Touhou 19 thoughts

[The_Trader]

17 hours ago, Gri said:

Quick question: do you mean the US price is still 15$ like the other games?

From where I am from, it is 19.49$ instead of the usual 17.49$. I am guessing it's because they didn't put regional pricing. It's only +2$ for me, but it might be more for other if that's the case.

I have been avoiding reading too much about touhou 19, but from what little I have saw, I really don't like the new artstyle (that Suika portrait looks awful). I know Zun's focus isn't drawing, but when you compare with MoF-SA-UFO, something definitely went wrong. It's as if Zun was using templates to draw character rather than drawing from scratch, so they all end up looking the same (it started a bit with 14, and it's gotten worse and worse). I mean, yeah, the player portrait from SA also looks too similar, but that was an exception.

Oh yeah, no replay. Wasn't there a PoFV tournament that used replay to show each match?

My price shows only $6.99.......................... The pricing a mess lol

[CountVonNumenor]

Just as I have taken a look at the Steam page of the game for Romania. Here the price is 14.76 Euro (or 16.16 USD). It's about 2 Euro more expensive than any other of the previous games available. 

[Marukos]

I feel like this game demanded more effort to be done than recent previous titles, besides that, there's the server expenses, thus explaining the higher price. Unfortunately, the game is haunted by bad design choices and ZUN overall don't knowing what he's doing. He was so focused and providing a diverse gameplay and creating a competitive game that he forgot to put effort in making the game actually work.

Story mode is dumb, as others have stated here, the split-screen is pointless if it's not an actual 1v1 battle, you just defeat the bosses IN YOUR SCREEN and you're good to go.

Vs Mode is fine, is by far the one I'm playing the most, the CPU is pretty fun to play against, but it lacks very basic features like the option to choose the scenario and an Arcade Mode since story mode is a fake 1v1.

I could say that the netplay makes the buy worth it if it at least worked, I couldn't play a single online match by now, most of the time it just fails, and when it doesn't fail, the FPS is always between 10 - 15, maybe there's not many people in my region that play the game, but damn, I don't think ZUN should ever touch a netcode again, at least not until he actually put the time to learn how to do it, he clearly didn't have a single clue of what he was doing. The worst part of it all is that there's no option for self-hosting, I'm hoping that ZUN or even the community will add this in a patch eventually, if there's never self-hosting I'm sure online will be unplayable very soon, since I don't think ZUN will keep paying the servers for more than a few years.

Having said it all, yes, the game is bad, it's unfinished and broken, probably the worst mainline until now, BUT I will say that, besides all that, I'm still having fun, enough to already have put a few dozens of hours in it.

But now, taking gameplay aside, I liked almost everything else in the game, the new characters, music, and I could be wrong, but I feel like ZUN is finally trying to create an ongoing plot for the series, instead of various separate stories for each game, not only the game makes references to past incidents, but also a lot of the endings are kinda of cliffhangers. If ZUN is really trying to write a bigger plot that will last for games to come, I'm totally for it.

[Pepi]

Does anybody here know how to set up a private room for online play?
I don't see any option to select a specific room to join

EDIT:
I figured it out, first both players need to set the same room name (let's say "SonBitenDrip69"), then you click on "join room" and done!

Edited August 18, 2023 by Pepi
Figured it out

[YuyuPhantasmagoria]

I haven't played touhou 19 but one thing I have to say is that (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) I absolutely adore Hisami's character design.

[Gri]

11 hours ago, Marukos said:

If ZUN is really trying to write a bigger plot that will last for games to come, I'm totally for it.

This sort-of already happen with MoF-SA-UFO-TD-HM.

While the plot of these games is mostly self-contained, they are references that connect the stories together.
 

11 hours ago, Marukos said:

He was so focused and providing a diverse gameplay and creating a competitive game that he forgot to put effort in making the game actually work

Pretty sure Zun doesn't care about competitive gameplay. Otherwise, character would be more balanced (and online would actually work a little). I just played the demo not the full game, but even with just 5 characters some were definitely OP compare to other.

