buskerdog

Once again my thanks to the host, and thanks to everyone else for participating! This tourney really went on for a long time, and it's nice to see so many new faces around, That's really high given the sample size! My absolute favourites were Diverse System's U.N. Owen was Her; and Shanghai Scarlet Teahouse, but if the overall tournament average is anything to go by, there was heaps of amazing stuff here. As with all remix tournaments, I also find there are some tracks that grow on me since my original rating, and in this case those tracks include M.E.P.H.I.S.T.O and the already very highly-rated The Beautiful World. A recap of what I submitted! - for those who don't who possess Ken's world-class skills of deduction Not that he needed to use them this time Seriously Ken, I'm now way too self-conscious of everything I write in these tourneys Last time I said I would host the tourney after, so I'm ready to take up the role of the next host. I'm very busy at the moment and anticipate that I will continue to be for several months, so maybe expect the next one later rather than sooner; that being said it seems this tourney alone has lasted us a good while. Whenever the time for that next tourney comes, not needing to make comments myself as the host should suit my business.

I've had an eventful week, which may have included me getting rushed to hospital. Good thing I'm still alive to finish this. Better stop postponing just in case I die again. Rough Sea I often find it hard to find things to say about EDM, I feel there isn't much to comment on. I had to go and listen to the original again to be able to fully appreciate it, but I liked the opening of this song, and I appreciated the Theme of Eastern Story being weaved into there. The climax was alright but maybe it got a bit much right at the peak. I don't know what much more I can say other than you don't often get remixes of Illusionary Joururi. 5/10? I didn't feel there was anything particularly special to take away from this one. The beautiful world I really liked the mellowness of the opening, the piano reminded me a bit of the soundtrack from Breath of the Wild. It created this atmosphere that brought out the mysteriousness of Merry the Magician. I was expecting it to continue like that, but nope suddenly rock lol. It would appear this song is about Yukaribel. It still commits to being atmospheric, it's just a different kind of atmosphere now. I can really feel there's a journey being expressed through this music. I like how you can tell the music is based on Necrofantasia without it really being shoved up front. Although I think I would honestly have preferred if the whole thing was a continuation of the opening, it's a very cool song that uses the themes in it excellently. 9/10. U.N. Owen was Her? Atmospheric, I love the secluded village vibes given off by the instrumentation. There's also this kind of bubbly percussive noise used starting at 1.33, not the first time I've heard it but I don't know what the instrument that makes it is called, is anyone able to tell me? Because I'd really like to know, it's a sound I quite like. Anyway, this mixed around UN Owen in a lot of creative ways which I really liked. We've all listened U.N. Owen Was Her to death so naturally, it takes something for a remix of it to leave an impression on me, but this might be my new favourite rendition of it. Listening to this transported me into a dreamy, rural location - well, of the mind at least. 10/10.

I love Metroidvanias. I have several friends who already love Hollow Knight. I know I would love Hollow Knight. But, I just have too many other things keeping me occupied at the moment. Celeste was also on my watchlist of switch games to get, but I never got around to buying it. Sigh... one day I will find time to play all these cool games...

Damn this thread got way more activity then I expected in very little time. Guess I have no choice but to appear myself. It has been said on this forum before. It will be no surprise to anyone who knows me. Anyone who's followed my forum posts will see it coming from a mile off. Deep breath in I like Monster Hunter. Deep breath out I still haven't played the Sunbreak expansion for Monster Hunter Rise yet. I don't have the time. This seems to have become a Pokemon discussion so I'll drop my two cents too. I used to be a big fan myself, in fact it was the first video game I ever played, so it's been with me for a long time. However for several years now I've not been happy with the direction the series is going, so I stopped following it. Most of my attachment is gone now, although my friends who also grew up with it remain more enthused than I am. Oh well. I have Touhou now. Touhou basically replaced it.

^ Stuff like this actually being baked into the game is a really good approach to difficulty. Like, take any game that has a "true ending" for example.

I perfectly get you @ScarletPyro, no intention to be condescending on my part. Just wanted to make sure confusion was avoided - and it happened to segue nicely into a little rant about accessibility : ) I like discussion and I'm open to hearing everyone's point of view. After all, I'm not the expert (although I admit that sometimes I like to think I am). For example I was very interested to hear @SasaMisa's view on 8 bit and 16 bit era games, because personally I pretty much hate 8-bit games but I love games from the 16-bit era.

