Touhou Jyuuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost

[KennyMan666]

The 19th official Touhou Project game has been announced, and it's a VS shmup!

The character select screen shows 19 slots, of which five have been shown. Apart from the obvious Reimu and Marisa, we've got Nazrin, Seiran, and Aunn. So it definitely looks like there's an animal theme going on, the three new playables are all animal youkai, Reimu has paw prints on her dress, and the ribbon on Marisa's hat seems to be resembling cat ears.

A demo will be released on Reitaisai on May 8th.

[xxx1993]

I knew it. Just goes to show there will be a Touhou game every two years. It’s good to see you again, Reimu, Marisa.

[Lethe]

This is the litmus test/closer on whether modern Touhou games can be good or not.

Let's hope a score counter miraculously appears at some point.

[xxx1993]

So if this is a VS shmup, it’s like Phantasmagoria of Flower View, right? Or Twinkle Star Sprites?

[To Far Away Times]

I had a good feeling there would be a new a Touhou this year.

Phantasmagoria was not great but I think the concept has potential. Hopefully the AI doesn't just disable it's hitbox and clip through shit if it took some hits early in the clock like it did in that game.

[pulsemod]

I haven't been in to the newer games very much, but I do really like the first 2 vs games so I'm hoping this one will turn out well since we haven't had one in forever!

[BrianC]

Phantasmagoria was not great but I think the concept has potential

You mean Phantasmagoria of Flower View? There was a previous game named Phantasmagoria of Dim Dream for PC-98, as well as an unrelated Sierra adventure game named just Phantasmagoria (which also got a sequel).

[DejahThoris]

Phantasmagoria was not great but I think the concept has potential

as well as an unrelated Sierra adventure game named just Phantasmagoria (which also got a sequel).

Easily the best of the 3.

[Lethe]

Physical demo came out yesterday.

I can confidently say this is the most bizarre thing ZUN has made in many years. Judging from the description I was expecting something more Twinkle Star Sprites-like than PoFV-like, but it's not entirely either. The system's a little complicated and hard to describe in brief... it's graze/bullet stalling-oriented reinterpreting aspects of 15 and 18.5, with the canceling/pellet side being much less relevant. There are no spell points, only chain count. You have to collect items to get meter, but there's often so much shit going on it maxes out without trying anyway. Cards exist, you equip 1 in versus and they stack up over stages in singleplayer. Besides that, don't get hit.

There's no score or timer, which is a blunder that will fuck up singleplayer, but there's also no replays, which is a bafflingly gigantic blunder that will also fuck up a competitive scene. The music has fully degenerated and is essentially background noise. The versus AI seems fairly challenging at least, though I was unable to tell how long it took me to lose because there's no timer... seems gentler than going full ham on PoFV though.

Resounding "WTF is this" so far, which is a good sign. It's just fucked up in missing essential things that would take no effort to implement! (Where do you think we are?)

Edit: Forget what I said about the versus AI, it's just Marisa being bullshit as usual. All the other ones are easy.

[KennyMan666]

Tried the demo yesterday. Definitely some things from PoFV to unlearn, you can no longer quickly delete bullets around you with a lv2 charge. There's still a shadow thingy, but it now appears when you charge an attack, not while you focus. Charging attacks is also a separate button and not shared with shoot or focus. Beating an opponent in story mode gets you an ability card from them.

Of the playable characters, Nazrin seems very weak, and Seiran is pretty good. Reimu's not bad, and Marisa is mostly good but she is also bugged—the lasers from her options can just stop working for whatever reason.

[BulletMagnet]

Out on Steam.

[KennyMan666]

Yeah, I've been playing it since Saturday. It's pretty fun! I've tagged a Clear with all characters in Story Mode on Normal, though not all of them were 1CCs. It was mainly for the purposes of unlocking characters, you start with only Reimu in Story Mode and unlock more for both Story and VS by clearing Story with various characters, and it doesn't have to be a 1CC to count (and thank fuck for that because some characters are an absolute pain). All characters get unlocked in VS way faster than in Story, in Story you often only unlock 2-3 at a time, and towards the end a couple characters that only give you one unlock when you clear with them. When you unlock all characters for VS Mode you also unlock Online VS Mode, but I hear the online isn't exactly good.

How good a character is in Story Mode is, in my experience, very closely tied to how good they are at dealing with Bosses. I might have played too passively, but until I played a character with an Ex attack that the CPU can't even remotely handle even on Lunatic, I don't know if I ever saw a Story opponent lose a heart (which takes two hits to do, and they have five hearts, so, have fun). You can win Story stages by depleting all of the opponent's hearts, but also by defeating their bosses—the first two opponents die after you've beaten two bosses, and I think it's then +1 boss for each following opponent. Story Mode is always six opponents long. Nazrin and Aunn are really, really bad. Seiran remains good. Marisa is no longer bugged. I do really like that you power up along the way by getting ability cards from defeated opponents, some of which are real good.

There's a total of 19 playable characters, of which five are brand new girls.

Character spoilers!

The returning characters that weren't in the demo are Sanae, Ran, Rin, Tsukasa, Mamizou, Yachie, Saki, Yuuma, and Suika. The five new ones are Son Biten (and yes, she looks like Sun Wukong—but her story is that she's only been convinced by Yachie that she's the second coming of Wukong, while really being unrelated), Enoko Mitsugashira, Chiyari Tenkajin (who clearly buys her clothes at the same store as Hecatia), Hisami Yomotsu, and Zanmu Nippaku. Chiyari, who also is the aforementioned character with the Ex attack the CPU can't handle, is my potential favourite when it comes to gameplay, but I haven't played much VS.