Touhou 20: Fossilized Wonders

[BulletMagnet]

To be released at Comiket in August, demo available at Reitaisai next month. Apparently it'll be something of a "back to basics" entry.

[To Far Away Times]

Very excited for this. A new mainline Touhou game is like a holiday.

[Lethe]

Going off demo impressions this is top 1% fangame tier, best canon game since the 12.x series. Not that demo impressions are ever a good barometer in the end, I had a very positive impression of LoLK's first 3 stages and then ended up hating the back half of it. "Back to basics" is not descriptive at all, it has a PCB+UFO+LoLK mashup system with a rank element. The stages have real pacing and Lunatic will bury you in shit if you leave enemies alive or summon at the wrong time. It has the way-too-many-shot-types problem again: 8 per character with drastic variability in usefulness, and the option to mix and match any combination of subtypes.

I'm sure the usual suspects have been complaining about power loss, rank, RNG etc (and anything else making the game fun). I hope the full release doesn't water any of those things down excessively.

[cj iwakura]

If I just decided and up and go over to Japan during Comiket, would I have a snowball's chance of getting in?

[PC Engine Fan X!]

If I just decided and up and go over to Japan during Comiket, would I have a snowball's chance of getting in?

Yes, you'd be able to get in but you'd have rush to the booth selling those demos only to find out that they're all gone. Hint-hint -- get in line earlier and you'd have a better chance of scoring one is the best & sage advice to take into consideration. Cool to hear that the Touhou 20: Fossilized Wonders dev team will release it on Steam later on.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[cj iwakura]

If I just decided and up and go over to Japan during Comiket, would I have a snowball's chance of getting in?

Yes, you'd be able to get in but you'd have rush to the booth selling those demos only to find out that they're all gone. Hint-hint -- get in line earlier and you'd have a better chance of scoring one is the best & sage advice to take into consideration. Cool to hear that the Touhou 20: Fossilized Wonders dev team will release it on Steam later on.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

I'd be happy just having got in, I'd figure out the rest afterward.

[Faith]

Touhou Kinjoukyou ～ Fossilized Wonders (Steam)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3671 ... d_Wonders/

Released!!~

[xEbb1993x]

So you have to beat the game on Normal to unlock the Extra Stage. Figures. Ten Desires did something like that too.

[Lethe]

Omoshiroi game my gaijins. Early impressions rating from me is above 11, 14 and 15. A top 5 full-numbered game at a stretch. Tweaking a few crucial parts would make it come off close to or better than UFO, but the honest chance of that happening is miniscule.

The balance is less masochistic than the demo was, you get shot power easily, and you can now get an absolute ton of resources by engaging with its systems, but to make up for it the second half of Lunatic is batfuck hard beyond expectation. The stage 5 midboss needs to be seen to be believed. For once, full-on no-resource clears might not even be possible. Though I'm sure you can avoid a lot of obligate bombing through careful hyper/summon routing. The stages are easily the best in the series (not that the bar's ever been high).

Some interesting stuff going on audiovisually too. Not necessarily amazing, but different. It has way more charisma than anything from the 16-19 period. And it features a surprising choice of returning character, who I'm pleased to see get a moment in the limelight, and who features some really fiendish patterns which I'm sure will be well-remembered.

A man can only dream that actually putting some thought into a game like this sparks enough enthusiasm in ZUN that we get some more good ones afterwards, as was the case with UFO.

[cj iwakura]

I had no idea it was out until I saw a friend playing it, I assume they still have the gaul to let fan patches carry all the weight.

[CStarFlare]

Not fixing the incident value bug in this feels malicious.

[Lethe]

Not fixing the incident value bug in this feels malicious.

That's not the only basic thing that didn't get fixed though. After repeatedly getting away with playing in ways that shouldn't work (including slipping through implausible gaps such as the s5 boss's death rings), I started suspecting the game of having a subpixel-sized hitbox. Not only is that actually the case and supposedly it's unintended, but I also learned that some of the uncommon bullets have screwed up misalignments. (diagram) All of this was in the demo.

At least the value bug will be trivial to mod out without affecting anything else. And, having brought it up, even the misaligned collisions in th20 are tame by series' standards. I hadn't even noticed what was wrong. Much less of a pain than EoSD's hitboxes, or the stars in 15, or god forbid whatever the fuck is going on with the giant growth attack in 14.

In this case the figuritivebox is a positive. At minimum it makes a few obnoxious-looking parts much less strict than they seem while barely affecting the large bullets which are frequent in this game. There's some irony to this sentiment coming from me after I've soapboxed so often on how much I hate certain games that rely on such things. Aging tired-of-this-shit drunk amateur achieves what the most widely celebrated company in STG history couldn't, does it by accident, again. Really makes you think.

[CStarFlare]

Yeah, the hitbox thing is also kind of obnoxious but at least you can manage around it. With the scoring bug your only option is to... have a big dead spot in your game until you reach multiplier level that breaks out of the bug state? I'm half convinced Zun resents that people play his games for score; he's been taking steps to limit scoring since Touhou 8.