Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

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Shepardus
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Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Shepardus »

Image

https://kourindou.exblog.jp/27419239/

Title translates to "Secret Sealing Nightmare Diary ~ Violet Detector"

Looks like a photo game in the vein of Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler:

Image
Also looks like ZUN got tired of appending 0 to the end of all the scores.

To be released Friday, August 10.
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NTSC-J: You know STGs are in trouble when you have threads on how to introduce them to a wider audience and get more people playing followed by threads on how to get its hardcore fan base to play them, too.
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Mantrox
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Mantrox »

Definitely not a fan of the visuals/design :/

I know nothing about Touhou, but are the designs of the games similar to this?
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Bananamatic »

the frame around the game definitely got harder on the eyes since touhou 15
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Sumez »

Mantrox wrote: I know nothing about Touhou, but are the designs of the games similar to this?
I'm in the same boat, but from what I have seen, yes they all look like that. You'd think he'd gotten better at drawing at this point.
It's crazy cause all the fan games, which there for some reason are a ton of, often look really good.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by chum »

fucking idiots
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Mantrox »

chum wrote:fucking idiots
Hummm
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by KAI »

Shepardus wrote:a photo game
damn
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by CStarFlare »

Cool. I've never been good at these but STB was a genuinely unique take on the genre that played on one of Touhou's genuine strengths and defining features.
chum wrote:fucking idiots
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Shepardus »

Bananamatic wrote:the frame around the game definitely got harder on the eyes since touhou 15
ZUN seems to have become quite fond of the color purple.
CStarFlare wrote:Cool. I've never been good at these but STB was a genuinely unique take on the genre that played on one of Touhou's genuine strengths and defining features.
IIRC ZUN had the idea for StB much earlier but didn't have the right characters for it at the time, so he made other games first. It really is quite a brilliant concept.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Shepardus »

Coming soon. There will also be a Steam version, don't know when though.
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NTSC-J: You know STGs are in trouble when you have threads on how to introduce them to a wider audience and get more people playing followed by threads on how to get its hardcore fan base to play them, too.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by CloudyMusic »

Shepardus wrote:Coming soon. There will also be a Steam version, don't know when though.
Oh cool, guess I'll just wait for that rather than trying to find somewhere to import the disc from.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Nameschonvergeben »

Do NOT spend money on this game.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by waiwainl »

Why?
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Nameschonvergeben »

A lot of copy pasting patterns and this is not a hyperbole. Instead of designing proper patterns, a lot of the scenes in the game are just a combination of 2 generic base patterns (i.e. ZUN created a generic pattern for a lot of characters and then combines those characters to create "new patterns" where each individual character always uses the exact same pattern), which makes them really bland and generally miss everything you gain from properly designing patterns. The game also gives you weird tools like a teleport that's for the most part either useless or mandatory to teleport through walls coming at you and an automatic deathbomb/deathphoto when your camera is charged that gives you an insane number free hits sometimes like here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sOBr-CYl_A
Nobody I know that played the game casually liked it, in fact everyone agrees it's the worst Touhou yet and the scoring while not explored yet is not based on runs but simply on your single overall best photo, which already leads to a bunch of obvious issues.
Apparently even the controls have some issues.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by chum »

waiwainl wrote:Why?
because it's complete dogshit
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by DietSoap »

chum wrote:
waiwainl wrote:Why?
because it's complete dogshit

So are you calling Shepardus, Mantrox, Bananamatic, and Sumez fucking idiots? Or Zun and anyone that likes this game fucking idiots?
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by CloudyMusic »

I mean, I do appreciate the impressions from people who would know whether it's any good or not. Better than paying money for it being disappointed.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by DietSoap »

Everything Nameschonvergeben said was correct. If you still want to spend money on it then I can't stop you.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Pearl »

Nameschonvergeben is 100% right
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by CloudyMusic »

Thanks for the words of warning, guys. Sucks that it's not good! There's a review on another site that goes into a lot of detail too. EDIT: Removed the link and copied the original review text by "KirbyComment", since I realized that linking to that site might be against the rules here... (oops!)
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.
Last edited by CloudyMusic on Tue Aug 14, 2018 5:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by M.Knight »

You know it's a Touhou fansite when the review has to put a disclaimer for people who prioritize the story and characters above the game itself, and when you have another review that lists the release date matching the reviewer's birthday as a positive aspect worth mentionning. :lol:

Anyway, thanks for linking that review, it's pretty in-depth! A shame this game turned out bad, as most of the Touhou spin-offs have always been pretty interesting so far. What ZUN should do IMO, is stop forcing himself to release games on a yearly basis, and give himself more time to create them intead of churning out stuff like this. If he has some additionnal IRL constraints compared to before, that's all the more reason to avoid rushing his game releases.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Despatche »

But... he already started doing that. He now takes two years to do games that mostly copy assets, when it took him a single year to make largely new games for many years. Things like Violet Detector are just supposed to be fun little games out of nowhere, and spell card collections never take as long to make; that's why so many DNH scripts are spell card collections.

Yeah, he's a family man and all, but the real constraint is that Touhou is becoming fucking Fate and I hate it. The man knows what he's doing, we have years of proof. He just... doesn't want to for some reason. He doesn't want to sit down and make this amazing game anymore, he just wants to do a bunch of little dumb things. This is the exact opposite of Jeff Minter, who wanted to go from making meh games to great games and largely succeeded.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by M.Knight »

Oh, I didn't know he is now taking longer to release his games! But judging from Violet Detector, it seems like it's still not enough.
On the other hand, it's quite possible that as you said, he doesn't really have the drive to make something amibitous anymore. So even with all the time in the world, he wouldn't create something with as much content and thought put into it as say, IN. It would be a shame to see the series go downhill like that.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by Despatche »

His recent games have been fairly decent. I don't know what happened with this game, because 14, 14.5, 15, 16, those have all been pretty playable games. I'm genuinely worried here, guys, I think something really bad happened.

If his schedule makes sense at all, we're getting an announcement for 17 at some point early next year. I'm really hoping he does another overhaul like with 13, and hopefully it's more like 10~12, but that's far too much wishful thinking.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by BulletMagnet »

Steam page is up, if anyone's still interested.
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Re: Touhou 16.5 announced for Comiket 94

Post by null1024 »

That review up there sums up my thoughts on the game pretty well.
I was going to go buy it on Steam when it came out, but it's not really a great game and I'll probably never play it again. The mechanics don't fit together and there's a bunch of weird issues that didn't exist in previous 2hu games.

at least StB still exists
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.
this one's really, really bad
it's been entirely fucking me up so much
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