Touhou 19 - Thought on the demo

[Gri]

So, what are you guys thoughts on the demo of Touhou 19?

I have just finished the demo Story Mode with all 5 characters, and so far the game seems pretty much the same thing as PoFV, except slightly better/worse in some area. I did play in Japanese, so I might have missed some things. I didn't try to find out what the card did, so I can't talk about those.

The goods: 
- Graphics are ok
- Soundtrack is ok. Nothing groundbreaking yet.
- Unlike PoFV, you now have 2 special attacks for your screen (Lvl1 and Lvl2 charge) and 2 special attacks to send to the opponent (Lvl3 and Lvl4). It's cool that the Lvl1 attack is now less powerfull. This could mean that we'd see less characters clearing all enemies with one attack.
- Clearing a stage with a "Perfect Victory" gives you a different card. It might get frustrating to try and unlock these, but we will see in the full game how card play out. 
- Animals spirits seems to have various effect. This is cool, since the player can focus on taking down a specific type depending on the situation.

The neutrals:
- The slow mechanic can be good, but sometime it plays against you when you are trying to charge an attack Having a key for Shooting/Charging, a key for Slow and a key for Bomb might give more control to the player.
- Bombs are limited. This can make bad RNG more punishing, but it also means the match will take less time (In PoFV, have rechargeable Lvl2 attacks that clears bullets could drag on some games, until the bullet speed become really fast)
- This might be a Story Mode thing, but the character send a special spell card boss and when you kill it, the match automatically ends. If this is limited to Story Mode, it could be a nice thing since it makes the mode a bit more special.
- There's no Character Balance, but at the same time it was to be expected that Reimu and Marisa would be stronger than the other characters.

The bads: 
- I never really had this issue before, but sometime the screen can be pretty hard to read when there's a lot spirit+bullet+special bullets+focus area. It makes things a bit chaotic.
- The controls. While you can now auto-fire, you can no longer use one key for shooting and charging. I think I'll get used to it, but being able to choose another control scheme similar to PoFV would be nice.
- Had a visual glitch that made the background look weird, like the bottom half of the background was vanishing. Might be just me.
- Bombs are pretty weak and don't clear much bullets.

So far, the game feels like just more PoFV, so if you liked that game you may like that one.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Gri

[Juuni]

Tbh, I really am excited for the full game. It seems like it’s going in a great direction with essentially reduxing PoFV mechanics, like making the controls actually feel nice this time. The graphics are nice, I honestly love the new music(especially since ZUN remixed the better themes for Nazrin and Seiran as their stage themes ruled), and the new charge systems are really good. I definitely think screen reading is a slightly issue, but that was always a problem in this type of game. Overall, extremely excited for the full release.(You can probably tell my favorite mainline touhou game by this reply lol)

[Eulogous]

Defeating the CPU in their boss attack ending the match is probably the single best thing added in for these types of games. It's a good way of circumventing the cheating AI opponents from phasing through literally everything.

I really like a lot of the ideas going on. The graze points from 18.5 being used to charge your gauge is nice, as well as the inclusion of Cards from UM, and the various Animal Spirits from WBaWC. When it comes to the UI, I feel like placing your remaining hearts above the gauge instead of the top of the screen would've been better. My eyes are naturally drawn to the bottom half of the screen anyway.

3 hours ago, Gri said:

- The controls. While you can now auto-fire, you can no longer use one key for shooting and charging. I think I'll get used to it, but being able to choose another control scheme similar to PoFV would be nice.

Never had any real issues with the control scheme, but I play these games with a controller. Might be a problem on keyboard, though.

Overall, I'm largely indifferent to the Phantasmagoria-styled games, but I'll give credit to some of the new ideas for being pretty good. I'll probably buy it when it fully releases, but I'm not exactly hyped for it. Would've been a hard pass if not for auto-fire and the whole beating boss attacks winning the match system.

[Gri]

1 hour ago, Eulogous said:

Defeating the CPU in their boss attack ending the match is probably the single best thing added in for these types of games. It's a good way of circumventing the cheating AI opponents from phasing through literally everything.

Yeah, but it also means that the CPU might be program to not get hit at all until a certain condition has been met (time or sending X attack to the CPU). The CPU were always broken anyway. I think they run on a timer, and will avoid any hit until the timer has been reached (or if their path finding is obstructed by something like Medecine's poison or Aya's fast bullets). This is out it worked in the extra mode of PoFV, but in normal game it seems to also work that way, except that the timer goes back up every time the CPU gets hit. In hard and lunatic, I was never able to win the first round against Eiki, no matter how long I last (my guess is the timer is pretty high)

I just tried out VS mode, and like in PoFV, the CPU is much stronger than in Story Mode. I can confirm that killing the boss "Final Story Spell" doesn't do anything, it is merely one of the spell the boss can throw at you (it wouldn't have made sense in VS anyway, since against a human it wouldn't work) 

I'll take back what I said about graphics being in the "goods" (at first, I was struggling to find good point, so I just put graphics and forgot to remove it). While the UI is fine and the new boss sprite are good, I don't like how all the characters have the same face, almost as if Zun just reuse a template for each character face. But to be fair, that's been an issue since DDC-LoLK (and that's a topic on it's own) 

I do like Reimu's theme in this game, other themes are ok.

[Deiffu]

I think it's a solid game, i like the soundtrack and definetly prefer new controls over PoFV controls. Tho it needs some balancing and polishing (mostly that return to title button crashing the game bug).

Also i haven't heard anyone complaining about spell bosses defeat sound sounding to close to enemy losing, it made me lose several times and should be changed.

 

Also, also Reimu's balls are op af.

 

[Juuni]

55 minutes ago, Deiffu said:

 

Also, also Reimu's balls are op af.

 

Reimu in general is easily the strongest character, because her patterns are for some reason extremely dense and way better than the other characters spells. Like, the homing bullets suck to dodge, the balls come in either titanic size or just a huge amount of them, and on top of that reimu has a bullet removing skill.