Covering (almost) every Touhou game in release order #8 - Mountain of Faith

[Cosmic]

Moving on from what most consider "early Windows" Touhou, we have Mountain of Faith!

After PoFV, Mountain of Faith was intended to be a kind of "soft reboot" for the Touhou series, keeping the same characters and continuity from before but going back to the very basics of what the series was to build up something new and different from that point, especially in the gameplay department. For the first time since EoSD, the game features Reimu and Marisa as the only two playable characters, each having three shot types, which unless I'm mistaken, is the highest number of shot types a single playable character has ever had in the series. Reimu's are generally fairly simple and easy to get the hang of, with her classic homing and forward focus shot types, and a third new type focusing on wide area coverage which as far as I'm aware has never reappeared since, but Marisa's are really weird and gimmicky, to varying results. her first one has a trail of orbs that follow her around and fire their own bullets, freezing in place relative to Marisa's position during focus, and her third has these strange magic circle thingies that shoot out blue fire and stay in the same position whenever you focus, flying back to Marisa once you unfocus. Her second is comparatively simple, playing similarly to previous Marisa shot types, but there's a glitch where if you're between 3.05 and 3.95 power, it deals 10 times the damage it's meant to, allowing you to beat every boss in the game in seconds.

This glitch becomes significantly easier to abuse thanks to a new, and to be honest, really annoying change Mountain of Faith makes to the way bombs work; now, instead of having a separate, dedicated meter for bomb use, every bomb used consumes one full level of power, and they become unusable below 1.00 power. I'll be honest, this change is literally just annoying, without any possible benefits, and I don't understand what ZUN was thinking when he made it work like this. Thankfully, it's not nearly as bad here as it is in the next game, but I still hate it here. "Hmm yes, I would like to use a bomb when I think I might die if I don't, oh oops I don't deal any damage anymore" what on earth was this man thinking. Additionally, bombs themselves have also been nerfed; now, instead of each shot type having a unique bomb, they all just make a big circle fly out in front of the player that deletes bullets, and gets bigger the more power you have when you use it. Functionally, this isn't that different to how bombs are in the rest of the series, they're kind of just a thing you throw out when you're in trouble so you don't die, but I don't care, I like having multiple unique bomb types and I wish this game also had those.

Despite my issues with the game's implementation of bombs, I actually think this game plays really well. There are no real gimmicks to speak of here, aside from the faith system which only impacts scoring, and the game has some overall really solid level and boss design. There's not really a whole lot to say here, it's just a generally solidly designed bullet hell. The environments here also look really nice; the previous games have definitely had good environment designs before (PCB's fifth stage and IN's fourth/sixth both particularly stand out to me), but there's a real sense of consistency here, both in terms of the quality of the environments and the general vibe that they go for. Stage 4's waterfall is a particularly great one, the enemies popping out from behind the water being a really nice detail, and Stage 6's pillars overlooking the lake is the perfect backdrop for a battle against the final boss, but my favorite stage here is easily Stage 3. I don't know, I just love the reveal of the river at the beginning combined with Gensokyo the Gods Loved playing in the background, it's a great combination.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack here is great, as is to be expected by this point. There's the previously mentioned Gensokyo the Gods Loved, one which I really like and which definitely deserves its spot as a uniquely iconic song to the series, but it's far from the only great one here. Fall of Fall and A God that Loves People both also have a great sense of atmosphere to them, and Cemetery of Onbashira also does a great job at hyping you up for the final battle, contrasted immediately by the sense of overwhelming power and "oh fuck, I've just challenged an actual god to a fight" carried by Suwa Foughten Field. Also, Tomorrow Will Be Special, Yesterday Was Not and Faith is for the Transient People are just generally bangers. I don't have much to say about those ones, they just go really hard, and that first one with the comically long name in particular is by far my favorite song in this game.

