I can't understand anything in it, but it seems like a lot of fun. I've been spending some time trying to get the darn game to work so I figured I would discuss it with the weeaboos and the surprising number of fighting game fanatics here. Oh, and anybody waiting for an english patch might never get to play. The game is apparently a pain in the face to work with and no translators feel like taking on the project. From wiki's I've gathered that No dedicated graze button is balls Movelists are more interesting and easier to use Gravity pulls towards people, not the ground Nitori Kawashiro is Solid Snake What I'm still trying to figure out How to change the damn keybinds How to change move profiles Which moon rune means buddhism
I'm a bit of a shmup aficionado, and I really enjoyed Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, and Imperishable Night. However, after those three, the Touhou series seemed to wane. I also got annoyed with the fandom, which focused on the cute girls rather than the games themselves. (It was the Friendship is Magic fandom before FiM came to be.) And while the games were fun, they lacked the full package for what makes a good shmup. Sure there's plenty of dodging bullets, but a good shmup also requires accuracy, tactical and positional planning, and variety. The Touhou games tend to be very one-note. Contrast them to some of the best shmups to come out in recent years, like Hydorah or Jamestown. Sure there may not be as much OMG BULLETS, especially in Hydorah, but the games can be equally, if not more challenging due to the features they have that the Touhou games lack.
13.5 is a fighting game. It's a weird one where it's all aerial. I like the attack system, but gravity is weird and I feel it would have worked better if it were aerial focused with downward gravity instead. And the shump touhou games get more interesting when you get into the scoring systems instead of just winning. High score runs are all about positioning and planning. Depending on the game the types of play you need to get high scores can vary wildly. 9 and 10 were the low point of the windows games. 11 wasn't great, but it got back into the groove. 12's spaceship system was fun to use and and 13 has some of the most interesting pre-stage 6 boss fights in the series. 12.8 is my favorite. It has the most interesting scoring system out of any of the games in my opinion. It's short and only has one character, but the freeze system being tied to attack power made it fun. And I thought Jamestown was pretty boring compared to Touhou. I enjoyed Jamestown, but it didn't hold my attention as long as the Touhou games have. I feel more pressure to get a high score while losing horribly in Touhou. I'll have to try out Hydora though. Never heard of it. But yeah, fighting games.
Oh, another one of those then. IaMP was interesting, though people got a little too into it, so they whined about the sequel. I guess neither of those were "official," but 13.5 might be interesting to look into. (If it were for Linux.) And don't get me wrong, I'm all about scoring. I 1cced all 3 of the Touhou games I mentioned on Lunatic mode, then went back to perfect my score. (I don't bother to compare my scores to others, because I always considered the joy of a shmup to be that it's a competition against oneself. I probably don't rank very high on the official scene.) However, the Touhou games largely consist of dodging, there's no way around it. Sure in some of them grazing plays an important part of getting points, but it's only a subset of dodging. What I consider to be more interesting is when other factors come into play. Radiant Silvergun remains my all time favorite shmup simply for the wonderful depth and planning that is required to high-score in it. You had to map out the color chains, choose the highest scoring combo of that particular level, and then shoot with precision to ensure you hit only the ships you want to hit. NOT shooting some of the ships is key to getting high scores, which I always found to be a novel concept. Ikaruga comes close to RSG in this style of gameplay, though less of letting enemies survive and more involving the shield mechanic. The fact that enemies shot at you when they died definitely added to the care required in positioning. Mars Matrix also did the shield thing, though utilizing your movement to shoot the caught bullets back resulted in some nice movement play. Jamestown is a bit on the easy side, but juggling the vaunt system to maintain score is what made it so fun to me. Hydorah just goes for brutal oldschool. Less bullets, but they're shot in a more intelligent manner, meaning you had to use your movement to manipulate enemy shots and create paths for yourself. Also, the level designs were gorgeous. It was a darling for the shmup community for a long time. I'm getting a bit off here, but the point is that there's so much more to shmups than the Touhou games achieve. I don't deny that they're some of the best curtain-fire games out there, but curtain-fire does get dreadfully boring.
