Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

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Lethe
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Lethe »

Comments on the Reitaisai demo below. Spoilered in case anyone who's waiting on the Steam demo doesn't want their impressions colored.
Spoiler
You pick two starting items and buy one after each stage. The items on offer are random selection + generic resources + a special item associated with the stage boss. Items unlock as starting items once you've purchased them on a run.

Options contribute a lot of your total damage and dying drops power by a full level (hello UFO). One of the passive items enhances your base shot so it feels on about the level of earlier games, and some items grant helper options that stick around permanently. I guess the idea is that you use the item helpers as insurance against chain deaths.

Scoring is inane. There's no grazing, no cancel PIV (easily missed opportunity, just make the bullets turn into money) and the spell card bonuses don't scale. Money items are point items, and the current money in hand affects the item value. You can print money by hitting bullets with the mallet; C items recharge on a timer, but one of the passive items gives you cooldown reduction. Hence you stall out every pattern waiting for the hammer to recharge so you can cancel the densest point, repeat through the whole game while spending/losing as little as possible, and there's your score.

The Sakuya shottype is similar to PCB Sakuya-B with smoother tilting and adjustable spread width via vertical movement. I find it really fucking irritating to control: the waggling speed decays the closer it gets to neutral, and any unplanned unfocused movement leads to it drifting about organically on both axes.

Danmaku isn't very interesting. Nonspells are kinda obnoxious and probably harder than any of the spells shown so far. The music is about as generic as it gets, although the stage 3 track's opening melody sounds rather familiar. The character art's okay. The vibe/personality isn't coming through much at all to me, but it's not like it's the first time that's happened in a demo. I think I find this one more tolerable than the last two-and-a-half games (excluding The Game That Shall Not Be Named), which isn't exactly praise. The best I can say is that this could be DDC 2, since that's a game I quite like in spite of/due to its complete brokenness.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by ZPScissors »

So this is a problem

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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BulletMagnet »

Yeah, apparently some kind of bug that lets you buy stuff infinitely or something, presumably it's on the to-fix list.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

This is a bit different from what I was expecting. There's item spam, but it's not quite like what I was thinking. I get the feeling there will be cheevos for not using cards. The card RNG is dumb but if it's feasible to just use zero cards, I genuinely don't care.

That bug is high-larious and I hope he fixes the trial at least. The full game is supposed to be out in like two months though. That being said, I know people seem to think this bug is "obvious" because it's easy to do, but it's not. This is the kind of thing that you never think about until the last minute. It might be fixed, it might not, but since it's so "obvious", it's also very easy to ban.
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Ms. Tea
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Ms. Tea »

Out now on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1566 ... arketeers/

Comiket 99 was cancelled because of the state of emergency, so I guess it went straight to Steam this time.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

It's been counterstopped already, and there's a complete invulnerability exploit that's been discovered if using autofire. Oh, ZUN. :lol:
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by banjoted »

I've enjoyed this thread immensely.
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Despatche
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

Oh.

You kids have fun with that, then.

I guess.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BulletMagnet »

Also on DLSite if you want it DRM-free. Y'know, once it's un-borked. :P
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Lethe »

I doubt it's going to be truly un-borked. Even if the counterstop point is raised by a couple of orders of magnitude it won't stop the scoring system from being fundamentally stupid. The charm point here is doing silly shit by messing around with the cards. I don't think this one has much going for it besides that. The survival difficulty appears comparatively high, but there's little motivation to go through with no-card play when it's not the fun part of the game.

One thing I can say for sure: this is the worst-sounding Touhou game since SoEW. The music's not shit or anything but I got tired of all the tracks after hearing them a couple of times which isn't a good sign.
Actually benefited from turning the BGM off.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

NNN for life. No UFOs, no 13 hypers, no releases, no 17 hypers, and no cards. Just do it.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Lethe »

Right, and my point is that LNN will normally make you appreciate a game a great deal whereas in this case I can't see it doing anything but making it worse. Without cards, there's no reason to play this over anything else. It's not some extraneous crutch system, it's the entire appeal of the game.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

What does that even mean? It's literally all the same shit.

Also 14.3 exists which is basically the same thing, except that game actively encourages you to not use items.

The game is better without cards, of course. These games always end up better without the gimmick.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Lethe »

What I'm saying is by refusing cards cold turkey you don't get a fuller appreciation of the game, you get a generic modern Touhou game with tons of HP bloat and no upside. When I cap a spell and I have 2 extra variety options and a tiny fixed thing that blocks bullets it's not like I've tranced or aggressively border broke, I've still had to deal with the pattern. Giving the player more tools to mess around with is only a bad thing when they trivialize gameplay - which a number of the cards do, but you can just not buy those.