Anyway, onto the story, which I'm just realizing it's quite unusual for me not to have covered by now. This game also suffers somewhat from the Perfect Cherry Blossom issue of not really conveying its story through the in-game dialogue all that well, but from what I can gather, the Moriya Shrine, dedicated to the worship of the gods Kanako Yasaka and Suwako Moriya, is losing faith in the outside world, so Kanako transports it into Gensokyo on the top of the Youkai Mountain in hopes of gaining more faith there, annoying the local youkai and prompting Reimu to go and investigate. Six stages later, she reaches Kanako, who tries to persuade her to convert her own shrine to Kanako-ism, but Reimu refuses, choosing to keep her shrine true to itself as opposed to casting aside its previous god in exchange for the added faith and donations that Kanako promises her, and the two fight each other. After this, Reimu wins, and the local mountain youkai come to accept Kanako and Suwako as new local gods in exchange for Kanako not being as annoying about it as before. Later on, Reimu visits the Moriya shrine again, and Suwako shows up, apparently disappointed that she didn't get a chance to fight her like Sanae and Kanako did, so they fight too. Also Marisa is there and you can play as her instead if you want, but this is one of the few games where the story feels uniquely tailored to Reimu specifically and works way better if you pick her, so I've decided to just ignore Marisa's presence entirely. 

Despite this game being more than a little cryptic as to what exactly is going on in the early stages, I actually quite like this story. Kanako works really well here, being someone who's just annoying and pompous enough to work as a villain while not being so up her own ass as to be completely unable to get along with the locals, and like I previously mentioned, the story here feels uniquely tailored to Reimu specifically as a main character, something which is surprisingly rare in this series and which I really enjoy. A large part of why Reimu works as a main character is her versatility and how you can drop her into just about any incident and have her presence make sense, but it's still nice to occasionally get a story that's just as much about her as it is the shiny new villain ZUN's decided to introduce. It's a shame Marisa doesn't work nearly as well in this game's story, though, but I suppose it was an inevitable trade-off, so I'm willing to accept it here.

The game's other characters are also quite good. Stage 4 features best girl Aya as a boss fight, which is always welcome, but the new characters have a lot to offer as well, although in my opinion they're not as good as some of the previous casts. There's the previously mentioned Kanako, who's great, but Hina and Suwako are also characters I really like, Hina being a "misfortune god" and yet also one of the most genuinely nice characters in the series, and Suwako just generally being a silly and enjoyable character to watch. Nitori is also introduced in this game, and while she doesn't really do anything for me here specifically, I quite like her in everything else she's in, so that's cool. This game also introduces Green Reimu, also known as Sanae Kochiya, priestess of the Moriya Shrine, and... I'll be honest, she's one of the few characters in this series I actively dislike. I can't think of a single trait I associate with her aside from being from the outside world originally, a concept which is done significantly better by Sumireko later on in the series and which is barely a factor in her more recent portrayals, and yet for some unfathomable reason ZUN insists on shoving her into every game he can possibly find an excuse to make her be playable in. She doesn't bother me at all in MoF specifically, and there's nothing I inherently dislike about her as a character, but at this point, I'm really just sick of her. Oh, this game also introduces Minoriko and Shizuha Aki. I have nothing to say about them, other than that they sure are characters who exist.

Overall, while I do definitely have my issues with this game, its overall solid design and excellent music and environments still make it one I frequently enjoy coming back to, and even if in practice a lot of its changes feel bizarre and unwelcome, I can at the very least respect ZUN for making a genuine attempt at something new with this one.

EDIT: Fuck I forgot to mention, this game also changes how continues work. This time, you have infinite continues, but whenever you use one, you go back to the start of the stage. Personally I actually really like this, continues always kinda feel like cheating to me in the other games, until you use up too many and the game goes "nah fuck you you're not allowed to play anymore", I much prefer having to be skilled enough to beat a level without them to clear it but in exchange being allowed to retry as many times as I want.