[Marukos]

5 hours ago, Gri said:

Pretty sure Zun doesn't care about competitive gameplay. Otherwise, character would be more balanced (and online would actually work a little). I just played the demo not the full game, but even with just 5 characters some were definitely OP compare to other.

Yeah, competitive was not the right word, I meant that this game was made with online being the main aspect of it in mind, which would be the case if the online worked...

 

7 hours ago, Gri said:

This sort-of already happen with MoF-SA-UFO-TD-HM.

I know, but this time feels different, it really felt like the start of a bigger plot, but again, I could be complete wrong and it will simply finish in a future Touhou 19.5.

[Kurzov]

On 8/14/2023 at 3:26 PM, CountVonNumenor said:

I have not really caught up with the game news and what is going on. Could you please explain what happened? Outside the fact the game came out and what the character roster looks like, I have absolutely no idea of anything else. I have not played the game either, and probably won't do it given that bullet hell is not really my cup of tea when it comes to video games. So I'm listening, why is this "the worst game launch in Touhou history"? 

Some thouhgts of mine

[Kurzov]

On 8/18/2023 at 8:08 AM, Gri said:

This sort-of already happen with MoF-SA-UFO-TD-HM.

While the plot of these games is mostly self-contained, they are references that connect the stories together.

More or less

[Space Banana]

Touhou 19 had so much potential to be one of the greatest games, but it got too rushed.

It's a very fun game and has many characters to play with and I'm enjoying it. It's sad because if only the game wasn't rushed it would have been amazing, because there are many positive things to talk about the game, but the negative aspects turn me off completely from considering buying it.

• The OST's original tracks are very cool and I like them, but the rest is just rearrangements of old themes and most barely differ from the originals.
• The pixel art is very cool, and the portraits are too.
• The new character's designs range from really cool to meh. I like Hisami and Son Biten more than the rest.
• Input delay is really good as always
• Finally my controller's analog triggers work. So many games don't support these analog triggers
• I can't talk about the story yet, because you progress through it as you play with each character, instead of each character being an isolated variant of the story.

Then we have the strong downsides of the game:

• No score at all
• No replays (wtf!!!!!)
• No extra stage
• Online is fucked
• Some character portraits are worse than others, and generally all have the same energy to them, which doesn't help distinguishing character personalities
• Unbalanced portions of the game depending on the context (for example fighting certain enemies in lunatic)
• Some playable characters are very weak
• Main game is the shortest ever, with every run lasting around 15 minutes
• Versus mode takes forever for the enemy to get hit, feels very unfair
• In story mode, the enemy doesn't get hit, you just have to clear the spellcards. This is fine, but it's weird considering it's supposed to be a versus game. Also in the same mode, the enemy live indication doesn't lower when you clear a spellcard and doesn't represent the amount of spellcards you need to clear either, so you don't know how many are left to clear unless you know from memory
• This is the first Touhou game to crash on Linux when you alt-tab (if it's in fullscreen mode). I'm not sure if this happens on native Windows as well
• The card mechanic is not necessary and doesn't need to be in this game. You won't care about the cards and you can't even pick the ones you want. It just feels forced

I assume the price increase to 14€ or whatever is due to zun hiring a pixel artist, but the game in its current state should not be this expensive. I hope zun patches it and improves it a little bit at least

[Pepi]

42 minutes ago, Space Banana said:

• This is the first Touhou game to crash on Linux when you alt-tab (if it's in fullscreen mode). I'm not sure if this happens on native Windows as well

I also ran Touhou 19 on Linux. I didn't have any issues, aside being unable to connect to my friend for some reason? Note, I'm running it under the Bottles app with their custom wine version (soda 7.0.9).

