moozooh wrote:Chempop, the issue with Touhou games that what seems to be the major part of this forum overlooks is that, like many easy/below average difficulty games, Touhou shmups are pure score-em-ups. Their true fun and challenge lies in exactly that: their elaborate and risk-inducing scoring systems. Most of these systems, as I have
illustrated above (and keep in mind those are not the best, let alone only, examples), completely change your approach to playing them, similarly to Shikigami no Shiro or Psyvariar series, and pure survival play won't put your score even remotely close to proper scoring attempts. The slow bullets are largely there to make these systems work as intended, as high-level scoring incurs lots upon lots of risk-taking.
Some people don't like the fact that overall challenge is mostly voluntary, others are fond of it. I don't know which camp you belong to, but I know that a good deal of world-class scoreplayers (of which the most active is, surprisingly, GFA2-ISO, who has played them since 2003 or so) have either played these games competitively, or are at least fond of them otherwise. And I'd like to point out here that Japanese gamers (and Asian in general) don't differentiate between platforms with the snobbery typical of Westerners. In terms of survival difficulty, later games (Subterranean Animism and Undefined Fantastic Object in particular) offer challenge quite comparable to below-average difficulty Cave clears (Futari 1.5 Original, DDP, DOJ BL). You won't be having an easy time with them even with the extends they liberally give out under certain conditions. Again, there are scoring systems that allow for a lot of improv (Imperishable Night, Fairy Wars), there are those that require precision for achieving world-class scores (Mountain of Faith, Undefined Fantastic Object), and there are those that take the middle ground (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, Subterranean Animism).
Stage layout is still not as professionally done as your average Cave or Raizing game, but it's nowhere bad and is quite comparable to early 90s games by developers such as Taito or Konami (much better than Milestone at least), and is gradually getting better with each new game. People are just spoiled by better games, but the amount of games with significantly better layout and attack variability is not that large at all. ZUN's average development cycle of a single Touhou game is 9–12 months, which is much less than Crimzon Clover's author allowed himself, and that is already much more than you can expect from a single man doing the entire development, bearing in mind that he has no budget other than his own free time, and anything other than programming isn't his profession.
KennyMan666 wrote:Someone tell me why going out of your way to bash something you don't like in every single thread about the subject, like some people here do, is not against the forum rules.
I'm not mentioning any names, but it's Treasurance and Bananamatic.
Forum rules do have an entry on this subject:
"Please don't start flamewars for the sake of it, we will put them out. Heated discussion happens, people have different opinions, but it's obvious when someone is purely out to cause trouble." And these two idiots have been doing it for more time than what should be considered appropriate.
This is one of the best descriptions of this.... er.... topic that I can think of. A very good job, without even once sounding like a fanboy. And that's a rarity, because USUALLY when I hear stuff like this, it ends up being "BLAH YOU DONT KNOW WHAT YOU"RE TALKING ABOUT TOUHOU IS AWESOME RARGH HULK SMASH!!!111". So thank you for that well thought-out post. I actually agree with many of the things you've said here.
Now, understand, I'm very much NOT a Touhou fan. Frankly, the games bore me. In terms of survival difficulty, they're way too easy for me, and while normally that's not THAT big of an issue (I like Akai Katana, for example, and that game is also easy), I *also* dont like the scoring in any of them very much, which is the real reason I do not play them.
And I think that's one of the reasons why some players just dont like them; the difficulty really IS voluntary, and alot of shmup fans simply have problems with that.
One of my own problems with the games (all of them) though is the bosses. Now, yes, I *have* seen a great deal of the bosses in these games at their highest difficulty levels; so it's not like I just plain havent seen good ones or anything like that. But even still most of the bosses are just.... kinda boring. And the fact that the bosses often take WAY longer than the actual levels always just irks me. The bosses have too much health, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM is way too tiny, which ends up making it merely a chore to damage them.
That ZUN also seems to be more focused on making the attack patterns look nice, instead of being interesting to dodge, also bothers me. I remember once showing someone (that had only really played Touhou games up till that point) some videos of games by Cave and other danmaku developers, and he came back with "those patterns arent even geometrical though, they dont look nice. I dont get it.", and I really wanted to swat him. A great deal of Touhou patterns do 3 things: 1. Look nice. 2. be alot easier than they initially appear, and 3. take way, way, WAY too long.
Not to mention that way too many of the patterns in these games end up boiling down to what I call a basic "spray" pattern; hard to explain, but some people probably immediately know what I mean.
I know, I put alot of emphasis here on the attack patterns, but since the games seem to mostly consist of extremely long boss fights, the boss patterns ARE important, moreso than the level design.
And finally.... the fanbase. I know it has no bearing on the games themselves.... but the fans just ANNOY me. I've known more than a couple of people that considered themselves "Touhou fans" but had NO idea what genre of games these were. That they even knew they WERE games was amazing, considering that a great deal of that fanbase seems to NOT know this.
Overall, I dont think these are bad games at all... as shmups go, they are at least decent. But *I* just cant get into them myself, for these reasons. Yet (from a gameplay perspective) I can understand why others DO get into them.
Though I also REALLY believe that if ZUN didnt fill these games with girls and way, way too much story, if he'd just used generic ships or something, they would NOT be very popular / well known at all. ....and that bothers me a bit too.