 

[Gri]

The new continue system is definitely the worse change about the game. If I want to grind a stage over and over again until I am good enough, I'll just use practice mode. With this new continue system, you can get stuck for a good while on stage 5-6, while in previous game you would just use a continue on stage 5, then the rest on 6 and move on. I'd rather just finish my game than force myself to grind a stage on repeat. In SA and UFO, I managed to be far better at stage 6 than stage 5, since I was forced to restart instead of just moving on. Another bad thing with that is that it turns the game into a tedious die-n-retry loop, where you are trying to clear a stage, die to a boss, then retry the whole stage, die to the boss next attack since you don't know how to dodge it and you still need to improve in the rest of the stage, repeat till you get bored or finally beat the stage. Also, in this continue system, it is MUCH harder to unlock practice mode, since the game requires you to be able to beat the stage under 3 lives (or maybe 5 if you carried over some from previous stages). This also makes practice mode almost useless, since if I am able to beat it under 3 lives, why would I need to use practice mode that gives me 9 lives. This is very bad design because the game force you to be good RIGHT NOW, rather than giving you tools to improve, or allowing you to improve at your own pace. In other word, this is a big issue for player new to the game (whether they've beaten other Touhou or not), since it prevents them from enjoying the game first and then improving their run. You can't expect the player to just BE good (especially when there's tricky spell cards involved, like Orin's in SA). we all started somewhere. It took me a year to clear all game with all shot-types on Normal+Hard (and by the way, the continue system just become more annoying as the difficulty goes up, since it involve more resets). For practicing, I prefer to just do full runs of the game until I can clear it, or use Spell Practice/thprac for part that I have trouble with. I prefer having the choice on how I want to practice, rather than the game choosing for me.

Yes, having a limit in the old continue system was a bit weird, since the moment you used a continue, you've already lost, so all that's left is practicing the rest of the game and see and how you improved compared to your previous run (first run, you might need 7 continue, then 5, then 2, then 1, then just one life, then congrats you won). In this case, having a limit is a bit meaningless. If the players want to just kill itself and use 80 continues to clear the game, let them. Those that want to improve can still focus and try their best to use less continues. Thankfully, there is a patch to change the continue system of MoF-SA-UFO back to the old one (except there's no limit, since it is hard to mod one into the game), you still get the bad ending, so no cheating (I used that patch for UFO's Hard and MoF-SA Lunatic).

And if you feel like it's cheating to use a continue, then you are free to not use them.

I never tried to reset a stage from TD-UM, but with that system you get to choose at least.

As for Power bombs: I am somewhat glad they have been removed after SA, but they aren't as bad as you say. The basic shot is stronger in MoF and SA (well, more in SA), so having higher power is less important for dealing damage (there's still small difference, but just using 1 bomb won't halve your damage). The main issue with Power bombs is that you lose coverage by having less options, which can be important during stages. Power bombs have the advantage of being rechargeable. When you use a Power Bomb, you can continue the stage and collect power items to get it back. When you use a classic bomb, that's it, you can't get it back, and if that was you're last, then you are doomed  to fail at the next "bomb section" of the game (we all have these depending on our skill), no matter how good you do. This means that with Power Bomb, the game discourage the player from using too many bombs in short succession (which is good since bomb should only be used in a pitch). In a boss fight, you need to survive about 2 spells to get the bomb back, so technically having Power bombs gives you more resources than if you were using classic bombs (unless you are playing DDC, where you can grid a ton of them). With classic bombs, you can spam bombs as long as you have them (or recharge by dying), making it feel like you are skipping some stages rather than actually clearing them (in HSiFS, I just bombed most of stage 5, since it is way harder than anything else in the game). 

The main advantage of classic bombs is that they are a no-brainer, you just use them and hope you won't need too much to clear the game. Simple and straight-forward.

 

[Flame Sniper]

Ohh god, this game (second 1cc).