[Space Banana]

2 hours ago, Pepi said:

I also ran Touhou 19 on Linux. I didn't have any issues, aside being unable to connect to my friend for some reason? Note, I'm running it under the Bottles app with their custom wine version (soda 7.0.9).

I used Lutris's builds of wine and proton-ge and both had this issue

Not so sure about vanilla proton because i didnt buy the game on steam

I didn't try bottles or vanilla wine

[Pepi]

1 hour ago, Space Banana said:

I used Lutris's builds of wine and proton-ge and both had this issue

Not so sure about vanilla proton because i didnt buy the game on steam

I didn't try bottles or vanilla wine

It could also be a specific problem to your hardware. I'm running a ryzen 5 3500U with integrated vega 8 graphics.

[Space Banana]

On 8/22/2023 at 11:54 PM, Pepi said:

It could also be a specific problem to your hardware. I'm running a ryzen 5 3500U with integrated vega 8 graphics.

This happens only with th19 on fullscreen very specifically, and I don't have old or quirky obscure hardware/drivers, so it surely is something that is different in the engine that doesn't go along well with wine

[vanyk]

My opinion may be controversial about this topic. I just wanted to share my thoughts. 

I don't want to repeat others' thoughts, because everyone here gave good points about this game. UDoALG is not as good as we thought it would be and could be. It looks like the game was made in 4-5 months (for example, Chen's spinning animation had been done 5 hours before the game was sent to print). And we don't know whether most problems will be fixed. Let's hope BeatMARIO or somebody else would persuade ZUN to work more on Touhou 20 (BeatMARIO successfully persuaded him to add multiplayer in UDoALG and has already told ZUN about the problems with UDoALG recently).

What actually surprised me is the community reaction. I'm used to traditional "it is over, Touhou is dead" (because people have been regularly saying that since TD) and "I buy games to give ZUN money for beer". And... that's all. Most fans just wasted their breath, but nothing changed. Some fans say: "ZUN does not listen the fans", have you tried to talk with him or send him a letter about the problems? There are cases when small Touhou doujin circles ask him to write music for their games and he agrees (so we have official Shinki theme remixes (not only in AUS) and more Rinosuke related music). And when they get such questions, what do they reply most often? "I haven't tried, but I am sure he won't listen to me". And it seems like most fans think in such way, because ZUN has no idea what is happening in fandom. He gets invitations to Reitaisai and different meetings so he might think that everything is okay. And he rarely watches Touhou-related fan content himself (I don't know why), so he doesn't have the complete picture.

Well, let's imagine that ZUN is that bad that he doesn't want to hear his fans and makes Touhou only worse. But there is a problem: the fanbase is the one who creates Touhou. I offen hear the point that Touhou has enormous amount of fanmade content (especially in Touhou introductions), but there is the same problem: that's all, again. Most people just say that there is a lot of stuff, but it seem like nobody is interested in it or knows about it (and it is really a big problem, that fanbase doesn't know about the content it creates). Touhou remixes aren't popular now, Touhou style music is still not that known. Have anyone noticed those 2 good fangames which were released a few days before UDoALG's release? Anyone? I do not say that "anyone must create at least one fan works", but I'd like to see at least good advertising of the fanmade content (I can't call 3-4 playthroughs a good advertisment of those 2 games). So people would know about alternatives.

This reminds me a similar situation in TBoI community. There were times (before Afterbirth+ release) when this game didn't have any good modding instruments and mods like Godmode were one of the best, but you could see that they are just fanworks. Then Antibirth was released and this mod looked like original TBoI but better and with more content. A few weeks after Antibirth the official DLC was out and it was not that good in compair with Antibirth. So Edmund (the creator of TBoI) had to fix everything and he cooperated with Antibirth developers. And after that the next DLC was actually good. 

