Touhou 14 demo released: Something about a bomb

[Zaarock]

Isn't that "freezing gimmick" in Judgement Silversword on the last boss?

EoSD predates Judgement silversword by 2 years.

EoSD:Full: August 11, 2002

Judgement Silversword: 2004

That's Judgement Silversword: Rebirth Edition though. The original version won a wonderwitch doujin game competition in 2001 which lead to the enhanced version. There's gotta be some pre-2000 shmup that does the same sort of thing though..

[Formless God]

I can feel it in the air tonight

[Formless God]

They got it.

2chin doesn't seem to have said a thing about the mechanics.
Cirno, a mermaid, a nurutu cosplayer, the only things that looks HD are the cutins and the number display

Code: Select all

http://sp.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm20961599

Lunatic.
I can already hear Zengeku's complaints.

[ilikepie21k]

Ok, so these are some notes I collected from the first few times I played the demo.

ok some quick things about double dealing character regarding shot types and gameplay mechanics

shot types:
each character's A shot type uses their weapon and their B type is without it
the unfocused shot for each type is the same

reimu:
unfocused is homing from td
in A focused mode reimu throws her gohei and it homes in on enemies, damaging them
in B focused mode it's needles from td with a wider spread

marisa:
unfocused is lasers from td
in A focused mode her hakkero is a flamethrower
in B focused mode it fires missles like in td

sakuya:
unfocused is spread shot like sakuya A unfocused in pcb
in A focused mode it's similar to the charge shot from uwabami breakers: sakuya lays knives behind her and they home in on enemies
in B focused mode it's a regular focus shot

bombs:
reimu A: she swings her gohei in front of her
reimu B: fantasy seal from td
marisa A: dark spark (master spark that turns easier)
marisa b: an energy ball that floats to the top of the screen
sakuya a: something similar to marisa c in sa, if you don't get hit during the set time, some bomb chips are reimbursed, if you do the shield goes away
sakuya b: freezes bullets on the screen before turning them into point items

how to get extra lives and bombs:
other than from bosses, the way to get extra life and bomb chips is by picking up a lot of point items at once, it's more common to get bomb chips

[chum]

Here's my thoughts after 2~ hours of playing

Scoring: The primary method to increase score in this game seems to be grazing (of course), bullet cancelling, and PoCing, which is nice since PoCing (collecting items at the top of the screen) has been incredibly minor these last couple of games. Grazing and Bullet cancelling increases the point item value. You can also use bombs to bullet cancel, which seems incredibly effective with SakuyaB who is definitely gonna be the highest scoring shot unless something changes...

When you PoC enough items at the same time, their value is further multiplied and you get either a bomb or a life fragment, so it seems that timing your PoCs and trying to kill many enemies quickly in order to get big PoCs may be of importance. You can also autocollect items by bombing. Suiciding will probably play a role in this game considering how good the bombs are, as is pretty standard fare with Touhou.

I found lots of neat grazing opportunities while playing this game. I played mostly on Lunatic but I also did a run on Normal. A lot of pointblanking for graze and many potential supergrazes are there. Spellcard bonus seems to be more important than in TD and SA, so hopefully there won't be many cases where you want to intentionally throw away a spellcard bonus.

Bosses: Patterns are quite good. Extending head girl has a funny gimmick and Werewolf girl is tough as nails with mostly completely random, fast, dense attacks. She's also fucking awesome. I have no idea what they're saying, but I like their designs. Cirno also made a reappearance on stage 1 and It's probably ZUN's derpiest sprite and portrait yet.

Character selection: Reimu, Marisa and Sakuya are playable, each with two types. It doesn't seem balanced at all at the moment, but the characters do have different attributes, so at the moment while Sakuya may be the best scorer, Reimu still seems more suitable for survival. There isn't a "universally best shot type".

Stage design: A lot of people that don't like Touhou's stage design should play this game because It's very different. It's not that there's that much more stuff going on than usual, but the enemies are much more durable, and they also leave behind suicide bullets like in Fairy Wars. It's seriously hard to kill every enemy, and trying to PoC and graze on top of that is going to be a challenge. It's still the same old enemies, same sprites and all (fairies, orbs and spirits)

Music: Great, a huge improvement after TD. Stage 1 is a bit weak, though.

Visual: Backgrounds aren't notable and the aesthetic appeal of patterns isn't especially high by Touhou standards. Hopefully the later stages will prove better in this regard.

