東方桃源宮 ～ Riverbed Soul Saver [ Touhou Fangame]

[ARF]

From the makers of 東方導命樹 ～ Mystical Power Plant and 幻想浪漫紀行 - Phantasmagoria Trues comes this awesome fan made touhou game!




At the moment it has a main game with 6 stages, 4 difficulties and 6 different shot types, stage practice, boss spell card practice, replay support and a pretty cool scoring system. An extra stage is obviously planned for a future version, possibly another difficulty or spell card challenges as well.

It's free so you can download it from the creators blog here: http://th-jss.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/20 ... -769f.html

Scoring is basically hypering stages and PoC'ing everything, capturing spell cards for massive bonuses and shotgunning for some extra spirits for more hypers.

[KennyMan666]

Downloading at 6 kb/s, stay strong Japanese servers.

[SuperSoaker360]

Neat! I really enjoyed MPP and PT. Will give this a spin tonight.

[CStarFlare]

Lot of fun, Lunatic is a bit easy though. Have their other games typically had a fifth?

The hyper requires a bomb, am I getting that correct? I'm guessing Graze raises the item value, though it doesn't seem to show this anywhere.

[Lord Satori]

He also created The Last Comer, as well as a few lesser known danmakufu scripts. When I saw the character list on the wiki I was excited at first, but then quickly disappointed when I realized it seems to be just "oh, here come more historical figures that are somehow alive after all this time and have turned female for some reason!" It made sense in Mystical Power Plant because the game coincided with the release of Ten Desires, which has a similar story, but for whatever reason this game also sticks to that trend. So character wise, this game seems to fall short. I hope the extra stage turns out to be better.

[Despatche]

oh, this is finally out.

i thought tlc/mpp/rss and pr/pt were two separate groups... guess not.

nearly every character in touhou is based on some legend, historical figure, or simply trend, so it's really not any less or more boring to just pick one.

[Lord Satori]

only lately have Touhou characters been based on actual historical figures.

[BulletMagnet]

Been tooling around with this a bit, a few thoughts/questions...

- I like the fact that you can't collide with "normal" enemies, which makes dashes for the POC a bit less harrowing, as well as the fact that you still get "partial credit" if you use a bomb/hyper during a spell card. Also nice not having to worry about being underpowered/unable to POC after dying.

- I do wish there was a way to activate the "hyper" without using a bomb, as the hyper gauge ends up a quarter depleted while you're waiting for Marisa's movement-hampering laser to run out. On that note, is there ever any real reason to bomb "normally" instead of using a hyper? You get the same super attack plus a powered-up shot, a score bonus, and an auto-bomb if you screw up.

- Also wish the high score tables were organized by shot type as well as by character.

- I'm not sure why, but my computer runs this one really weird: sometimes it'll play smoothly with no problems, then all of a sudden the frame rate will drop into the single digits, then for awhile it'll be fine again. And this is in a small window with the "frame cut" all the way up to four. Really odd, considering all of the ZUN-developed Touhou stuff I own has never given me technical issues even in fullscreen.

Overall quite fun, especially for a freebie, thanks for mentioning it. I also gave Mystical Power Plant a try, though I'm unsure how it works...it seems you just collect those green leaf things to temporarily power up certain stuff you do, and after getting a bunch of them your abilities are reset but you get a score/item bonus. Or am I way off?

[ARF]

Lot of fun, Lunatic is a bit easy though. Have their other games typically had a fifth?

The hyper requires a bomb, am I getting that correct? I'm guessing Graze raises the item value, though it doesn't seem to show this anywhere.

I don't know, but someone looked through the data and found stuff about ultra or overdrive difficulty stuff. Yes, hyper requires a bomb, and I honestly have no idea what grazing actually does, save from increasing your score by 10 per graze point.

- I like [...] the fact that you still get "partial credit" if you use a bomb/hyper during a spell card. Also nice not having to worry about being underpowered/unable to POC after dying.

I think the balance between using a hyper for speedkilling spellcard for a high bonus vs getting a lower bonus but a lot of extra {flowers/spirits/blue shard thingies} is worth thinking about. I can see letting hypers time out before finishing off a nonspell to get more of those things to quickly refill the hyper gauge from the next spell in order to hyper again on the next nonspell be a potentially worthwhile strategy.