This glitch becomes significantly easier to abuse thanks to a new, and to be honest, really annoying change Mountain of Faith makes to the way bombs work; now, instead of having a separate, dedicated meter for bomb use, every bomb used consumes one full level of power, and they become unusable below 1.00 power. I'll be honest, this change is literally just annoying, without any possible benefits, and I don't understand what ZUN was thinking when he made it work like this. Thankfully, it's not nearly as bad here as it is in the next game, but I still hate it here. "Hmm yes, I would like to use a bomb when I think I might die if I don't, oh oops I don't deal any damage anymore" what on earth was this man thinking. Additionally, bombs themselves have also been nerfed; now, instead of each shot type having a unique bomb, they all just make a big circle fly out in front of the player that deletes bullets, and gets bigger the more power you have when you use it. Functionally, this isn't that different to how bombs are in the rest of the series, they're kind of just a thing you throw out when you're in trouble so you don't die, but I don't care, I like having multiple unique bomb types and I wish this game also had those.

Bombs in this game might look annoying, but they answer a strategy issue of past games (that I'm sure ZUN dislikes), Bomb Spamming. What's stopping you from unleashing a hell of bombs on the Stage 5 & 6 bosses if you stockpile enough of them?
It takes away a part of the strategy to use bombs in smart ways, but instead guarantees that if you manage your power right, you can pretty much drop a bomb every 2 boss patterns with the amount of power items the game gives you.
Making the 5th power level be a "free bomb/no power loss on death" is smart, it makes the system work.
Yeah, having a single circle bomb sucks and the implementation on SA was so unfair the system was scrapped.

EDIT: Fuck I forgot to mention, this game also changes how continues work. This time, you have infinite continues, but whenever you use one, you go back to the start of the stage. Personally I actually really like this, continues always kinda feel like cheating to me in the other games, until you use up too many and the game goes "nah fuck you you're not allowed to play anymore", I much prefer having to be skilled enough to beat a level without them to clear it but in exchange being allowed to retry as many times as I want.

Our opinions differ a lot here, I'm in the camp that this change sucks.
I feel like it makes practicing the game worse, let's say you are stuck on Stage 4, and you finally managed to beat it, now you are in a completely unknown Stage 5 without any idea what to do. In the other system, you can brute force through and get an idea at what to do in the later patterns of the game (you can have a lucky day and reach stage 6 without continues, it gives me more satisfaction).
And it makes practice mode feel redundant by essentially turning the main game into an intensive practice session, another thing is that you can't practice stages you haven't reached, meaning there's no easy way to unlock harder stages with how the continue system works.

Despite my issues with the game's implementation of bombs, I actually think this game plays really well. There are no real gimmicks to speak of here, aside from the faith system which only impacts scoring, and the game has some overall really solid level and boss design. There's not really a whole lot to say here, it's just a generally solidly designed bullet hell. The environments here also look really nice; the previous games have definitely had good environment designs before (PCB's fifth stage and IN's fourth/sixth both particularly stand out to me), but there's a real sense of consistency here, both in terms of the quality of the environments and the general vibe that they go for. Stage 4's waterfall is a particularly great one, the enemies popping out from behind the water being a really nice detail, and Stage 6's pillars overlooking the lake is the perfect backdrop for a battle against the final boss, but my favorite stage here is easily Stage 3. I don't know, I just love the reveal of the river at the beginning combined with Gensokyo the Gods Loved playing in the background, it's a great combination.

The faith system is like EoSD, the more score you get, the more lifes you can gather.
This is one of the games that better encapsulate the vibe of Gensokyo, when i think of that place the backgrounds of MoF come to mind.