I'd like to make some counter-arguments, if I may. Game design is a keen interest of mine; although I don't consider myself an authority on the matter, I do consider myself to have worthwhile knowledge. I enjoy video games that are hard. Challenges are fun. But hard video games are not for everyone, and quite frankly, they're not meant to be for everyone. Video games are ultimately a form of media, like books and music, and their main purpose is to entertain. What sets games apart is their interactivity - and interacting with things can be fun even when it's not hard. Also like books and music, video games are a form of art, and all art is subjective. Saying that difficult games are the only ones worth anyone's time is like saying that only 1 genre of music is "real" music, or that people should only read 1 genre of fiction. Different kinds of games are made to appeal to different people in different ways, there is no 1 game that will make everyone happy. Enjoy what you enjoy and let other like what they like, recognise what are the elements of the game that make it fun, if not its difficulty. I get that what you're trying to criticise here is game difficulty, but you should be more careful with your words, because you make it sound like you are criticising game accessibility, and that is a huge asshole move. Everyone deserves to be able to enjoy a game, and accessibility options are an INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT PART OF THAT. Consider people who are colourblind, hard of hearing, partially paralysed, or even blind. Game developers, especially those from big companies with a big budget, should responsible for adding settings such as adjustable colour, sound subtitles, key remapping, descriptive audio, and yes - even the option to just make something easier - to address these users. Western developers have a much better track records of doing this than Japan. Sometimes it might not always be that simple - for example, how far can you take accessibility options in a game designed for competitive play? - other times, adding certain options requires technologies that are simply out of the developer's scope. However, I stand by my point that accessibility is important, and something that bigger developers should be acknowledging if they aren't already. Yes and no. Yes, commercialisation has lead to mediocrity in the name of mass appeal. And yes, making a game that earns a lot of money though mass appeal generally means making a game not very difficult - after all, investors would never ever want to anything that risks an unhappy customer. But the "No" is that I don't think the correlation to difficulty is very strong. Games made purely for mass appeal (usually) aren't very hard, but I don't really think that's effecting all the other developers around. I'd say that improvements in processing power and a shift in design philosophy are better explanations. Difficulty levels are NOT the answer to this issue. What a difficulty setting actually means is different for every game, so nobody can understand it. And furthermore, you're putting the responsibility on the player to choose what will be the most fun when chances are they don't know. It can even be damaging to the experience the developer is trying to create - plotting a difficulty curve, for example, is going to be a complicated mess if not all your players are even using the same difficulty. Ultimately, it is an extremely difficult question to answer. In my opinion, the best approach for players is to simply know what games will offer them the experience they want - and for developers, to make a game that a specific audience of players will love, rather than a game that a broad group of people will just like. Well I'd say there's already been a bit of a revival going on, just look at the success of Elden Ring and other FromSoftware games.

@CountVonNumenor Just Wherever it makes sense For what you're making

Oh yeah, 100th Black Market is also releasing at Comiket 100. Gotta love the subtext that Comiket is in fact a black market

Touhou 18.5 ~ 100th Black Market has been announced for release on August 14th. Wow, Marisa looks really good on that title screen! Finally out of Reimu's shadow, huh - can't wait to see what she gets up to. Since this is a spinoff, I'm not sure exactly how the gameplay works in this one, but it's a follow up to Unconnected Marketeers and sees the return of ability cards in what seems to be a more complex system. Also, Eternity Larva is in one of the screenshots. Just when I was talking of how the Touhou 16 characters need some more appearances... very nice! Although, I suppose it might be like the photography games where they don't really have any dialogue. Regardless I'll still be happy to see them and find out how this interesting gameplay works.

GENJIIIIII Aw man Genji is actually underrated. According to ZUN, he's still living in a pond behind the Hakurei Shrine somewhere. Everyone's all like "Bring back Mima" and meanwhile I want Genji to have another appearance in a manga or something. My first thought for underdeveloped characters however went to the Touhou 16 cast. Aunn deserves more spotlight Also, she's far from underdeveloped but I have to ask - where has Alice been in recent years????

Recently, I found myself revisiting an animation channel I once watched before my Touhou days began. One of their videos uses Bad Apple!!, which is how I was originally exposed to the song. However, the video only contains small parts of Bad Apple, as it is an unfinished animation parody of the famous shadow art video. What I did not realise, which I only noticed now by looking in the video's description, is that the version of Bad Apple contained in the video is in fact not the Alstroemeria Records arrange, but a different cover of it. So, I present to you: the first version of Bad Apple I ever heard - Draw the Emotional's version - now in full. And in light of my recent Kosuzu Motoori art I shared in Creative Works thread, I also have an arrangement of her theme to bring to light. The song is called Fantastic Girl Story, and it's by, errrr, certain circle that likes to strike down their works from Youtube. Hopefully this one stays up, at least for now...