What lessons can we learn from this situation? The community had the alternative and most of the community KNEW about it. The creator also knew what was hannening in fandom. And they didn't even need to make a new game, they modified the original one. A lot of old Touhou fans say that they would like to see Touhou 8 remake. Well, why won't they create the one themselves modifying the original game? Wait, modify original Touhou games, is it possible? Yes, it is for a long time, there are already a lot of good mods (for example loddk (th15, thcrap), umalt (th18, thcrap), subhatred (th11 (only extra), thcrap), DDDDDDDDDDDD (th14, standalone), epro (th17, thcrap)), which don't just change textures, text, music, but also change patterns and add new spells or mechanichs. There are already several guides and instruments to make the modding process simplier. But still a lot of fans avoid this part of community and it is still not that popular (Yomi tried to popularize it. His most popular video about Touhou mods has 61K views, but you see the actual result). So we returned to the same problem: Touhou community knows nearly nothing about itself. And after that the question arises: why the community of the game which does not rely on fanworks could fix the problems, while the community which is based on fanworks doesn't even want to try?

This situation is quite sad and disappointing. Western Touhou community is very passive and we should improve the situation. I hope this post is not for nothing.

GOOD NEWS for the ones who still play UDoALG or want to play it. There are already several modifications that can make your game process much better. All these mods you can install using thcrap (if you want to use the mods that changes gameplay in multiplayer, both players must have the same mods, otherwise 100% desync):
Th19BugFixes (Fixes most bugs and crashes. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)
lang_en (English patch, the game is mostly translated, but if you know Spanish or Chinese I would more recommend using lang_es or lang_zh-hans, because they are translated more than lang_en)
Th19StoryBGMChange (Proper music for story mod (read ReadMe.txt in "alt" directory in the mod's directory for more info))
Th19Balance (Characters are much balanced. Also big nerf of Chiyary, and Rin fix. Read ReadMe.txt for more info. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)
Th19StoryBalance (Story mod is much more balanced. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)
Th19FixOrinLV2 (Fix Orin LV2 bug (included in Th19BugFixes). DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)
Th19BigPortraits (Changes portraits for attack animations (customizable, only boss attack animations with big portraits by default. More info in ReadMe.txt in the mod's folder))
Th19ExAttackResAnimFix (Fix some extra attack animations (included in Th19BugFixes))
th19pofvui (UI is like in POFV)
visuals (Player's shots are less distracting)
th19gohei (Reimu's player sprite is with gohei)
th19oldspr (Changes some boss sprites to old ones)
alphes (Alphes styled character portraits)
BetterSoundClue (Changes some sound effects)
SakuyaTouhou19 (Adds Sakuya)
TESMgoofs (Meme, but with good boss attacks. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)
Th19Chaos (Unstoppable waves. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES)

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the netpatch for better p2p matches: https://github.com/RUEEE/th19p2vp

[Gri]

You can't really blame the Western community to think that Zun won't listen to them. Despise the demand for it, Zun has never bother to add english translation to the game (either by doing it himself or by hiring someone). This alone shows that Zun has little interest in Western community. In the end, yes you are are right, they could try to reach him, but we would need a great number of people sending "proper" email to Zun regarding issues with the last game, and we would need the japanese community to do the same.
 

On 10/14/2023 at 4:35 AM, vanyk said:

it seem like nobody is interested in it or knows about it

This part is another topic completely. I wouldn't say that "Touhou remix" are less popular, more like some fan have heard enough (there's only so much remix of "UN Owen was her" you can heard before being tired of listening to the same tune). For fan games, that's up to the dev to announce their game. I haven't play much fan-game, but I make sure to leave review and talk about the game if it is good (which is what people should be doing, but there a lot of "passive" fans which just listen to music and look at artwork. You can't force them to be "active"). Playthrough of a game and stream are actually a very good way of making a game known.

