes a super powerful Darmanitan expy - 140 base Attack with Sheer Force for ridiculous damage output combined with a passable 95 Speed. She also levels up super-fast as her Cost (essentially a Puppet's EXP curve, EXP yield and weight all in one) is in the lowest tier. I catch two puppets for backup - Murasa purely serves as revive fodder, while Merlin is mainly used to make setting up on the final fight practical as well as making the second-to-last fight winnable.

Q: Why is the text moving so fast?
A: Text can be advanced nearly frame perfectly in this game, and there is a whole lot of text. It gets very tiring to speedrun it manually, and the only other serious runner of this game uses JoyToKey macros to auto-mash text, so I choose to do the same. If there were any runs of this category done using manual controls, it wouldn't really be fair to compare the two, but there aren't any manual runs for the time being.

Q: Why are you closing and reopening the game?
A: Either I died midfight and it's faster to restart than wait for the rest of my party to die, or I'm performing RNG manipulation. This game has limited RNG manipulation for starter nature/ability and the species/IVs/level of wild encounters. In-battle RNG cannot be manipulated and you "lose" the manipulation as soon as you do start a battle.

Q: What is the world record for this game?
A: The best recorded time for this particular category is 2:43:35 by 家具野箪笥 using JRTA timing. My offstream PB is currently 2:40:53 using the same timing but there is no video available right now. I'm aiming for sub 2:40.