Despite this game being more than a little cryptic as to what exactly is going on in the early stages, I actually quite like this story. Kanako works really well here, being someone who's just annoying and pompous enough to work as a villain while not being so up her own ass as to be completely unable to get along with the locals, and like I previously mentioned, the story here feels uniquely tailored to Reimu specifically as a main character, something which is surprisingly rare in this series and which I really enjoy. A large part of why Reimu works as a main character is her versatility and how you can drop her into just about any incident and have her presence make sense, but it's still nice to occasionally get a story that's just as much about her as it is the shiny new villain ZUN's decided to introduce. It's a shame Marisa doesn't work nearly as well in this game's story, though, but I suppose it was an inevitable trade-off, so I'm willing to accept it here.

Kanako is pretty villainous in this game, the Kappas and Tengus at first were against her essentially taking control of the mountain (it was always controlled by the Tengus). Reimu/Marisa acted like a mediator between the two before a full out war exploded, read these dialogs from Aya in Reimu's scenario:

"Lately, there's a god that's been giving even us some trouble.

She keeps acting like this mountain is hers...

And she's even come down to the foot of the mountain lately
to try and gather faith..."

"If she really got out of hand, we tengu were going to go
beat her, so you don't need to do anything."

Nitori also says something similar to Aya in Marisa's scenario:

"Recently, a threatening god has taken up residence at the top of the mountain.

Thanks to that, us kappa and tengu
have been bothered."

The game's other characters are also quite good. Stage 4 features best girl Aya as a boss fight, which is always welcome, but the new characters have a lot to offer as well, although in my opinion they're not as good as some of the previous casts. There's the previously mentioned Kanako, who's great, but Hina and Suwako are also characters I really like, Hina being a "misfortune god" and yet also one of the most genuinely nice characters in the series, and Suwako just generally being a silly and enjoyable character to watch. Nitori is also introduced in this game, and while she doesn't really do anything for me here specifically, I quite like her in everything else she's in, so that's cool. This game also introduces Green Reimu, also known as Sanae Kochiya, priestess of the Moriya Shrine, and... I'll be honest, she's one of the few characters in this series I actively dislike. I can't think of a single trait I associate with her aside from being from the outside world originally, a concept which is done significantly better by Sumireko later on in the series and which is barely a factor in her more recent portrayals, and yet for some unfathomable reason ZUN insists on shoving her into every game he can possibly find an excuse to make her be playable in. She doesn't bother me at all in MoF specifically, and there's nothing I inherently dislike about her as a character, but at this point, I'm really just sick of her. Oh, this game also introduces Minoriko and Shizuha Aki. I have nothing to say about them, other than that they sure are characters who exist.

Sanae is a tragic character, she essentially was forced by Kanako/Suwako to give up her life as a demi-god on the outside world and come to Gensokyo, that's why ZUN usually gives her something related to being egoist in her in-game descriptions. Yeah, she is not the greatest character, but works as contrast to what Reimu should accomplish as a shrine maiden. (Sanae is the popular shrine maiden in Gensokyo, while Reimu is depicted as being lazy with her non-youkai hunting shrine maiden tasks, not even knowing who the Hakurei god is). 

Overall, i like this game, even if the changes to the continue system are not of my taste.

The rest of the cast is really enjoyable, even getting protagonism in future games (Nitori in SA and Aya in HSiFS and spin-offs)
 

 

[Flame Sniper]