On that note, is there ever any real reason to bomb "normally" instead of using a hyper?

The biggest use seems to be pointblank bombing and sitting on top of a boss to refill the hyper gauge quickly, which is good on nonspells at least. I have a feeling that you get more out of not shooting and dropping 2 bombs then suiciding for new bomb and finishing the nonspell off with a hyper (or waiting until the spell after the nonspell is captured for bonus spirits before going into hyper perhaps).

- I'm not sure why, but my computer runs this one really weird: sometimes it'll play smoothly with no problems, then all of a sudden the frame rate will drop into the single digits, then for awhile it'll be fine again. And this is in a small window with the "frame cut" all the way up to four. Really odd, considering all of the ZUN-developed Touhou stuff I own has never given me technical issues even in fullscreen.

Try to lower the effects in options and set the rendered frames/frame skip to 1/2 in config, this made the game run pretty smoothly for me.

I've never played MPP so I can't say much about that.

Did another scoring run the other day, ended with 24.5 billion points, using MarisaC on Normal again. I think my route was decent for the first 2 stages, but then I slipped up a bit on stage 3, and didn't get the extra big fairy after stage 4 midboss (should have hypered later, to have more firepower for the midboss non), did one ill-advised hyper on the stage 5 bosses last spell card (should have capped it and hyper to collect the bonus spirits instead, would probably have been worth a lot more) and stage 6 was awful (killed like 3 trains too early and the doom fairy went poorly) lost several thousand point items there. I think this route could earn you around 27-28 billion with some smaller changes to the hyper timings and boss strats. Lunatic should score higher, but I can't hope to execute a good run in lunatic.

Replay

[CStarFlare]

Lot of fun, Lunatic is a bit easy though. Have their other games typically had a fifth?

The hyper requires a bomb, am I getting that correct? I'm guessing Graze raises the item value, though it doesn't seem to show this anywhere.

I don't know, but someone looked through the data and found stuff about ultra or overdrive difficulty stuff. Yes, hyper requires a bomb, and I honestly have no idea what grazing actually does, save from increasing your score by 10 per graze point.

I feel like there's a lot of enemy patterns that are very grazable, but not very many boss patterns seem to be set up for supergrazing. It would surprise me if graze was worthless - maybe it affects bullet item value?

If the value of items from cancelled bullets can be increased, that might be a significant source of points - you can get something like 12 million points from those items at the very beginning of stage 1 if you bomb. Not enough to be worth a bomb in this game, but if that value could be increased, and combined with denser bullet patterns later in the game maybe it could worth doing at some point.

[ARF]

I feel like there's a lot of enemy patterns that are very grazable, but not very many boss patterns seem to be set up for supergrazing. It would surprise me if graze was worthless - maybe it affects bullet item value?

If the value of items from cancelled bullets can be increased, that might be a significant source of points - you can get something like 12 million points from those items at the very beginning of stage 1 if you bomb. Not enough to be worth a bomb in this game, but if that value could be increased, and combined with denser bullet patterns later in the game maybe it could worth doing at some point.

Maybe someone can find what graze does in the data. I find grazing to be pretty tough in this game compared to the regular touhous, seems like the grazebox is pretty small and no graze is awarded while you are invulnerable. Would be interesting to see how it would affect the routes when you try to balance grazing, hyper chaining in stages and humping bosses with hypers.

[CStarFlare]

I've got a silly question - does item value actually fall below the POC? I've started to get the impression that it doesn't - when I test on the very first fairy, I seem to get 7,800 points after collection all the items regardless of where I grab them. If it doesn't matter, then this just got easier - I can pointblank more enemies without worrying that sucking in their items will cost me points. It seems that base point value is just a function of the total number of items collected - is that correct?

I managed to crash the game on Yuyuko's second card - I was letting it run so I could pick up the point items that her Phantoms drop, and it died around the 10 second remaining mark. Hasn't happened to me since, but it's probably not work milking that for ~300 point items anyway.

