DLW Commentator Notes

~~~ DLW Commentator Notes ~~~



General Scoring Explanation:

Scoring in DLW revolves around Aspect Shifts (bombs-turned-hypers), and extending them as long as possible, preferably for the entire stage, by grazing and collecting items (mostly grazing), without dying or bombing after the Aspect Shift (AS for short) starts. When the AS ends, whether from it running out of time, reaching the end of the stage, or manually ending it, you receive a bonus to Point Item Value (PIV) and Score, based on its duration to the power of 1.3. PIV affects not only point items, but also spell bonuses and future AS bonuses. There is also a substantial clear bonus, based on number of lives, power, and PIV.



Time Stop VS No Time Stop:

There is a glitch in this game called Time Stop, so impactful for scoring that it warrants two separate categories. This run is the current Time Stop record, 549B, while the current No Time Stop record is 81B by Karisa, showcased on TRS last year. This glitch will be explained in depth below.



Choice of Difficulty:

Easy was chosen for three main reasons:
1) It's the easiest difficulty in terms of survival, obviously.
2) Aspect Shifts are extended by 6.08 frames per bullet graze, compared to 3.52 on Normal, 2.24 on Hard, 1.6 on Lunatic, and 1.28 on Overdrive. This means that it's much easier to extend ASes on lower difficulties, with how many lasers this game has. So, even though the Score and PIV bonuses from ASes are greater on higher difficulties, you end up getting much longer (and therefore bigger) ASes on Easy.
3) Normal (and higher) has a spell card that messes up the Time Stop route a bit. You can play around it, but it's an extra layer of difficulty added onto the run.



Choice of Team:

Any team can perform Time Stop on Stage 6, but the Intrinsic and Instrumental Value Team (Sanae and Seija) is the only team that can perform the Double Time Stop run, because of the team they fight against in Stage 4. As a result, this is the highest-scoring team for Time Stop runs.
Sanae's Aspect Shift is Quantitative Invocation. It has no immediate effect, but you get a prize reward at the end of the Aspect Shift (point items, power items, PIV items), and the longer you kept it going, the better the reward. If you keep it going for long enough, you even get a screen clear, and you can even get an enemy / current boss phase insta-kill (this will be relevant later).
Seija's Aspect Shift is Cheating Out of Bounds. It has no immediate effect, but you get an invincibility period at the end of the Aspect Shift, and the longer you kept it going, the longer the invincibility period will be. This normally isn't too useful for Scoring, since your AS usually only runs out when the stage is already over, but it has a use in this run simply for the fact that it *doesn't* insta-kill a boss phase (this will also be relevant later).



Stages 1 – Stage 4 Boss:

This is played pretty much identically to the No Time Stop runs, focusing a bit more on extending the ASes over score from spell bonuses and point items, since I will be getting score that's orders of magnitude greater later down the line. In other words, PIV is more important than Score at the start, even more than it already is in No Time Stop runs.
I was still a bit rusty, as this was day one of attempts, so my gameplay isn't too good, my strats aren't optimal, and I play it very safe, because I just want to reach Stage 4 for an attempt at getting Time Stop. If you want to see what a good early-game looks like, and all the cool risky grazes this game has, definitely check out Karisa's 81B run.
Stage 1: It is possible to keep one AS throughout the entire stage, but it's pretty tight with Sanae & Seija, and I'm not that good, so I do a 2-AS route instead.
Stage 2: Tetsuko's 1st spell and 3rd non have some risky strats that I elected not to go for.
Stage 3: Acytota's 2nd spell, the DNA Graze as it's called, is quite a big graze to go for, but, more often than not, I just end up hugging the boss too hard, so I also play it safe there.
Stage 4: The AS on this stage will be ended manually, so I focus on point items over graze until I reach the boss.



Time Stop:

The Time Stop glitch is performed by defeating Sakuya & Reisen's 1st spell / Aimi's 3rd spell one frame before a time stop (it might technically be on the same frame, hard to say for sure, but the point is that it's frame-perfect, unquestionably). This glitch carries over between stages, and gets deactivated the next time a time stop occurs – Aimi's 3rd spell, in this case, meaning that I have to get it there again for the final few spells.