The new continue system is definitely the worse change about the game. If I want to grind a stage over and over again until I am good enough, I'll just use practice mode. With this new continue system, you can get stuck for a good while on stage 5-6, while in previous game you would just use a continue on stage 5, then the rest on 6 and move on. I'd rather just finish my game than force myself to grind a stage on repeat. In SA and UFO, I managed to be far better at stage 6 than stage 5, since I was forced to restart instead of just moving on. Another bad thing with that is that it turns the game into a tedious die-n-retry loop, where you are trying to clear a stage, die to a boss, then retry the whole stage, die to the boss next attack since you don't know how to dodge it and you still need to improve in the rest of the stage, repeat till you get bored or finally beat the stage. Also, in this continue system, it is MUCH harder to unlock practice mode, since the game requires you to be able to beat the stage under 3 lives (or maybe 5 if you carried over some from previous stages). This also makes practice mode almost useless, since if I am able to beat it under 3 lives, why would I need to use practice mode that gives me 9 lives. This is very bad design because the game force you to be good RIGHT NOW, rather than giving you tools to improve, or allowing you to improve at your own pace. In other word, this is a big issue for player new to the game (whether they've beaten other Touhou or not), since it prevents them from enjoying the game first and then improving their run. You can't expect the player to just BE good (especially when there's tricky spell cards involved, like Orin's in SA). we all started somewhere. It took me a year to clear all game with all shot-types on Normal+Hard (and by the way, the continue system just become more annoying as the difficulty goes up, since it involve more resets). For practicing, I prefer to just do full runs of the game until I can clear it, or use Spell Practice/thprac for part that I have trouble with. I prefer having the choice on how I want to practice, rather than the game choosing for me.

The continue system got so bad for me, i just don't want to go past Stage 4 in SA and UFO. I agree with you (i need to try the continue patch again, the first time it gave me trouble).
I even prefer LotLK's point device mode that has a shorter die-n-retry loop with a save file to stop playing once you feel like it.

As for Power bombs: I am somewhat glad they have been removed after SA, but they aren't as bad as you say. The basic shot is stronger in MoF and SA (well, more in SA), so having higher power is less important for dealing damage (there's still small difference, but just using 1 bomb won't halve your damage). The main issue with Power bombs is that you lose coverage by having less options, which can be important during stages. Power bombs have the advantage of being rechargeable. When you use a Power Bomb, you can continue the stage and collect power items to get it back. When you use a classic bomb, that's it, you can't get it back, and if that was you're last, then you are doomed  to fail at the next "bomb section" of the game (we all have these depending on our skill), no matter how good you do. This means that with Power Bomb, the game discourage the player from using too many bombs in short succession (which is good since bomb should only be used in a pitch). In a boss fight, you need to survive about 2 spells to get the bomb back, so technically having Power bombs gives you more resources than if you were using classic bombs (unless you are playing DDC, where you can grid a ton of them). With classic bombs, you can spam bombs as long as you have them (or recharge by dying), making it feel like you are skipping some stages rather than actually clearing them (in HSiFS, I just bombed most of stage 5, since it is way harder than anything else in the game). 

The main advantage of classic bombs is that they are a no-brainer, you just use them and hope you won't need too much to clear the game. Simple and straight-forward.

Exactly, and as you get better and start dying less, you can spam more bombs due to having more Power available (instead of just keeping the power high). Thing is that in SA you might not lack power, but range (Reimu's homing is bad in this entry, so the easy way is out).
Another thing with Classic bombs is that the game encourages you too much to use them, because a death means at least 3 bombs you lost without reward. This makes me start spamming bombs like a madman as soon as i hit Stage 5

 

[Cosmic]

Bombs in this game might look annoying, but they answer a strategy issue of past games (that I'm sure ZUN dislikes), Bomb Spamming. What's stopping you from unleashing a hell of bombs on the Stage 5 & 6 bosses if you stockpile enough of them?
It takes away a part of the strategy to use bombs in smart ways, but instead guarantees that if you manage your power right, you can pretty much drop a bomb every 2 boss patterns with the amount of power items the game gives you.
Making the 5th power level be a "free bomb/no power loss on death" is smart, it makes the system work.
Yeah, having a single circle bomb sucks and the implementation on SA was so unfair the system was scrapped.

Yeah, this is fair, I can see where you're coming from. Admittedly the system does annoy me way more in SA, and it never bothers me that much in MoF, so it's not the worst change. My issue with it is honestly with how it lays the groundwork for the SA bomb system already (doesn't help that SA is already one of the hardest games in the series as is).

The new continue system is definitely the worse change about the game. If I want to grind a stage over and over again until I am good enough, I'll just use practice mode. With this new continue system, you can get stuck for a good while on stage 5-6, while in previous game you would just use a continue on stage 5, then the rest on 6 and move on. I'd rather just finish my game than force myself to grind a stage on repeat.

