Touhou

[ainsoph9]

Yeah, I thought that the character choice was odd. I am hoping for an expansion pack or something in the near future here. While I have not played it myself yet, I have seen videos on YouTube. The game seems to suffer from some balancing issues, including character choice, how powerful the characters are compared to each other, etc. Even though I think that it is refreshing to see some characters be playable that we have not seen before as playable characters, it comes across as awkward that some of the more religious characters are not playable. Kanako, Suwako, Minamitsu, Nazrin, Nue, Kogasa, Kyouko, Shou, Shikieiki, Komachi, Seiga, Soga, Yoshika, the Aki sisters, and probably several others all have religious affiliations to one extent or another. Yet, none of them are playable. I think that Koishi was definitely a bone to the Koishi fans out there. So, why not have Satori as well, who is usually paired with her? For that matter, why no Rin or Okuu?

Having played the game demo, I found the controls to be kind of stiff and awkward. It is much harder to push your way through danmaku than it was in previous Touhou fighters. This would be fine, except that it is inconsistent in how you do it. The way you set up your character type is also not very transparent in terms of the hows and whys. Likewise, I found that some characters seem to have "cheap" moves. For example, Reimu can pretty much teleport between the left and right sides of the screen without limit to get behind her opponent. This just screams "cheap exploit."

The music, art, and stages are much improved over previous games, but they still seem to lack that graphic edge where they could be. The music is...well, it is Touhou music. What else can I say? The art is a huge change from previous games, which can be both refreshing and good and also too much for fans to handle, as it drifts perhaps too far from previous games. This creates a problem of consistency in character design. Are we really playing as the same Reimu in the series? I must say that the stages are much improved from previous games, as it appears that great care way taken to make them fit with the story and theme. At the same time, it appears that they sometimes suffer from artistic inconsistencies and are not interactive enough to help drive the fight. If the characters in the background are supposed to be voting on the fight, they should show it more.

Overall, while I still want to play the full version of this game, I am going have to let it take a backseat to some of the other games on my list.

In other brighter news, the new episode of "Memories of Phantasm" was released in Japanese only without voices on YouTube today. I am waiting for the English sub with voices version to pop up, which should happen probably pretty soon.

[dalek]

A suggestion to play: Perfect Cherry Blossom. Never played it, but do Stage 3 Boss Theme PCB and see what comes up on Googol. (Google). Hint: it sounds like IOSYS song Marisa Stole the Precious Thing, I think. Never got my XP computer back.