Passing Into Fantasy: Guide for “The Black Plains of Destiny”

Stop moving. The fairies actually can’t hit stationary targets.

To understand the Black Plains of Destiny, one must first understand the difference between a bullet hell and a danmaku (translated to “bullet curtain”). The former is a large quantity of fast bullets that requires the player to have quick reflexes to solve. The latter has even more bullets, but they’re slow, and it’s more a matter of applying technique to identify and create openings in the curtain. Kind of like a fast paced puzzle game.

This game is the latter. Thus this level is designed to teach you the techniques needed in the game.

Section 1: The Survival Game part.

I don’t know what’s so unusual about the protagonist starting off naked with amnesia. Pretty much every game made these days has that exact same start and then you spend the first ten minutes punching trees and gathering rocks. But when when this game does it, it’s somehow weird. Anyhoo…

You don’t have a weapon so ignore the enemies and follow the red arrow. The take-away here is Jordan has a different speed if shes running in the same direction she’s facing.

Section 2: The first few pink dolls.

They’re simple and require no explanation

Section 3: The first fairies.

Cover in this game is janky, so stick to the open areas.

The fairies shoot bursts which start off 180 degrees away from you and turn about 150 degrees or so plus about 15 degrees of spread. They absolutely will never hit you if you stand still. (Unless the fairy itself bumps into you and moves you.)

The lesson here is: Not every bullet on the screen is a threat. If it’s not headed towards you, don’t move into it.

Another thing you can do here if you want to pad your score is “clothesline” the enemies. Move to the top wall near the left side of the screen and steadily shoot straight down. This creates a wall of bullets. The enemy will move into it and die. This will be useful later when the game will have enemies coming in from two sides and will expect you to shut down one of the sides with this maneuver.

Section 4: The midboss fairy

In case the player didn’t pick up the fairy’s weakness the first time, the gold fairy starts off with a full-auto burst of the normal fairy’s attack pattern to show the massive blind spot in the middle.

Defeat that attack and the fairy switches to a full 360 degree spread of bullets that…also will not hit you if you stand still. It doesn’t matter where you stand. It will miss.

Section 5: Fairies and Dolls

By now the player should’ve noticed the last boss required no motion. There is a short burst of fairies to confirm that, yes, every fairy in the game has Stormtrooper aim. (By the way, there are other enemies that do this too in later levels.)

Next comes a few red dolls. Because the game would be no fun if there was no dodging at all, these have a basic attack that is aimed directly at you. Beat them and you move on to the boss.

Section 6: Air Spellcard

This is where you really have to use Aim mode. There isn’t much space between the bullets and your character normally moves fast (and inconsistently depending on direction.) So you have to use aim mode (default L Shift), which sets movement to the lowest speed in all directions, for small precise movements.

Section 7: Fire Spellcard

These are just random projectiles of various speed depending on color. A little practice in observation.

Section 8: Water Spellcard

This one requires Streaming in order to beat. There is a steady line of small blue bullets aimed at you. So you start from one wall and slowly move to the other wall, moving as little as possible to maximize the amount of time you have.

(A more advanced technique you need later is reversing the stream. For when the attack last longer than it takes for you to reach the far wall. So you slowly stream until about 90%, then suddenly dash to the 100% between shots, and then fit through a gap you created around 95%. That would be very hard to pull off with this spellcard since the fire rate of the blue bullets is rather high.)

Section 9: Earth Spellcard

Remember how the gold fairy would miss you no matter where you are standing? This spellcard teaches you about arcs. It starts with shooting three arcs of 6, 8, and 10 bullets, followed by three arcs of 5, 7, and 9 bullets. All aimed. The arcs with an odd number of bullets will produce precisely one bullet each that needs to be dodged. The arcs with an even number of bullets will miss you so long as you don’t move.

Section 10: Deathblossom

It’s just two alternating attacks with gaps. Just move back and forth.