[ARF]

I've got a silly question - does item value actually fall below the POC? I've started to get the impression that it doesn't - when I test on the very first fairy, I seem to get 7,800 points after collection all the items regardless of where I grab them. If it doesn't matter, then this just got easier - I can pointblank more enemies without worrying that sucking in their items will cost me points. It seems that base point value is just a function of the total number of items collected - is that correct?

I managed to crash the game on Yuyuko's second card - I was letting it run so I could pick up the point items that her Phantoms drop, and it died around the 10 second remaining mark. Hasn't happened to me since, but it's probably not work milking that for ~300 point items anyway.

I'm under the impression that it doesn't matter where you pick up the items, but I haven't done any testing at all, really. Yeah, sucks about the Yuyuko crash, it kept happening for me if I let the timer go below 10 seconds before ending the spell, even in spell practice. You can still milk it for a few waves safely, I'm not sure why and at what point it will start crashing.

[Despatche]

only lately have Touhou characters been based on actual historical figures.

that's because when he started this thing (with teosd, not thrtp) he was going all in with tropes. that break in 2006 is more like a "time to put away the tropes" thinking time. notice how you have three games specifically based on religion, a concept of which specific people are at the heart of. notice how the other newer games like subterranean animism and double dealing character don't really have a lot of outright proxies; even shinmyoumaru is considered to be part of the same species at best (minish!). and with stuff like that in mind, you have:

remilia, who is explicitly referred to as a dracula descendent, like most vampires... like shinmyoumaru and the kobitos.
yukari, who is implied to be related to or a proxy of lafcadio hearn, end of.
tewi, who is explicitly based on the white hare of inaba, end of.
kaguya, who is kaguya, end of. she's in everything, she's even in naruto now.

as you can see, the only thing that's really a trend is the decision to make some religion-based games. speaking of which, if there is a pattern at all, the next "major" game will probably be a religion game to close out the td/ddc/?? trilogy, also similar to what was done with mof/sa/ufo.

[Lord Satori]

Trilogy? TD and DDC had very little to do with each other storywise. If anything, TD was the end of the chain of events that began with MoF, because if it weren't for the events of those games, Byakuren would never have landed the temple over the area where Miko was sealed/sleeping (forgot which), prompting her awakening in TD. DDC was entirely Seija Kijin's fault, as she started a rebellion in an attempt to invert the social structure of society. She has no connections to anyone in TD.

By the way, remilia isn't descended from dracula. She said she was, but it was later revealed that she was lying. And Shinmyoumaru isn't really descended from a specific individual, iirc. She's just part of their race. The focus is more on the legendary mallet that she wields.

I guess it just annoys me that the trend in this series of fangames is to pick actual people who existed and put them in gensokyo for no good reason. It's one thing to use a religious figure who may or may not have existed at all, and is almost completely based on legends (iesua from The Last Comer), but taking a historical figure that definitely existed and is well known defies the very nature of Gensokyo (don't argue that TD did the same thing because that bothers me too for the exact same reason).

Another thing (and probably the biggest) that annoys me is how until this point, each fangame has had a plot more or less based on the plot of the latest official game. TLC brought a religion to gensokyo just like UFO did, MPP brought a historical figure to gensokyo just like TD did, and then comes RSS which... brings yet another historical figure. He could've done a tsukumogami revolution, which would've been an excuse to use the tsukumo sisters as a cameo first boss instead of "herp derp here's yuyuko for some reason". The one thing I like about this is that he chose a person who was an actual female irl so no "lolification" was needed.

You don't see people making a loli George Washington or anything like that.

One more thing, I am aware that I may be sorely mistaken about many things in this latest game as I cannot read japanese.

[Squire Grooktook]

loli George Washington

Would play that doujin, for sure.

[Despatche]

Trilogy? TD and DDC had very little to do with each other storywise. If anything, TD was the end of the chain of events that began with MoF, because if it weren't for the events of those games, Byakuren would never have landed the temple over the area where Miko was sealed/sleeping (forgot which), prompting her awakening in TD. DDC was entirely Seija Kijin's fault, as she started a rebellion in an attempt to invert the social structure of society. She has no connections to anyone in TD.

