Thoughts on Touhou 16?

[CaptainKraken]

Ahoy!

Touhou finally made it to steam apparently (about time XD) with the 16'th installment, of all things.

I bought it and I like it a ton. I like the variety and the colors and the gameplay and the music.
It just makes me happy

Is this the one people are divided about?
I've heard some people say it's bad and some people say it's great.

Maybe I'm a lunatic or perhaps I'm just easy to please.

What are your thoughts?
*Cue friendly discussion*

[Square_Air]

I've yet to play 16 since I've been too busy with other shmups, but i'll probably get around to it eventually. I'm interested in what the consensus is since I've only glanced at a few videos so far. 15 was really controversial though. I personally find stage 6 and Junko to be incredibly sloppy. It's like Zun was drunk as fuck and published the game before it was finished.

[Bananamatic]

scoring system is a bad joke

[maximo310]

This game screams for Zun to take a break.

[BulletMagnet]

It felt very sloppy to me in terms of basic visibility, a problem I've rarely had with other Touhou stuff, so it's near the bottom of my personal ranking of ZUN's work.

[CaptainKraken]

It felt very sloppy to me in terms of basic visibility, a problem I've rarely had with other Touhou stuff, so it's near the bottom of my personal ranking of ZUN's work.

That is something I noticed too.
Especially stages 2 and 3.

It's weird though; those were my favorite as far as overall aesthetic goes.

What's near the top?

[Despatche]

Threads like these are always dangerous.

Bullet visibility? In Touhou 16? The game about the seasons? I just wanna be clear we're talking about the same game, because bullet visibility is simply not something Touhou has ever had an issue with, especially not in a newer game like 16. I have partial color-blindness, and I have seen games with real bullet visibility issues, like Rapid Hero. The Touhou games, and definitely Garegga and Raiden V, are absolutely nothing like Rapid Hero.

Anyway, game's fine enough, arguably a better game than 14 or 15, definitely a better game than the tragic 13. ZUN definitely does not need to "take a break", he takes too many of those as is. If anything, he needs to take a break from all the manga and assign more time to the games, to prevent having to haul ass at the last minute like every doujin dev does. It'd be nice if he sat down to do a new set of sprites too, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

[Shepardus]

Rapid Hero's one of the few NMK games I haven't had bullet visibility issues with. The bullets look similar to early Psikyo bullets, I'm not sure why anyone would have a problem with those. USAAF Mustang, on the other hand...

[chum]

Trash game, ZUN hasn't made bad game like this since SoEW (2)
he's Finished. now is the time to support his actual masterpieces, like DS (12.5) which can engage you for a lifetime

[Despatche]

Rapid Hero's one of the few NMK games I haven't had bullet visibility issues with. The bullets look similar to early Psikyo bullets, I'm not sure why anyone would have a problem with those. USAAF Mustang, on the other hand...

Every single orange/brown pattern in stage 3 is almost invisible, and a number of patterns later in stage 2 and in some of stage 4 are very hard to see. This has been an endless source of trouble for me as I actually really like the game otherwise. The orange/brown bullets here are very close in color to the backgrounds they're against while having poor borders; this is a big problem with the stage 3 rocket. Mustang probably doesn't have this problem as it uses those highly visible white/black flashing bullets, like a number of NMK games do. I don't know why Rapid Hero doesn't, not at all.

I simply don't run into stuff like this very often. Garegga and Touhou don't do this. The closest Raiden V comes to this is the stereotypical desert stage that the first game and II also suffer with, and all three of those stages are significantly more visible than what Rapid Hero does.

[CaptainKraken]

Threads like these are always dangerous.

Haha sorry. XD

Bullet visibility? In Touhou 16? The game about the seasons? I just wanna be clear we're talking about the same game, because bullet visibility is simply not something Touhou has ever had an issue with, especially not in a newer game like 16.

The visibility is great compared to other shmups, certainly.

Stage 2 is yellow-red with a bunch of yellow-red bullets, and stage 3 is pink with a bunch of pink bullets.
It's not enough to cry foul on if you get hit though.

[Despatche]

The strong contrast between bullets and backgrounds ensures that it isn't an issue. I actually had to open the game to see what people were talking about, because I never noticed anything like that at any point. I still don't. Rapid Hero, man.

[extend]

Props to the guy keeping this up for over 2 decades. I'm not competent enough to criticize the scoring, but I personally find it less than superb.
The whole thing would also greatly benefit from some reworked sprite sets (imho).

[Lord Satori]

The design of many of the characters seem a little less compelling than usual, imo. I also wish Zun had either used a different character for the EX stage, or added a Phantasm stage, because it feels like we were cheated out of a new character as is.

[Nameschonvergeben]

I haven't played the game much casually, so I can't comment how fun that is, but the scoring is really broken. It kinda feels like ZUN wanted to make a pretty complex system with all the combinations of shottypes and seasons the game offers, but didn't put in the necessairy thought and tuning to implement that system well.