While this glitch is active, item drops (power items, point items, etc.) do not fall, the Aspect Shift bar does not progress naturally (you can only end it manually or by reaching the end of the stage), and, importantly, if you activate an Aspect Shift after or just before activating the glitch, the invincibility timer will last forever. There are a few other minor effects, most of them purely graphical, but there are also some memory allocation issues, due to items staying on-screen longer than intended.
Due to the permanent AS invincibility, this glitch has massive scoring implications. You can graze during an Aspect Shift's invincibility period, and since this glitch makes that period infinite, I can spawngraze pretty much the rest of the game and accumulate a ludicrous amount of graze. Graze during an Aspect Shift gives a lot of PIV, which in turn gives A LOT of score. Exponential growth at its finest.
This glitch will almost always desync replays. This video was not a replay, but a live run (if it wasn't obvious by the input display (which I'm not sure if the commentators will show)).



Stage 4 Boss:

I time out non1 to get a bigger AS bonus, and then on spell1, I time an Aspect Shift on the frame a time stop occurs. It's okay to be late, because I can try again as long as the timer doesn't run out, but if I'm too early, the run's over, better luck next time. It takes me a few tries, but that's actually good, since that just means I get a bigger AS bonus.
Since I have a maxed-out Quantitative Invocation going, I insta-kill the spell, and because I did so on the frame a time stop occured, I activate the Time Stop glitch. And because I activated an Aspect Shift right before the Time Stop, I got invincibility frames, which will now last for the remainder of the stage. I use them to spawngraze the rest of the fight.



Stage 5:

The Time Stop glitch is STILL active, I assume because the variable(s) related to it aren't reset between stages, bad coding practice by the way, thanks though, so I simply activate an Aspect Shift to get infinite invincibility frames and go back to spawngrazing the rest of the stage.
Since this was my first time entering Stage 5 with this glitch, some of my routing and execution might not have been the best. The biggest mistake was forgetting to capure the midboss's spell. My brain was thinking about too many things, excitement and nerves aplenty, RIP ~1.5B.
You might see some glitched bullets starting to appear in this stage. This is believed to be because items don't despawn properly due to this glitch. Similarly, the saws in Kiseki's 3rd spell glitch out and don't behave correctly.



Stage 6:

The AS in this stage will be ended manually, so I focus on point items over graze. I still graze where I can, for raw PIV, every little bit counts. Also, since I don't want to insta-kill a boss phase with it this time, I use Seija's AS instead.
Everything is as usual until Aimi's 3rd spell. This spell also has a time stop mechanic, so after the first time stop, the glitch is deactivated, and I'm temporarily vulnerable. I say temporarily because you can get Time Stop off this spell as well, if you can once again end it frame-perfectly, as a time stop is about to occur. Since I want the spell bonus for this one, I do it by shooting down the boss instead of using Sanae's AS reward, but the idea is the same.
By some miracle, I managed to get both frame perfect Time Stops on my first run that made it to Stage 4, when I wasn't even 20% consistent at either of them. I simply had to pause, as I was in complete shock and utter disbelief. Not literally shaking, but pretty damn nervous. Thankfully, I had practiced the end quite a bit, so I knew what I had to do, and I executed it quite nicely.
The final spell, "The Perfect Matches", gives ~48k graze just on its own, so it's definitely worth getting the second Time Stop instead of keeping the AS from the start of the stage going.
Finally, the TLB. You *still* have Time Stop active, so most phases are just spawngraze and win. The main thing to note is that I wait for the final phase to grab point items because Reisen's AS gives you double score for point items. A minor optimization, but someone might wonder why I did that.



The End:

Feel free to skip the credits and the results screen (which takes almost two minutes due to how high my PIV got), and there's the final score: 549,311,361,010.
Massive thanks to 小小哦晰晰 for discovering(?) and showcasing the Time Stop glitch in an incredible TAS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_l4j_C0aN4), and to Karisa for theorycrafting with me and pushing the non-Time Stop category to crazy high scores that no one thought could be reached (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0SLaDy28g). This run would not have happened without them.
Thank you to Analogue Reverie for making an incredible game and not patching this glitch.
Thank you to the commentators for commentating this run.
And thank you for watching it!



~~~ Happy 2nd birthday, DLW! ~~~