"Trilogies", in this sense, are not determined by plots, but by development patterns. I say "trilogies" instead of something like "generations" because one part of these patterns is that the "normal" games come in threes (tEoSD, PCB, IN; MoF, SA, UFO; TD, DDC, ???), and are treated as such as far as game design goes. Here's a more comprehensive breakdown of each engine:

-PC-98 engine 1: THRtP, TSoEW, PoDD
-PC-98 engine 2: LLS, MS
(Seihou engine: SSG, KOG)
-Windows engine 1: tEoSD, PCB, IaMP, IN, PoFV, StB
-Windows engine 2: MoF, SWR, SA, UFO, soku
-Windows engine 3: DS, FW, TD, HM, DDC, ISC

Play the games in these groups, and you'll notice that they share a lot of stylistic similiarities, and that some later games of one group may have a prototype of this or that characteristic in the next.

I'm predicting a new engine soon, as well as the next main game going onward from TD in terms of plot (seems to be some odd/even pattern there) and from DDC in terms of gameplay (trilogies). Plot pretty much has nothing to do with anything other than the whole religion thing, because many of the events in this series are supposed to be self-contained. Hell, I can't even call the Bougetsushou series a "sequel" to anything, other than backstory-tier stuff from the Eiyashou folks in CiLR. I will say that MoF/SA and UFO/TD make for a pretty good Lorwyn-type "bisected quadrilogy", though.

I'm surprised a new game hasn't been announced yet. I'm pretty sure we're getting at least one more small game before the year's done--that's what he did with DS and FW--figured it'd be at this summer's Comiket for some reason.

By the way, remilia isn't descended from dracula. She said she was, but it was later revealed that she was lying. And Shinmyoumaru isn't really descended from a specific individual, iirc. She's just part of their race. The focus is more on the legendary mallet that she wields.

All vampires and all kobitos descend from those particular individuals by the rule, that's the point of the legend; Dracula and Issun-boshi would even be their kings, and probably do serve as such in this or that tale. Either way, the point is that characters like Remilia and Shinmyoumaru represent that character/trope by proxy. You have to look at these historical figures as less actual human beings and more a group of statements that make up a trope, because that's what it means to be a legend.

I guess it just annoys me that the trend in this series of fangames is to pick actual people who existed and put them in gensokyo for no good reason.

They're doing that because of MoF and etc; that was part of my point.

It's one thing to use a religious figure who may or may not have existed at all, and is almost completely based on legends (iesua from The Last Comer), but taking a historical figure that definitely existed and is well known defies the very nature of Gensokyo (don't argue that TD did the same thing because that bothers me too for the exact same reason).

The very nature of Gensokyo is "things that have been forgoten", or "things that once existed but no longer do" (technically the same thing). Extinct creatures are supposed to and do wind up there. Historical figures absolutely should too, especially if everyone "generally forgets" (relevance) about them. See also: gods.

You don't see people making a loli George Washington or anything like that.

See, it's funny, because Touhou George and Abraham actually exist. I'm pretty sure someone's gonna try to make a game eventually.

One more thing, I am aware that I may be sorely mistaken about many things in this latest game as I cannot read japanese.

Well, that's what the wiki is for! And seeing as literally the entire translation effort is dependent on that wiki, you're stuck unless you completely ignore the wiki entirely, which also means you have to completely relearn everything you know about Touhou.

[CStarFlare]

So I cleared Lunatic today, and while recording the video I realized that while powered up, blue shards are worth 100x Point Items Collected. (I realized that they were worth more, but not how much) I believe without hyper, it's 10x.

So I imagine a good boss procedure to follow would be

- Suicide on a nonspell if you're close to a hyper (assuming you have less than the number of bombs you respawn with)
- Defeat the spell without ever being in hyper (which causes the boss to drop significantly ~20 blue shards than if you defeat it having been in a hyper at any point of the spell)
- Hyper before collecting shards, then sit on top of the boss during the bomb. When the bomb ends, drop another one.
- In later stages, continue bombing even during spellcards - the bonus they're worth doesn't compare to the couple hundred million you're going to earn risk free, and your hyper will probably last until into the next nonspell earning you free pointblanking time before the next attack starts AND double of whatever fragment drops.
- When your hyper runs out, might as well bomb nonspells to fill up as fast as possible assuming you still have enough resources (you do).