I made some pixel art in a higher resolution to what I normally do lately. It's been good practice. Have some images of Kosuzu being cute!!

Yeah Cave is a pretty esteemed developer of bullet hells. I heard about them working on a Touhou mobile bullet hell back when it was first announced but forgot about it so thanks for the reminder. Hopefully the game comes out on time and is a well received experience, although I doubt I'm going to play myself as I'm not someone who plays mobile games.

On the 11th of August, Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (AKA Touhou Koumakyou) will be 20 years old! Touhou 6 is very important game in the series, marking the start of the windows era and introducing many characters and songs that have become especially iconic to the fandom. To celebrate this occasion, Touhou Youtube creator Megapig is rallying the community to release a bunch of fanmade content on August 11th. So if you want to join in, get something ready for the anniversary day! In other "news" - although everything I'm about to say here comes from a secondary source, so take it with a grain of salt - there was apparently a tweet made recently that ZUN won't be attending the livestream for Touhou Station game jam this year - but supposedly the reason for this is that he's hard at work on something to release at next Reitaisai. Due to the upcoming anniversary, some people speculate that he could maybe be remaking Touhou 6 - but to be honest, it's probably just Touhou 18.5 or Touhou 19. Still cool!

I think I heard about before. A lot of people aren't happy about this because the company making it is apparently really scummy. Not that I play any of these gatchas anyway, just sharing information. A touhou card game gatcha might win me over though

What criteria exactly are you using to determine who's part of the tier list? If you were to include any doujin circles, your list would be unquantifiably large. Obviously you want to include Touhou content creators from Youtube, so for that reason maybe you only want to include doujin circles who have an official Youtube presence - but at that point, wouldn't it essentially just become a music tier list? Which wouldn't even hold any value because music is subjective although tier lists are also subjective but usually the point of them is to attempt to be as objective as possible. Also, what of content creators who do more than just Touhou? I'll give 3 examples. First looking at MTB, he mostly makes Touhou content but occasionally he does something else like a Half Life video. Still, I think we would agree he is a Touhou content creator, but the next two examples are more tricky. They are also music examples, which is a bit ironic given what I said earlier about ranking music on a tier list, but that's beside the point. FalKKonE? He makes a lot of Touhou remixes. However he also makes just as many remixes for at least a dozen other fandoms. Is he a Touhou content creator or not? And Stringstorm, who you recently linked in this forum. They primarily don't make Touhou content, however they have a couple of videos about Touhou. Does that make them count as a Touhou creator or not? Is the plan only to include active creators, or any creators? Anyways, I'm very interested to see what this tier list could look like. I'm happy to magic up a list of a few creators I know once I know what's game and what isn't.

A dumb question I want answered

M.E.P.H.I.S.T.O I haven't heard of this circle before, but they have some nice distortion guitars and a nice vocalist. She reminds of the singer for Cinnamon, Cinnamon!! a lot... oh wait that's because it's the same person lol. There's quite a lot that goes on in this between different instrumental sections, tones, and the way she sings. Although mind you, none of it really sounds like G Free... At the start I was expecting this to be cool, but it turned out cute overall I think. I like the singer but for some reason I'm not wild about the vibe of this song. 6/10. Elegant Ice Maiden OK, that thumbnail is cute overload. I can't tell if this whether this is trance, house, or something else lol. Whatever it is, I do like what I hear, particularly that minor key section was interesting, however as Dana said it's pretty repetitive and feels same-y throughout aside from that minor key section which was the highlight. Because of that, it ended sooner that I expected it to. I did still think it was pretty, ahem... COOL. But it also hasn't got much too it, it's just kinda average. 5/10. Higan Retour ~ View of the River Styx I really love the airy feel set by the plucked guitar in the intro (that is what a guitar sounds like when plucked, right?), it sets the stage well for the incoming build up, which also seems to feature a bit of synth pad. There's some real progression in this, you wouldn't think you can express so much with just electric guitar, you can feel the journey through this song. That airy instrument which I am assuming is a plucked guitar never truly goes away either, it's always back to add more depth to the composition. It happily takes a good 4 minutes before fully popping off - but despite the overall metal intensity, it all comes to a calm resolution at the end. 9/10. This is 8 minutes of pure demetori bliss.

I've always resonated with Adequate by A-One (feat. Odyssey. Actually, Odyssey did pretty much all the work tbh).