On 10/14/2023 at 4:35 AM, vanyk said:

A lot of old Touhou fans say that they would like to see Touhou 8 remake

This is actually an idea I had when seeing how UDoALG was "unfinished" and "broken", and when seeing the many comments of "Why is character X not there?". The community could come together and try to make a truly good, competitive Touhou VS game. Not need to wait for Zun to do it, he won't (this requires maintenance and updates, which Zun never do aside from very rare post release patch). This would be a BIG project though, since it would "serve" the whole community (so, a lot of pressure to whoever will want to do it).

Mods are all well and good, especially for making old game playable, but for new game it just feel like doing the work that Zun should have done in the first place (Modding takes a lot more effort than simply changing the game's original source code). Paying for a game you have to "patch" yourself turns off a lot of people, even if thcrap is easy to use (there's always the possibility of breaking something with too much mod). Pirating is an option, but always risky which turn off more people.

So, even with Mods, you can't fix all of UDoALG issues. Only minors ones. For things like missing Extra, Replay and Score, even asking Zun wouldn't work, since he'd never implement these feature post release, since this is how that game was designed. He'll only consider this for the next game, and I doubt it will be a VS game, making the whole thing a bit pointless.

On 10/14/2023 at 4:35 AM, vanyk said:

Western Touhou community is very passive and we should improve the situation. I hope this post is not for nothing.

I am curious: do you know how the japanese community is reacting to Touhou 19, and if they tried to get things fixed? 

EDIT: On another note, thanks for sharing the mod list with everyone.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Gri

[vanyk]

14 hours ago, Gri said:

You can't really blame the Western community to think that Zun won't listen to them. Despise the demand for it, Zun has never bother to add english translation to the game (either by doing it himself or by hiring someone). This alone shows that Zun has little interest in Western community. In the end, yes you are are right, they could try to reach him, but we would need a great number of people sending "proper" email to Zun regarding issues with the last game, and we would need the japanese community to do the same.

Thank you, for your reply. I agree with you, I am sorry, if my post was too offensive. ZUN said that he didn't expected Touhou to be popular in the West. In his view, fan translations would be better than official translations (he is not wrong, especially if you remember the official translations of fightings). Japanese auditory is his main target.

14 hours ago, Gri said:

This part is another topic completely. I wouldn't say that "Touhou remix" are less popular, more like some fan have heard enough (there's only so much remix of "UN Owen was her" you can heard before being tired of listening to the same tune).

You can compair views on different Touhou remix music channels and see that there are less views than several years agree. I agree that listening to the same tune is boring, but for this situation Touhou style music exists (the last somewhat well-known albums are IBP and CoUD but more new ones are less well-known). But the problem is that Touhou remixes popularised Touhou greatly.

14 hours ago, Gri said:

For fan games, that's up to the dev to announce their game. I haven't play much fan-game, but I make sure to leave review and talk about the game if it is good (which is what people should be doing, but there a lot of "passive" fans which just listen to music and look at artwork. You can't force them to be "active"). Playthrough of a game and stream are actually a very good way of making a game known.

Most devs use Twitter for announces, but most of such announces are left unnoticed. Creators of one of those two games tried to popularize their game via youtube (mostly the game's ost was uploaded), but it didn't help.

Some playthroughs of those two games had more than 1000 view, so I hope you know the names of those two games.

To be honest, I noticed that something is going wrong when ASL was nearly unnoticed in Western Community (this great game has been in development for 5 years), while WWW and DLW got much more attention in the Western Community.

About "passive" fans, again nothing was made to make them more active. And don't say it is because Touhou games are hard, then why there are a lot of Geometry Dash fans? Also there are a lot of fangames in different genres, so everyone can play what they want. I am bad in phychology, so I don't know how make them more active.

14 hours ago, Gri said:

This is actually an idea I had when seeing how UDoALG was "unfinished" and "broken", and when seeing the many comments of "Why is character X not there?". The community could come together and try to make a truly good, competitive Touhou VS game. Not need to wait for Zun to do it, he won't (this requires maintenance and updates, which Zun never do aside from very rare post release patch). This would be a BIG project though, since it would "serve" the whole community (so, a lot of pressure to whoever will want to do it).