(I also watched ARF's replay today, which pretty much confirmed the above)

[ARF]

So I cleared Lunatic today, and while recording the video I realized that while powered up, blue shards are worth 100x Point Items Collected. (I realized that they were worth more, but not how much) I believe without hyper, it's 10x.

So I imagine a good boss procedure to follow would be

- Suicide on a nonspell if you're close to a hyper (assuming you have less than the number of bombs you respawn with)
- Defeat the spell without ever being in hyper (which causes the boss to drop significantly ~20 blue shards than if you defeat it having been in a hyper at any point of the spell)
- Hyper before collecting shards, then sit on top of the boss during the bomb. When the bomb ends, drop another one.
- In later stages, continue bombing even during spellcards - the bonus they're worth doesn't compare to the couple hundred million you're going to earn risk free, and your hyper will probably last until into the next nonspell earning you free pointblanking time before the next attack starts AND double of whatever fragment drops.
- When your hyper runs out, might as well bomb nonspells to fill up as fast as possible assuming you still have enough resources (you do).

(I also watched ARF's replay today, which pretty much confirmed the above)

Thanks for sharing, capping spells might still be useful to get the extra burst of spirits at certain points to quickly refill the gauge. But with this figured out 30 billion should be possible, right?

[CStarFlare]

After playing a few more spellcards, I'm pretty sure you don't get any blue items for capping a card either with a hyper or having been in a hyper. So if you start the spellcard with a hyper, you're not losing any spirits by leeching some with a bomb. (you're obviously losing the bonus, though)

If you don't have a hyper before a card starts, obviously try to clear the card. Even if you earn your hyper mid-card, the 20+ items you get after clearing plus the bonus are likely going to be more valuable than entering the hyper immediately and forfeiting both. Or, maybe it's best to hyper on a nonspell and get as much as you can, let it time out, then go into the spell fresh to get a full harvest of blue items after the spell?

There seems to be something about how much each point item adds to the gauge that I don't understand. There seems to be some sort of system that raises the threshold for each successive hyper, but there's also something else. In stage 1, there's a point where I typically am either right under or at a full hyper gauge. In two runs, this is where I stood at the same point:

- Gauge not quite filled, 386 points. >500 graze.
- Gauge filled, 384 points. ~70 graze.

The POC doesn't seem to have a visible effect on it, and based on the above graze certainly isn't it. It's always very close at this point, so I'm skeptical that knowing what causes this can actually be useful, but I want to know. One relatively simple possibility is that it's based on time - for every second that goes by, % of the gauge each item provides shrinks. (Or, the method the game uses for adding points to your gauge is imprecise. That may be more likely.)

Also, I haven't done any testing, but based on your replay I feel like Marisa might be much better at leeching blue items from bosses. Maybe it's just because she does more damage, or those crystals around her "hit" the boss and generate crystals separately.

[ARF]

If you don't have a hyper before a card starts, obviously try to clear the card. Even if you earn your hyper mid-card, the 20+ items you get after clearing plus the bonus are likely going to be more valuable than entering the hyper immediately and forfeiting both. Or, maybe it's best to hyper on a nonspell and get as much as you can, let it time out, then go into the spell fresh to get a full harvest of blue items after the spell?

I think the balance between using a hyper for speedkilling spellcard for a high bonus vs getting a lower bonus but a lot of extra {flowers/spirits/blue shard thingies} is worth thinking about. I can see letting hypers time out before finishing off a nonspell to get more of those things to quickly refill the hyper gauge from the next spell in order to hyper again on the next nonspell be a potentially worthwhile strategy.

Worth experimenting with indeed! The hard part is backing away in time as MarisaC still hurts the boss after you let go of shot!

I don't know what determines the variables with filling the gauge, but something which I haven't seen anyone touch yet is the hyper length; when there are no enemies on screen the hyper duration will not go down, so learning enemy spawns is extremely useful when prolonging the hypers during stages (it makes a surprisingly big difference if you hug the screen border when fairies are spawning from the sides etc.)

Also the grazebox definitely seems bigger with the hyper active, maybe it's just my imagination though. I really wonder what graze does!