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KirbyComment

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KirbyComment last won the day on August 6 2020

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About KirbyComment

  • Birthday 02/01/1996

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  1. I've so far played about 12 hours of version 0.01a, played all characters on Lunatic and got a No Bomb No Focus No Hit 1cc with Reimu. Overall I find the game better than expected. The game will however die very quick if netplay isn't introduced in the full game in a workable state and to a lesser extent if the game keeps scoring absent. In that case the game will be a fun enough, but short-lived experience. That said I will stay cautious regarding how the full game will turn out. These are my more detailed experiences with the demo of this game:
  2. Since my original review from when the game was new was removed, I will instead link to a forum page where someone by the name of CloudyMusic was nice enough to copy my now-removed review (posted on August 13, 2018). https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62889
    After having played the game for 10 hours, 7 of which reserved for the casual playthrough and the remaining 3 on low-level scoring, I can sadly say this one of ZUN's worst works so far. This review will be based solely on gameplay rather than story and characters because gameplay should arguably be deemed as far more important than anything else. The gameplay of the game is what decides your enjoyment of the game after all. This site also needs to describe a good overview for how the game actually feels to play. From this game I expected a photo game, with some kind of twist to it. This is all true in a sense, but not in the way I would expect it. I basically consider this DS and ISC put together, but done wrong. To clear a scene, all you need to do is deplete the health of the boss while requiring only one photo to be taken. This seems like a pretty strange choice, but I will not deem the game bad for this reason. I deem this game as bad for the mechanics and controls and overall bullet patterns that come along with it that are very broken and not well thought out. The following complaints are basically a result of ZUN not really caring about polishing his games anymore, which was apparently stated; he doesn't want to worry about his newer works so much as he makes them. Now moving on to the gameplay-flaws: - Tapping focus to aim at the boss disables your ability to take a photo at all. In StB and DS doing this would allow you to aim your frame at the boss, making it easier to make a photo of the boss. This is true in VD as well, except that you either can't make a photo right after releasing focus, or there is some fierce delay on it. - Holding Shift and the photo button allows you to be in charge speed in all other photo games, but in VD; as soon as you get 100% charge, you lose the ability to use charge speed and even holding focus allows you to take the photo. This means that more often than not your deaths may very well be caused by the change in movement speed you can't stop from happening. - Like I said, triggering a photo has delay, but it also doesn't seem to slow the game down. In fact I've seen it speed up before on Clownpiece's horizontal laser scene. - The teleport mechanic is practically speaking honestly by far the worst mechanic I've ever seen in Touhou. The inputs required are annoying and almost no pattern is designed with it in mind, except for the ones that are absolutely impossible without it. The scenes where the teleporting is required, it's really hard even using it correctly, due to it requiring double tapping to activate. To top it off, in the heat of the moment that you're in need to do alot of dodging, you can easily accidentally make the teleport activate by accident, resulting in death. This mechanic would have been much better if it was mapped to the C-button and single button press. - There is a clear quantity over quality; a wide range of the Touhou cast appears, but very little patterns are unique and mostly reused from other games. The third week also has 2 bosses on every scene, which would sound like it has potential to make for some really cool scenes, but every unique boss in reality uses the same pattern over and over. They are randomly placed with another boss in one scene, providing little to no variety. Some character combinations also match up badly with each other. Particularly the Hecatia+Suika scene is the worst offender of this problem. - Since patterns are all reused from other games, they aren't made with photo-play in mind, meaning making photos including the boss or high scoring photos is close to impossible on many scenes in the game, since they all force you to stay low. - Difficulty balance is all over the place. The scenes in Wrong-Saturday are the worst offenders of high difficulty, despite being situated in week 2 out of the 3 in the game. The plot-relevant scenes by comparison are a complete non-issue. The tedium in the week 3 scenes does not count towards the high difficulty of those scenes; it's artificial difficulty. - The most recent games had this nice addition of instantly canceling bullets when the boss dies. This is not the case in this game, which has caused me to die while the boss was already dead many times, including the scene in this video, doing it the exact same way. This one I don't mind as much, but I have to wonder why ZUN decided to get rid of a new mechanic that is convenient to the player. - The duo boss patterns, which there are ALOT of, are all extremely tedious, even with speedkilling strategies. Too much HP with usually not much going on so it's a drag. This is also because alot of them force you to stay low, making you unable to make photos of the boss to speed up the process, as mentioned before. - A few broken things which are just typical ZUN-programming, which I will excuse is that retrying by pressing Escape+R breaks the game, making it extremely unfriendly to resets. You are apparently also able to have infinite lives on a single scene because of this, which I find rather funny. Then also replays imply to allow for 12 characters even though you can only insert 8 when saving a replay. For anyone who thinks this game is good because of the story and characters, then I won't argue against it, if that's your cup of tea. I just think that in terms of gameplay this game really fails compared to every other game ZUN made so far. I hope people will see that this game isn't all as perfect as it seems. From a gameplay standpoint it really just looks like you'd think it's some sort of joke. One thing I can still say though is that the VD soundtrack is still very good, but unfortunately the gameplay around it just doesn't save it from a 1/5 rating. Here's hoping for games with more effort in the future.
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