Yes, the community could make a great "Phantasmagoria", but sadly, nobody makes it. Soku fans didn't wait, they just created Soku 2. There were some good attempts to create a new "Phantasmagoria": TH09x (my most favourite, because it add a lot of new characters), 幻想戦劇夢 ～ Wonderful Battle Dreamer (good), FRI (not bad). But those projects are not well-known. And because the community us passive now, I am not sure the new ones will appear.

14 hours ago, Gri said:

Mods are all well and good, especially for making old game playable, but for new game it just feel like doing the work that Zun should have done in the first place (Modding takes a lot more effort than simply changing the game's original source code). Paying for a game you have to "patch" yourself turns off a lot of people, even if thcrap is easy to use (there's always the possibility of breaking something with too much mod). Pirating is an option, but always risky which turn off more people.

So, even with Mods, you can't fix all of UDoALG issues. Only minors ones. For things like missing Extra, Replay and Score, even asking Zun wouldn't work, since he'd never implement these feature post release, since this is how that game was designed. He'll only consider this for the next game, and I doubt it will be a VS game, making the whole thing a bit pointless.

I agree with you. I wish he would make patches like in old days. (and mods are very stable nowadays even if they turn Touhou into another game)

15 hours ago, Gri said:

I am curious: do you know how the japanese community is reacting to Touhou 19, and if they tried to get things fixed? 

From what I know, just a little bit better. They wrote a lot of mails to ZUN (and posdibly BeatMARIO), but ZUN's reply was something like "yes I know about the problems, I could fix them if they realy bother you". Also there was a tournament, where nearly everyone played as Chiyary, and ZUN saw the process. So, nothing really changed.

The only active community now, is Chinese one. Oh, there is a new game with new characters, the next weekend there will be scripts with more patterns for them. Oh there is bad netcode, we will fix it. At least Western Community fixed bugs and balance.

15 hours ago, Gri said:

EDIT: On another note, thanks for sharing the mod list with everyone.

Here you are. I would be glad if more people knew about Touhou modding.

[Gri]

The only game I am aware of that was recently released is this Touhou/SMT crossover fangame (played the demo).

Other than that, I keep a lookout on Asprey's streaming for new fan-games (I don't watch them. Just take a peek to see what the fan-game is about). Of course, official reviews are better. Honestly, it's hard finding a good fan-game, since there's a lot of fans who would buy anything with the "Touhou" brand. It's hard to tell whether it's actually good, or just carried by the Touhou name.

[vanyk]

20 hours ago, Gri said:

The only game I am aware of that was recently released is this Touhou/SMT crossover fangame (played the demo).

If you are talking about Artificial Dream in Arcadia, this fangame is really successful and managed to get a lot of attention. This game is really good.

If you are interested the 2 fangames I was talking about are 鈴集無名の丘 ～ Little Doll Queen (good game, with beautiful patterns (but mostly they are not hard) and cute artstyle) and 東方宝天京　～ Treasure Castle Labyrinth (also a good game). Both games were released on August 11. Yes, they are shmups (maybe it is the reason why they were unnoticed).

20 hours ago, Gri said:

Other than that, I keep a lookout on Asprey's streaming for new fan-games

It seems like most Western fans watch only Asprey (I have nothing against him, he makes good videos). But there are a lot of other videomakers and streamers, for example PigeonVoyageur, Horrible Tales, williewillus, CrisdaOff (funny highlights). Alas, they are also not popular.

20 hours ago, Gri said:

Of course, official reviews are better. Honestly, it's hard finding a good fan-game, since there's a lot of fans who would buy anything with the "Touhou" brand. It's hard to tell whether it's actually good, or just carried by the Touhou name.

I agree with you.

[Gri]

1 hour ago, vanyk said:

Yes, they are shmups (maybe it is the reason why they were unnoticed).