Obviously, an NNN(N?) is going to be an accomplishment. I'm sure it takes plenty of skill and dedication, and I'm sure the scoring will too if the counterstop gets fixed. But also much like the scoring, I've yet to experience a reason to recommend someone bother doing it and not just play a better game instead. On the other hand, LNN with passive items? Might be alright, runs get different tools, you get to think on your feet a bit. Suddenly the rest of the game's shortcomings don't seem so stark.

Don't get me wrong though, using the cards isn't a glorification of the game either. The whole thing could have done with some serious thinking through instead of whatever confused mess it currently resembles, but we don't get that from these games.

Edit: And don't tell me something like "cards undermine the game design". That's giving ZUN way too much credit. If there's any game design he actually put thought into, it's in the card part, not the shooting part, and definitely not the scoring part.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

The game is going to have the "HP bloat" whether you use the mechanic or not.

Assuming they even bother to put the game up, I imagine royalflare will ban active cards, yes.

"generic" is such a strange word to use here, and we're talking about a series that literally reuses assets for numerous games. Oh well.

Touhou 16 is a MUCH better game without releases, by the way. "boring" or not, it's substantially better.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by ZPScissors »

Well uhh... this is a MASSIVE problem

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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by wht11 »

Despatche wrote:Assuming they even bother to put the game up, I imagine royalflare will ban active cards
Just by the way, they did brought it up after all, a day or so ago. But doesn't look like they bothered to account for any special rules or brake down of used items. Not surprisingly first scores up 4x 999999999whatever, very encouraging.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

This smells like a campaign. Anyway, the only 9 spam I see is for Sakuya on Lunatic. Sakuya also consistently has the bigger numbers regardless of difficulty. But yes, there needs to be something done about card choice.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by ZPScissors »

Despatche wrote:This smells like a campaign. Anyway, the only 9 spam I see is for Sakuya on Lunatic. Sakuya also consistently has the bigger numbers regardless of difficulty. But yes, there needs to be something done about card choice.
Lunatic Sanae is maybe possible, she's gotten up to 8.4b already

Hard Sakuya is definitely possible, she's already at 9.6b
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by ZPScissors »

ZPScissors wrote:
Despatche wrote:This smells like a campaign. Anyway, the only 9 spam I see is for Sakuya on Lunatic. Sakuya also consistently has the bigger numbers regardless of difficulty. But yes, there needs to be something done about card choice.
Lunatic Sanae is maybe possible, she's gotten up to 8.4b already

Hard Sakuya is definitely possible, she's already at 9.6b
"Lunatic Sanae is maybe possible"

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This also means every character can counterstop, at least with the Aya autofire glitch
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by wht11 »

ZPScissors wrote:This also means every character can counterstop, at least with the Aya autofire glitch
Can you explain this glitch in detail? Why is it affected by setting 30hz and this setting refers to what? I don't think it's refresh rate, is it? Sorry for bothering, for the moment I can't play the game to see for myself but I am curious about this.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by KennyMan666 »

wht11 wrote:
ZPScissors wrote:This also means every character can counterstop, at least with the Aya autofire glitch
Can you explain this glitch in detail? Why is it affected by setting 30hz and this setting refers to what? I don't think it's refresh rate, is it? Sorry for bothering, for the moment I can't play the game to see for myself but I am curious about this.
With Aya's card equipped, your character moves significantly faster while not shooting. When you start to move, you also get a few frames of invincibility. With 30hz autofire on movement, meaning hitting the button 30 times a second aka every other frame since the game runs at 60 FPS, these invincibility frames overlap each other so you just stay invincible. A demonstration can be seen here.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by ZPScissors »

Update:

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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BulletMagnet »

Seems we've got a ".5" sequel on our hands.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by To Far Away Times »

Touhou 18 was the best one in a long while, I'm down for a sequel.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by Despatche »

Gasp, a Marisa game! Didn't think he'd actually do it. Excellent 100 flavor also.

Something about the description makes me think of Lenen Teneisenki, which is concerning because that game is kinda fucked. I don't like calling it that because the dev literally got hurt making it, but at the same time it being so fucked is how they got hurt in the first place, so I don't know. However, 18.5 seemingly asking us to play only specific cells at a time is encouraging, and that's probably what Challenge mode in Teneisenki was supposed to be. Teneisenki Kinshou is also a thing, assuming that game doesn't put JynX in the hospital again. All I want is Arcade and Challenge mode! That's it! JynX can take twenty years to do it if that's what's required!
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BulletMagnet »

Steam page for the new game is up.
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by To Far Away Times »

BulletMagnet wrote:Steam page for the new game is up.


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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by To Far Away Times »

Touhou 18.5 is out on Steam. Anyone try it yet?
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Re: Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Post by BulletMagnet »

Also on DLSite, might pick it up later, though it'll probably be a bit tricky to get my head around the various items and such until translators have a whack at it.
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