Sorry I don't remember how long you said you've been in the community Isaac, so I don't know the context of what games those were at the time. But in my context, Hidden Star in Four Seasons was the only game available on steam when I started, and inverse to what you did, I downloaded first since I wanted to play in chronological order. You're absolutely right in saying it's a silly assumption that pirating = never paying for Touhou, once I reached the point in the series where games were available on steam (Touhou 15 had been added at that point), I bought the games officially instead, and continue to do so for every new release (Gouyoku Ibun actually being an exception, but I won't get into that). Even if I haven't payed for every game, I want to buy the new releases as my way of giving back to this series I love, and I try to give back in other ways too, such as through my fangames and even these very forum posts. Regardless of the availability of games, it's also true that the service of having the games pre-patched is just better and more accessible. I know how to patch the games myself, but I wouldn't have if I got into Touhou through an official purchase first and would have felt quite intimidated by the fact that I need to spend money on a game in Japanese that I might not even be able to play if I can't get the patch working. Having the download versions first made me much more comfortable with the idea of patching - unrelated to the thread topic, but big shoutouts to everyone working on the THCrap project, their creation is truly revolutionary and they're doing an unspeakably incredible service to everyone in the community. Didn't we already have a thread discussing the implications of Piracy? I feel like we've already drawn the conversation away from what Von intended. On the topic of why people openly dislike Moriya, that's not a question I have answers to, but Moriya Shrine has existed a long time, and has its own community associated with it - users who remain from that community having migrated to discord by now. I think for some the bad blood goes back further than the DMCA, which is still a very recent event in the site's history. My knowledge of matters goes no further than this. Since the DMCA, piracy has clearly become a relevant issue among some Touhou fans. Instead of censoring it, perhaps now more than ever is the time we should be talking about it? I think it's good that the Touhou fandom no longer has to rely on piracy to the same extent as they used to, and I'm especially glad of this for new fans. However, that reliance is far from gone, there is plenty of official content that is quite simply inaccessible for the west without piracy. To close off this post, I have a video to share. Touhou would absolutely not be what it is today without piracy, and I think this video shares a good message about how supporting your favourite creator has more meanings than simply filling their coffers.

Idk the conversion for y'all dollar people, but on steam the mainline games are about £11.40 whereas the danmaku spinoffs are all about £8.30 - personally I think the mainlines games should also be at that same price as the spinoffs. But what I really want is for ZUN to just make a value bundle to be able to purchase the games by era

NO MORE PROCRASTINATE Demoness of the Underworld Eerie orchestral, yet also meloncholic and emotional. Violins can very easily sound bad when they are not done well, but I can happily say that this is not the case in this piece. I thought that the piano was a bit loud at the end but that's really the only critisism I can bring against it. Despite literally only containing a piano and a violin it sounds and feels like there's way more going on, so you can tell they really nailed the atmosphere. 8/10, this is quality stuff that really sets a scene. Where is that Bustling Marketplace ~ Immemorial Marketeers More orchestra! But this one get me ready for FITE! The drums in this already set a really crazy pace, the whole energy of the piece is incredibly motivating, while also creating a sense of danger/climax. As the description says, "epic final boss music is epic". This take on orchestral is not afraid to up the intensity with more modern flavour either, I can definitely feel some metal influence in those drums at times. The cherry on top is the delicacy added by the traditional Japanese instruments. This piece uses lots of different ways to bring out the epic in orchestra, and it uses practically all of them well, without any sections feeling like they step on the toes of others. And I also have to mention that I'm a fan of the brief drum solo bit. This is a 9/10. Shanghai Scarlet Teahouse I was intrigued by this right at the opening. It felt like it was leading up to something big, and indeed, that big thing came. The main melody in hard rock form on top of the chosen chord progression and counter-melody already makes for incredibly energising music. The following, techno-whistley section makes for a very nice sounding break to relax for a moment. Then, after that, you're gonna throw HARD ROCK PAN PIPES AT ME??? My secret weakness, pan pipes - now you've got me invested. The epicness of the music is really sinking in, you could certainly describe it as epic rock or metal. At 3.20 the tune is also being shaken up a bit now it's been repeated a few times, very much approve. As if this song didn't have enough going for it already, we've even got a funky break down section in there. Finally, there's suddenly J-RAP??? My OTHER secret weakness??? HOW??? The ending guitar riffs are just pure cool, I'm getting some Stone McKnuckle energy there. Meiling fans, rise for your national anthem I guess, 10/10. Time to spend 5 minutes learning Meiling combos in Soku before giving up. Still two more rounds to go. Ken, surely we're not getting a better overall round than this, right?

Early Touhou fighting games often flag false alarms. Something about Tasofro's code is just notoriously jank, for example they are very difficult to language patch compared to the ZUN games.