Aha. Of course I wouldn't notice. There's 18 mainline shumps games (not counting HRtP), and once I'll Lunatic clear all of them (currently about halfway through), I'll take a break of shumps for a while, so I have no interest in shumps fan-games (yet).
 

1 hour ago, vanyk said:

It seems like most Western fans watch only Asprey

Well, he's the one that pop-up in my recommendation. You know the algorithm goes: the more popular you are, the more popular you'll get. I also watch Suwako when the topic is interesting (no gameplay video, I hate his) as well as MegaPig, and Tenkko since he advertise his channel here (and he covered fan-game I haven't seen before). For gameplay, there's Jaimers, as well as a few other. Mostly use them for guides.

Also, I don't watch twitch. I prefer playing games myself, so I do know much streamer.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Gri

[Macbeth]

I think touhou 19 was a let down vs th9. Yeah i get it the ai cheats in th9 but in th9 it felt like you actually fighting against the AI, th19 feels like youre just playing touhou with half the screen

[Macbeth]

Th19 mp is dead…

Edited November 2, 2023 by Macbeth

[SystemRestart]

Okay, so. I finally played it, I don't have the english patch yet so these are just initial thoughts, before I fully understand some things (gameplay and character wise)

My first impression is, huh, no replays. I wonder if there could be some complication with implementing them in this game? Or was it a deliberate choice? I also noticed, the lack of scores, and no final stats page or anything. As far as I could tell there wasn't even a "thanks for beating [difficulty]!" message....? Unless I missed it.

I'm a little sad about these things, because I usually do challenges (or just 1CCs) and share my replays, or at least screenshot my final stats as proof, or a kind of trophy? Maybe that sounds like a stupid problem to have with the change, but it's just something I wasn't sure about. Is the objective to steer away from scores and competition?

I also just started getting good enough at survival that I'm started to aim for more score, so that's probably also a factor in feeling this way. But, I did still have fun with the survival and chaotic dodging, I liked PoFV and Loved PoDD, so I still enjoy that part of the format, I also kind of like that you get those 'cards' that give you extra stuff (like sub-weapons) after each stage... though I definitely prefer some over others, lol,,,

I liked that, too, the big roster and the different boss paths each of them takes. I haven't figured out how to utilize the, uh, force field thing (kind of like from when you Focused in PoFV, but this time when charging your attacks), so I won't comment much on that for now, but I do like the variance in the character's shot-types, though, just like the card additions, that can lead to preferences, and some of you might struggle with a little like I did.

I also wanna say, I really like the new character designs, and I'm very intrigued by them, I liked the last game's cast, so I'm excited to see how I feel once I know anything about them beyond a couple rumors and stuff about Son Biten. (It's fun to see Tsukasa back already, and interacting with Ran!)

I also have one thing I'm wondering about. Since in this game, you don't immediately lose a 'life', or a heart, if hit once, you instead start flashing and have to be hit Again..... is a No Miss run, never getting Hit? Or will there be a different category, like, "No Hit" for if you're literally never hit, not even once, and "No Miss" for never losing a life? Because in this game you you can get hit once per stage, it resets, AND I also think that if you are able to unleash a boss attack on your opponent, it also lets you takes another free hit without losing a heart/life, correct me if I'm wrong.......

I actually like the system, of giving you that buffer that you can kind of plan ahead to account for, it's neat. But I would like to do a Normal "No Hit" someday, I think that'd be fun

Need to figure out the english patch and understand how some of the new mechanics work, but I guess there's some stuff I'm iffy about, and some stuff I'm really enjoying!! Can't believe I didn't mention until now, the character portraits are very cute, and the boss sprites are impressive and make me miss doing pixel art..... but it is kinda funny when some of them are HUGE compared to others, like Ran's seemed......... lol

Interested to hear other's thoughts! Who were you most excited to see return?

 

 

Edited November 14, 2023 by SystemRestart

[DynoHou]

i dunno i played only 7 and 18 lol