Difficulty: For survival I'd say It's rather low until Werewolf Girl which is possibly the hardest stage 3 boss in the series. For scoring we'll have to wait and see.

Overall I'm very pleased, and while I'm also worried that the end product will end up with a broken scoring system, it does seem that it will at least be a fun one unlike TD.

Give this demo a try!

Correcting the above poster: SakuyaB bomb does not turn bullets into point items, as far as I can tell it cancels all bullets on screen which increases the PIV very considerably.

[AntiFritz]

Stage design: A lot of people that don't like Touhou's stage design should play this game because It's very different. It's not that there's that much more stuff going on than usual, but the enemies are much more durable, and they also leave behind suicide bullets like in Fairy Wars. It's seriously hard to kill every enemy, and trying to PoC and graze on top of that is going to be a challenge. It's still the same old enemies, same sprites and all (fairies, orbs and spirits)

This actually surprised me when I played it, the stages seemed unlike the previous games and actually fun. Previously I always found touhous stages hit and miss.

[Cagar]

Stage design: A lot of people that don't like Touhou's stage design should play this game because It's very different. It's not that there's that much more stuff going on than usual, but the enemies are much more durable, and they also leave behind suicide bullets like in Fairy Wars. It's seriously hard to kill every enemy

This is true & awesome.

[Zengeku3]

I can already hear Zengeku's complaints.

Please post quotes

[oboewan42]

I really like the mechanics in this game, especially because the method of getting extends is logical and intuitive rather than being god-awful. (Extend fragments appear every 5th bonus, or whenever you autocollect 60 or more items at a time; otherwise, you get a bomb fragment)

As opposed to TH13, where you had to hyper specific enemies

edit: oh yeah, bombs are really powerful scoring-wise in this game; they autocollect all items (which can trigger bonuses) and each bullet cancelled via a bomb increases your item value by 2 (grazing increases it by 1, and it also goes up when you kill enemies and damage bosses). Will be interesting to see how this effects high-level scoring strategy.

I'd like to reiterate what's been said about the stage design in this game, it is frantic, you're not going to be doing much speed-killing here

Notably, the scoring in this game does not revolve around using the game-specific gimmick to crank up your base point item value

also ReimuA's shot type is cool

[Yield]

So far this seems rather good, there are some hit-and-misses with the music, but oh well.

I'm kinda having a hard time grasping what the central theme is though, I mean we've got a mermaid, a dullahan and a werewolf, is this Zun's answer to monster girl galore?

[oboewan42]

I'm guessing it's just following the grand Touhou tradition of having stage 1-3 bosses that have fuck-all to do with the greater plot.

[Yield]

I'm guessing it's just following the grand Touhou tradition of having stage 1-3 bosses that have fuck-all to do with the greater plot.

Yeah, you may be right, most stage 1 and 2 bosses are rather irrelevant, and the stage 3 bosses often first become relevant when the later stages are revealed:

E.g. Keine Kamishirasawa who is tied to Huziwara no Moko (EX) who is subsequently tied to Kaguya Houraisan (Stage 6B).

[Formless God]

Played this a bit more today. It's great so far, but I'm worried about the final product.

Gameplay: Item chaining. The window's so short it only works with PoC-ing or bombing, though. A multiplier is applied depending on how many items you sucked in at once. A x0.5 or above gives a bomb piece. A x2.0 seems to always grant a life piece. You can trade score for more pieces by "splitting" items into multiple suck-ins instead of grabbing them all at once.

I'm still a bit skeptical, though. It can quickly turn into "a bomb to get more bombs to get more bombs to get more lives to get more bombs" game. The later stages on Lunatic might get so dense that bombspamming becomes more viable than manually PoC-ing, and the fact that PIV goes up with each cancelled bullet and enemies take forever to kill also means you're better off just bombing everything.

The game's way too generous when it comes to resources. I got like 7 lives and 4000 bombs from the run.

One of the things I liked about TD is how the playstyle makes you hang around the middle part of the screen instead of the bottom like PCB and IN, and that playstyle is also present here.

Stages: Stage 1 and 2 are really weak and lacking in variety. Stage 3 is awesome to the max.

Bosses: Stage 1 boss has tough spells but way too easy non-spells. Throws me off balance every time. And you might as well timeout the final attack if you don't have 2 power.
Stage 2 boss's attacks could use some more speed considering how streamy they are.
I'm not normally a fan of random spreads because it feels lazy, but the werewolf's been kicking my ass hard and I like it.