Eh, this is fair, I guess. I don't really agree at all, since I'd still rather be required to have the skill to beat a stage before moving onto the next, but I can see where you're coming from.

And if you feel like it's cheating to use a continue, then you are free to not use them.

Alright, but this is exactly the issue I have with them. With how the current continue system works, you're given a choice between a playthrough where you have so many lives that deaths barely feel like they matter, and for some insane reason you can't see how many continues you have left, so you can't even quantify what you've lost with a death, and just outright going for a 1cc, which is a fun challenge once you're better at the game, but still not one to expect a new player to go for. With the MoF/SA/UFO continue system, it turns just beating the game in and of itself into an actual challenge, even with continues, which I enjoy a lot more than continue runs being nothing more than an easy baby practice run of the game so you can eventually take on the "real" challenge of playing the game without them. Not to mention that I just find getting booted out of a game once you die enough times to be an inherently annoying mechanic, regardless of genre (unless I'm imposing it on myself through deciding to do a 1cc run, in which case I actually quite like it for some reason).

another thing is that you can't practice stages you haven't reached, meaning there's no easy way to unlock harder stages with how the continue system works.

I will agree that this is just annoying with no possible benefits though, I do not like the way practice mode works in these games. What exactly is the point of practicing a stage I've already beaten?

 

[Gri]

Alright, but this is exactly the issue I have with them. With how the current continue system works, you're given a choice between a playthrough where you have so many lives that deaths barely feel like they matter, and for some insane reason you can't see how many continues you have left, so you can't even quantify what you've lost with a death, and just outright going for a 1cc, which is a fun challenge once you're better at the game, but still not one to expect a new player to go for. With the MoF/SA/UFO continue system, it turns just beating the game in and of itself into an actual challenge, even with continues, which I enjoy a lot more than continue runs being nothing more than an easy baby practice run of the game so you can eventually take on the "real" challenge of playing the game without them. Not to mention that I just find getting booted out of a game once you die enough times to be an inherently annoying mechanic, regardless of genre (unless I'm imposing it on myself through deciding to do a 1cc run, in which case I actually quite like it for some reason).

"Nothing to quantify what you have lost"? Previous game had the status screen at the end of the game. It shows you how much continue you've used and how many lives you lost. For MoF-SA-UFO, you can tell how much continue you have used by looking at your score (the last digit is the number of continue). This is how you can tell how you are improving. 

"Not to mention that I just find getting booted out of a game once you die enough times to be an inherently annoying mechanic". I did say the limit was a bit weird, but this is to avoid, like you said, player just having infinite lives so they don't care anymore about dying. So choose: Either have infinite lives and work as hard as you can to improve, or have a hard limit that forces you to improve (kicking you out if you are not good enough). I'd prefer infinite continue, but since the current limit is pretty high (5 on hard), it isn't really an issue.  Either way, nothing stopping you from taking the game seriously and avoid getting hit after using a continue. This is merely a tool for you to improve, without forcing you to improve NOW. When you have a busy schedule, a 30m Touhou game is easy to squeeze in, and the continue system will ensure that it won't last any longer. On the other hand, the MoF's system will make it so that it could take you 1h30, or more depending on how many reset you need. In the old continue system, I can choose whether I want to "skip" stage 5 and use Practice Mode later if I really struggle on it. For example, I am on Orin's last spell, and die. Do I really want to bother doing the stage all over again when I just made a silly mistake near the end? The answer is no. I know how to avoid that spell, I don't want to be force to grind it, I just want to move on to stage 6 (since I don't have too much time to game and want to keep the game to a short 30m).