They're official in that they are made by ZUN(and another team). They're not part of the main series because they're spin off games. Doesn't make them not fun though. You want unofficial, try touhoumon or touhouvania I've had some gripes with all of the fighting spinoffs and 13.5 has some too, but if you were to replace the bits I didn't like in the other 3 fighters with the bits I like in this one I'd consider it the perfect fighting game mix. Less because touhou and more because I think the systems they use. I like the idea of a largely aerial focused projectile fighter with the dodge system they have in place. I just wish they used directional inputs for all the moves, instead of blurring preset combos and junk into them. The redundancies could have been changed to replaced the combo system and the game would have been exactly the same, but more responsive. 13.5 is giving me a lot of hell. Partially because they hate non-japaneses this release, partially because there's no dedicated graze button, and partialy because I'm having trouble liking the gravity system. The movesets and stat system are a lot of fun to toy with though. Probably mostly because I'm a fighting game nublet, but I could see myself messing with it for hours if I read moon runes. ...Holy Crap... And from what you're saying I'd recommend 12 and 12.8. 12's scoring system in based on collecting certain power ups that collect power ups on the screen the multiply the points they have in side them. So on top of needing to collect the ones you're looking to get, you need to make sure they appear when you need them to as well gun down the bonus ship that appears in addition to what's on the rest of the screen. Bosses are still all dodging, but the levels are more interesting. 12.8's weird in that you don't shoot while focused. Instead you charge up a mini-bomb that freezes bullets kinda like a virus. The freeze spreads to bullets that touch the other bullets. The more of the screen you freeze the more points you get, so the focus is on allowing as much of the screen to get covered in bullets as possible before you let loose, while still making sure the bullets are close enough to eachother for the frost to effectively spread. It's also tied to your power system, so instead of getting power from pickups you get it from effectively freezing. The only downside to the system is that it kinda rewards farming the first 2 stages. The third stage you can't really farm because of lasers. And I played a bit of Hydorah. I really like it. I'll have to look into the other ones you mentioned.
My friend showed me some gameplay footage and it just looked like the most absurd thing I'd ever seen.
A good number of the best modern shmups tend to be Japanese, primarily because few American developers have an interest in making them. (The market is too small, and arcades are dead.) The interesting American shmups are usually made by indie developers. You have to approach them the way you would a game from the Bit.Trip series, in that they are games of skill. (In fact, several Bit.Trip games take inspiration from shmups.) The Touhou games are interesting in that they look insanely hard (especially on Lunatic), but once you get an understanding for the bullet patterns and the movements required to navigate them, they aren't as difficult as they seem. The key is getting used to mapping out a path in the patterns. Playing on lower difficulties acclimates a player to the process, and once it's mastered, the higher difficulties come much more easily. Videos of the lower difficulties aren't common because it just isn't as prestigious as showing off your skill in Lunatic, but really, there are difficulties that can be comfortable for just about anyone, even the newest players. Also, be sure to take a look at the Hydorah trailer, in all of its Engrish glory: http://www.locomalito.com/hydorah.php
I love the bit.trip games in part for the gameplay and in part because I love the music and design. I can't love Touhou because the shmupping (please let this be a word) because there's so much random frilly anime kawaii wierds in the way
Yeah, I'm not a fan of it myself, especially considering the fandom. I don't mind the concept of having people flying around instead of space-ships. ESP Ra.De was one of the first ones I encountered that did that, and it was quite good. But Touhou does go a bit overboard, especially for the later games. (Which was to appeal to the community.)
I was looking up gameplay of it and the first one felt very brony-esque. it was a guy who sounded like a fairly mid-twenties basement-dweller playing a game with schoolkids flashing over the screen. I feel I misspoke when I was talking about my feeling to japanese games earlier. It's mostly two things that put me off - reliance on anime aesthetics, or characters in "realistic" games being made inhumanly beautiful. My favourite game of my childhood was japanese, JSRF, because it had it's own style to it and that style was f*cking awesome, and before that I had a mega-drive with Sonic 2 which I enjoyed because I was like 11 and it was challenging for me (LIL KVALLY KID NOT GUD AT GAEMS) That's not to say I don't also have problems with western games >:3 but generally there's more choice in interesting settings and styles. For every 10 gritty brown games, you get some colourful game like TF2, Monday Night Combat, or the BIT.TRIP series.
:| Most Touhou fans don't even know about the games, or if they do, they haven't played them. They're in it for the fandom, which is essentially a mirror image of the bronies, except with a larger concentration in Japan. In theory, I have no problem with people supporting something they enjoy, but when it boils down to fanatical exuberance, it does tend to become very annoying.
2hu is pretty tight. IDK where Kvalheim gets the idea that it's kawaii uguu weeaboo crap. Is this even remotely cute? Nah dawg, that's just ZUN being a fairly average artist without much of a clue as to how anatomy works. Shrine Maidens are real things yo. I'm waiting on an English patch before I try out 13.5.
Eh, it's catchy for a bit, but all the songs tend to be very similar and run together. (And it doesn't help that there are a bajillion fan remixes that sound mostly the same.) Granted, most shmups tend to have soundtracks that are mostly similar, but at very least the different Touhou games could use different musical styles to give them more of a thematic feel.
The music is what got me past the absolutely godawful fanbase and into an actual game. I'm glad I got past the crazies, but I'm slowly becoming one of them. Last I heard you'll be waiting for quite some time. Nobody wants to do a translation and the engine they use for it is apparently a pain in the face to hack. Normally I'd wait too, but when I found that nobody was working on a patch I decided to just jump in now.
