Touhou Puppet Dance Performance Any% FAQ

Touhou Puppet Dance Performance Any% FAQ
Last updated 25 July 2015
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Q: So what is Touhou Puppet Dance Performance (TPDP for short) 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: 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 how to get the almost-complete English translation patch for it. 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.

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: Chen (Assist style) is the main. She is a special attacker with an ability called Niche (Pokemon's Adaptability) that powers up her STABs to insane levels, and she has Wind and Earth stabs (essentially Flying and Ground) which hit most of the game super-effectively and almost everything at least neutrally. 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. Keine (Defense style) is the secondary battler, she is a Steel-type physical attacker with an ability that pumps up her physical attack and speed to base 140 and 120 respectively at low health. She hits two of the game's hardest bosses for 4x super effective damage, allowing us to defeat them despite them outleveling us. Finally, Daiyousei (Defense style) is used in the safe route as a Nature-type (Grass-type) special wall to defeat one particular enemy who is hit 4x SE by Nature but has Moody and speed-dropping moves that allow her to dispatch Chen.

Q: Any% and Any% Turbo? What's the difference?
A: Any% is your traditional Western community ruleset where we complete the game as fast as possible without cheating. It also notably bans using keyboard macros to auto-mash text in the game. Any% Turbo is the same thing but it allows using keyboard macros. Because text can be advanced nearly frame perfectly in this game, it makes the run a whole lot less exhausting but also allows for times which are impossible to get for a normal human playing without macros, so comparing normal runs with turbo runs really isn't fair.

Q: What is the world record for this game?
A: Any% - http://www.speedrun.com/touhou_puppet_dance_performance (As of writing: 1:51:57 by GreenMittenz)
Any% Turbo doesn't really have a WR but you can see a 1:49:30 run by me at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvzX-MR64JI and I have a 1:48:30 locally recorded.