News roundup time. A bit shorter this time as most of the important stuff got already covered:
News and updates
JP has just announced two new units. Unless there is any sign for a Yuuma release, it means this is the end of the Windows era cast. They actually did it... the cast has been exhausted. From now on, it is either shifting focus towards PC-98 (just as likely to happen as Half-Life 3), or just create new alts. I guess we will have to expect new EFES and Relic FES from now on, since these are the only ones that still have content to release. While regular FES is slowly getting merged with the General pool. Retro is also possible, but we know nothing new besides the the A7 Yuyuko. Only EFES are clear because Chapter 4, while Relic FES because they have to go through all music videos.
Anyway, get ready for Sannyo and Tsukasa (obviously they are separate banners):
Closing thoughts
As I am writing this, it is already 20th October 2022. Just 5 more days, and DanKagu will close forever. Even if I never touched that game, and cannot 100% confirm I would have enjoyed it even if we had a global released, I still feel very sad about its shut down. As if I lost someone who was dear to me. My feelings would probably be mixed of LostWord suddenly decided to shut down tomorrow, but DK really got me a strong feeling.
I am always getting mad when I look at even the tiniest character animation, let along an entire animated dialogue cutscene from DanKagu. Not only that the characters were moving and felt more lively, but the artstyle for them was also extremely cute. This is probably one of the greatest losses for me, since no other Touhou (at least mobile) game really wants to go that animation route. LostWord's dialogue cutscenes are as interesting and awkward as a PowerPoint presentation, and I have no idea what Arcadia Record is doing with their characters since nobody talks about that game.
Imagine the fact these characters were really moving in the cutscene, and this was not just me posting a simple screenshot
Since I did not have the chance to play the game, I will let other people try analyze what went wrong with it:
"I've played the game and I can say that TO ME, some other factors caused its failure were 1) its music game part feels generally odd and out of place compared to PJSK and Arcaea or those excellent mobile music games and there were several fatal bugs at the early launch that caused missing notes which u don't suppose to. And that lost those core music gamers to drop out. 2) the chart design is lame, every chart was almost the same. some will stand out but not many. it's not bad but there was nothing exciting and ngl this problem was kinda solved AFTER their announcement of stopping maintaining the game. 3) I don't think only doing Touhou songs is the problem, the problem is that the songs they chose are just not thrilling to a music game and that kinda connects to problem 2 yet still they could come up with better charts when they didn't. Those are kinda regarding the gameplay and they are important to me. I very enjoyed the game but because of those I kinda AFK now".
"So the reason this game failed is because it's just an Touhou skin of already existing games with the same mechanics. There are many Touhou fangames out there who are "Touhou versions" of other Popular games, but what make them interesting is how the mechanics translate to Touhou universe."
"Aquastyle was such a good developer. I really enjoy the game only spending my time and zero cash... and that should been a red flag. They failed catching whales/"hard-content" consumers cuz there was not such thing. The lack of making you spend money in the game for gameplay 0 cosmetics was good for the player but a bad decision for the life of DK. And no, it's not about being a "greedy gacha game" it's being profitable... At least GoodSmile recognizes the flawless point of their game and makes money with their merch, probably the reason why NextNinja can't go all in with LW development."
"As a long time veteran of both Touhou and gacha rhythm games I have a few opinions on this.
1) The game was in competition with too many other games, not just gacha rhythm games like: Idolmaster, bang dream, Hatsune Miku, etc. , but also other Touhou games, but even deeper than that, a plethora of Touhou based rhythm games, such as Spell bubble. It found itself in two small niches that were already over saturated: Touhou gacha games and Touhou rhythm games
2) The Touhou community is more hostile towards gacha than most anime/game communities.
3) Bringing no new characters into the mix because it's a derivative work means fans have no cool new units to look forward to, which is killer to a gacha. We can only be excited for getting a Chen so many times.
4) No compelling story as we go and meet the same characters we've seen hundreds or times over the years.
5) Touhou community too far spread to gather around one thing like fate fans can over FGO, and at the budget they went for, they needed a bigger concentrated chunk of fans to gather a round it to sustain a live service."
"Why bother with a generic flat design Touhou gacha rhythm game when I can play Muse Dash or Touhou Spell Bubble? It has better HUD, you can select the unlocked characters with in game animations, and you can add extra songs as DLC (Touhou collabs works wonderful here). Or even better, have secrets inside the gacha system like Trombone Champion. To make a successful gacha game, is doing something unique and dont copy paste other repetitive rhythm games"
Anyway, with DanKagu shutting down, what should we expect next? Will we, the scrubs not willing/being able to spend a single penny on a Touhou official/fan game, have anything else left to play an have the Touhou theme slapped all over it? LostWord seems to be following the same path once the producers realize they have no new idea what to introduce? They already do seem to be slowly running out of ideas. And to make it a coincidence, we are now getting a second back-to-back event rerun (last time when 2 successive events were reruns on Global was apparently back in spring). And once Chapter 4 will be over, what should we expect next? Will there be any new content? There are already discussions behind the corner that LW is not doing so hot, and that we may expect an EoS announcement at some point. So buckle up, these sure are interesting times.
Just please, don't show me an of the cute DanKagu animated characters at least for the time being, because I don't think I will be able to handle it. It is already bad the game is going down, I don't want to be reminded again what we have lost. Although I will probably do it myself, just because I may have masochistic tendencies. On this depressing note, I dont really know when will the next news roundup be. Nothing new is happening, and it feels ever more tedious to just spend anywhere between 30 minutes - 1 hour just for writing one of those updates. It was fun when I started, but now I feel like the drive is slowly doing down since the source material is barely giving me anything exciting to write about. Not even getting Chimata (and basically finally completing my top 10 Touhou waifu collection) made me more excited for the game. This does not mean the end of the news roundup (and by extension of this thread). I took a commitment to keep updating this, so I guess I will keep being around for at least making this thread be 1 year of continuous discussion (which should be in March next year).
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