Yes, beating the game should feel rewarding, but the moment you use a continue (regardless of the continue system) you have already loss (you've still loss and the Bad Ending and the lack of Credits will remind you of it). The Bad Ending should be a punishment, not a reward for having reset 15 times a stage and finally got good enough to be stage 6. The reward is the good ending, where you have beaten the game as intended, regardless of the path you have gone through to improve.

This is the same as Practice Mode. Yes, you could bomb-spam the whole stage (since you have 9 lives), but that would be pointless and you would not improve.  You could use continues and turn the game into a  "baby-easy-mode", but you would not improve. This is your choice to make, and I'll repeat myself, but I'd rather choose than being force into a single option (when in truth who cares about how I reached the Bad Ending for the Xth time). 

From TD onward, we both get to choose how we want our continue, so that's that. For MoF-SA-UFO, the choice is to use the continue patch or not.

 

[Cosmic]

"Nothing to quantify what you have lost"? Previous game had the status screen at the end of the game. It shows you how much continue you've used and how many lives you lost. For MoF-SA-UFO, you can tell how much continue you have used by looking at your score (the last digit is the number of continue). This is how you can tell how you are improving. 

"Not to mention that I just find getting booted out of a game once you die enough times to be an inherently annoying mechanic". I did say the limit was a bit weird, but this is to avoid, like you said, player just having infinite lives so they don't care anymore about dying. So choose: Either have infinite lives and work as hard as you can to improve, or have a hard limit that forces you to improve (kicking you out if you are not good enough). I'd prefer infinite continue, but since the current limit is pretty high (5 on hard), it isn't really an issue.  Either way, nothing stopping you from taking the game seriously and avoid getting hit after using a continue. This is merely a tool for you to improve, without forcing you to improve NOW. When you have a busy schedule, a 30m Touhou game is easy to squeeze in, and the continue system will ensure that it won't last any longer. On the other hand, the MoF's system will make it so that it could take you 1h30, or more depending on how many reset you need. In the old continue system, I can choose whether I want to "skip" stage 5 and use Practice Mode later if I really struggle on it. For example, I am on Orin's last spell, and die. Do I really want to bother doing the stage all over again when I just made a silly mistake near the end? The answer is no. I know how to avoid that spell, I don't want to be force to grind it, I just want to move on to stage 6 (since I don't have too much time to game and want to keep the game to a short 30m).

Yes, beating the game should feel rewarding, but the moment you use a continue (regardless of the continue system) you have already loss (you've still loss and the Bad Ending and the lack of Credits will remind you of it). The Bad Ending should be a punishment, not a reward for having reset 15 times a stage and finally got good enough to be stage 6. The reward is the good ending, where you have beaten the game as intended, regardless of the path you have gone through to improve.

This is the same as Practice Mode. Yes, you could bomb-spam the whole stage (since you have 9 lives), but that would be pointless and you would not improve.  You could use continues and turn the game into a  "baby-easy-mode", but you would not improve. This is your choice to make, and I'll repeat myself, but I'd rather choose than being force into a single option (when in truth who cares about how I reached the Bad Ending for the Xth time). 

From TD onward, we both get to choose how we want our continue, so that's that. For MoF-SA-UFO, the choice is to use the continue patch or not.

I get what you're saying, to some extent, it's just that none of this really changes my mind. When I beat MoF using continues for the first time, it still felt like I'd accomplished something, which isn't something I can really say about any other game in the series. Being 100% honest, I somehow managed to not notice the option on the menu of every game since TD to retry individual stages, so the knowledge that that exists does actually help, but I do still kinda prefer the MoF system. I don't think either one is "better" than the other, though, it's purely a personal preference for me.

 

[Gri]

Yeah. I agree that the first time you reach each stage it feels more "earned" with the MoF continue system, but this only works on the first run (seeing a new stage always feels good). After replaying the game on harder difficulty, it gets old very quickly. I am currently clearing SA with all shot-types on Lunatic, and if I had to grind Stage 5 for every times I used my first continue there, I think I would have given up.

Well, that's it for me on that topic.