It's like I'm playing against SFN or some shit

Music: Pretty nice. The menu music is lovely. Stage 1 isn't too memorable, and the boss's guitar rift is ass. Stage 2 has some cool piano still not that memorable. Stage 2 boss and Stage 3 makes my dick harder than diamond. Stage 3 boss feels ... incomplete. The chorus could've been developed a little more. Also, the intro almost made me cut myself.

[RNGmaster]

Stages: Stage 1 and 2 are really weak and lacking in variety. Stage 3 is awesome to the max.

POCing in them is pretty challenging and fun. I felt like ZUN definitely desgined the stages with scoring in mind this time around, which was a big gripe of mine in 10D (though that may have been because 10D scoring during stages was just "trance when there are lots of enemies onscreen").

St. 2 boss feels like it's meant as a fuck you to players using a homing shot type. Not very hard even with ReimuA though. Also, the nonspells are fucking stupid and only exist to kill my computer.
St. 3 boss is very fun but I feel like I need spell practice to be able to get anything out of her.

Other than that and the bombs being very... unbalanced, though I'm sure most of the blatantly unpolished things are the result of the game being a demo, this is shaping up to be a fun game. Much better than 10D, on par with UFO/SA.

[ilikepie21k]

Correcting the above poster: SakuyaB bomb does not turn bullets into point items, as far as I can tell it cancels all bullets on screen which increases the PIV very considerably.

What I meant is the bullets are turned into the little green items. And a little addendum to that, the bullets can be grazed while they are frozen.

[KAI]

Curious.

[Zengeku3]

Just a few quick opinion pieces from me then.

- Music: I like it except the Stage 1 theme.
- Stages: Much better than what I'm used to from ZUN. Stage 3 is pretty damn fun actually.
- Bosses: Okay Stage 1 boss, fun spellcards. Stage 2 boss a tad too easy, I like the gimmick but more could be done with it. Certainly not living up to Kyouko or Kogasa. Stage 3 boss. Oh my. I'm getting raped and I am loving it. Harder to dodge patterns than most arcade shmups in the early stages. Probably gonna be a relatively easy 1cc on Lunatic when the full game comes out but I'm not interested in difficulty of clearing but how challenging and fun the bullet patterns are.
- Graphics: They are pretty. I think Reimu's art is cute at least, and the others are... well it's ZUN art. I think the style is okay and it's cute.

Overall, I quite like it although I'm not too fond of the bomb-heavy nature of the scoring. I had hoped for a system no more complicated than NMNB PoC stages and graze things to make items worth more. Oh well, I am not complaining though. This game is shaping up to be almost tailor-made for me.

[oboewan42]

Another thought on the scoring mechanics: at least there's no boss pointblanking. Christ that was the thing I hated the most about TD.

[chum]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAxFMJ4dZc

To demonstrate what the game is like right now. Extremely silly.

[Udderdude]

Cave arrange mode quality .. D:

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Cave arrange mode quality .. D:

More like Touhou: Yagawa edition.

[null1024]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAxFMJ4dZc

To demonstrate what the game is like right now. Extremely silly.

I can't stop giggling.

[DocHauser]

I like the comments under chum's video that say 'But you've just finished with one life left, so how is this such a game-breaking strategy?' Clearly he needs to make a new vid where he finishes level 3 with 12 lives* left...

(*or 8, if there's a max limit.)

[trap15]

Game looks fucking awesome. Thanks for uploading that, chum. Maybe I'll have to stop hatin' and start playin'

[Yield]

The game's way too generous when it comes to resources. I got like 7 lives and 4000 bombs from the run.

Remember that in this demo the points at which you gain an extra life or bomb are currently fixed, like they were in the Touhou 13 demo, this will most certainly change upon release (making gaining ressources harder).

[SuperSoaker360]

Wolfbitch is fucking hard - but I like it!

Wish I could at least have practice stage to get to her faster though.

[mauve]

calling Komachi for stage 4/5 boss atm

This is actually the first STG of the series I've been interested in since SA. UFO/10D did nothing for me.

I have no idea what's going to happen translationside for this game though so don't ask me.

[RyIII]

The game's way too generous when it comes to resources. I got like 7 lives and 4000 bombs from the run.

This shouldn't have been too surprising. While the game was being developed, ZUN basically said that he wanted to make a game that his wife would be able to beat.

[Obscura]

Wow, that video makes it look fucking awesome.

Sadly, I doubt that kind of play will work on Normal difficulty.