Taking on All 20 Floors of Crypt of the NecroDancer as Hatsune Miku

In this game, both the player and the enemies move one turn at a time to the rhythm. Falling off the rhythm causes you to take damage, so you need to stay on the beat as much as possible. According to the commentator, many of the monsters in the dungeon only act once every two turns, and the game is designed so they can be defeated easily if you deal with them properly.

Hatsune Miku has the trait of passing through enemies when she attacks. Because this also lets her dodge the enemy's attack, the commentator explains that she is quite strong in one-on-one fights. Early on, the commentator found a zone where items appear and spent a little time collecting them. They got good clothes and rings, and changing outfits also changes Miku's appearance. The commentator says, "Let's use this cuteness to light up even a dark dungeon."

Miku's damage goes up as she chains attacks, and landing a 4-hit combo earns her a microphone. So the basic strategy is to string combos together in places with lots of enemies and aim for microphones.

The dungeon is divided into areas of four floors each, and every area has a boss fight. Defeating a boss rewards you with a new outfit. From the second area onward, monsters with higher HP become more common, but the commentator sees this as actually working in Miku's favor, since it makes microphones easier to earn.

Around this point, the commentator starts using "singing," which consumes a microphone. When Miku sings, her song spreads across the eight surrounding tiles: walls, barrels, and other objects are destroyed, and enemies are charmed and die while healing Miku. Used well, a single song can restore a lot of health, so the commentator's view is that you can push forward boldly without worrying too much about taking some hits. All food items are healing items, and ham in particular is the most premium, restoring four hearts. Since you can sing as a stopgap in emergencies and also use it to dig up items, the more microphones the better. The commentator describes this area as "a bonus area in a sense," since the mushrooms make it easy to earn microphones.

The boss of the first area beats out the fastest tempo in the game, but it died instantly just from being pushed against a wall.

Separately from the outfit received as a boss reward, the commentator also obtained a crown that heals Miku every time she defeats 10 enemies. Since enemies die just from Miku moving around, combining her with this crown lets her heal again and again.

The next area is split into fire and ice zones, and the ice zone in particular makes it easy to slip and lose the rhythm. The commentator's approach was to find the stairs quickly and get through. Having picked up a map at the shop made exploring easier, though the commentator adds with a laugh that their on-screen character portrait overlaps the minimap and hides it.

Unlike the floors before it, the third area's boss fight has rests mixed into the beat, and moving on those beats causes damage. You need to stay calm and properly rest. In practice, the commentator took an accidental hit here and says they would have died if they hadn't lined their outfit with an iron plate. The commentator notes that the scary thing about Miku is how often accidents like this happen.

Even so, the commentator says that just huddling in a safe spot won't earn you microphones and will only lead to a slow death. Their stance is that Miku's way of fighting is to work up the courage to jump into the middle of enemies, earn microphones, and keep singing.

In the fourth area, even Miku becomes able to dig through walls, and she tunnels through terrain filled with monsters. About this floor's rather unusual BGM, the commentator explains that it was performed at "EXPO 2020 Europe," Miku's second European tour, and is a song sung in Spanish.

The game includes a few new songs, but it mostly uses well-known ones, according to the commentator. They'd like to listen to the music a bit more, but there are far too many enemies for that. So they tell viewers that they'll list the song titles for each floor in the description, and encourage them to look up the MVs and listen.

From a treasure chest, the commentator found two spirits and attached them to Miku's top and right sides. Enemies that stop on the tile above her are warped somewhere else, and enemies that stop on the tile to her right are frozen for a while. With the spirits' help, Miku reached the boss floor without trouble. The boss is "Deep Blues," named after Deep Blue, the AI that first defeated a world chess champion at the end of the 20th century, and it too was defeated easily. As a reward, Miku got shoes that boost her damage, and she proceeds to the final area.

In the final area, the mood of the BGM changes dramatically, and "sweety glitch" plays. According to the commentator, this song was also the theme song of the music event "Hatsune Miku Digital Stars 2021." In this electric-looking area, electrical wires run across the entire floor. Unusual monsters appear, including invincible monsters that move along the wires, enemies that use lightning magic, and skeletons that split apart when defeated. Since Miku's gear had grown quite strong by this point, the commentator decided it was fine to force their way along the shortest route to the stairs. On the last floor before the boss, they healed up just to be safe before taking it on.

The final boss is "Coral Riff," which plays a variety of instruments with its eight arms. With the ice spirit, it could be killed instantly, but the commentator decided to defeat it the proper way since they'd come this far. First, the instruments attack as an opening act, so Miku holds out while fending them off, and after a while the main body starts moving. From there, it's just a matter of beating it down, and all 20 floors were cleared.

The exploration time was 7 minutes and 11 seconds. The commentator looks back on it as a unique adventure that combined dizzying, high-speed action and the constant tension of being on the brink of death with Hatsune Miku's vibrant music. They were mostly only able to play each song up to its intro, but listening again, every one of them is a wonderful song, and the commentator concludes that it's a great game whose enjoyment grows the more you play it.