Current Events > Do you have any opinions on the Touhou games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think I've played every 2hu game at least once. Even the PC-98 stuff.

They're neat, but I don't play them very often, especially the shmups. I'm not very good at them. And the characters and music are definitely the strong parts of the series.

On a somewhat related note, if you've ever wanted the best of 2hu in a strategy RPG, might I recommend Fantasy Maiden Wars? Plays like Super Robot Wars if you've ever played that. Neat character interactions with characters that usually don't show up (Keine and Nitori play big parts during the plot of EoSD, for example) and the music is phenomenal. There's 4 games, the first 3 can have English translations patched into the game but all 4 are translated via an LP someone did on the Something Awful forums (the LP itself is now located on LP Archive). There's also a Complete Box version of the game that I recommend playing over the others because it's just so much better in every way. Not translated, but you can just use the LP for the story.

My personal favorite 2hu fangame.

GiftedACIII posted...

Speaking of the gameplay, anyone here intentionally try to catch spellcards? I usually use my bombs on stage enemies instead of trying to power through them so that I can try my best on the spellcards without the temptation of bombing or losing bombs if I fail. This makes TH10-11's bomb mechanics very annoying to me of course.

I never went as far as to tie my hands behind my back with no bombs like that. 8 had a spell card practice mode which was close enough. I tied my willingness to use bombs to the strength of the character I was playing. The consequence of losing a life is getting de-powered, catastrophic for some, others laugh it off.

And it depends on the spellcard. Some, like Nue's last spellcard just felt like random bullets flying around at high speeds, so I went in less interested in trying to capture it and more interested in bombing for invuln frames and getting the win.

If the game has a busted strat like the malice cannon or MarisaB or that TH14 Marisa bomb loop though, I'm gonna use it. I got a real anything goes vibe from these games.

oh wow, the collab is happening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCXOn9hzFp4

Well, in light of recent news, I booted up PCB.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/0/8/AABqeEAAEu-w.jpg

Good to know that I can still clear Extra over a decade later.

Even if I have to rely on easy modo Reimu these days.

my opinion is that i'm awful at them.

Sometimes I forget that Undertale fans invaded and destroyed everything we cherished.

You know what else was nice for a while?
It used to be much easier to find arrangements of songs.
Now it's all clogged up with "Song but I removed every 5th beat" "Song but it gradually speeds up" "X song but Y soundfont"
The flood of AI voice videos will probably arrive soon.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Sometimes I forget that Undertale fans invaded and destroyed everything we cherished.

you mean KanColle fans

ViewtifulJoe posted...

You know what else was nice for a while?
It used to be much easier to find arrangements of songs.
Now it's all clogged up with "Song but I removed every 5th beat" "Song but it gradually speeds up" "X song but Y soundfont"
The flood of AI voice videos will probably arrive soon.

I feel this is a lot more due to channel takedowns, and the YouTube search algorithm being completely useless anymore

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I know. The walls are down. They've been down for a while.
All is lost.
Sorrow and defeat.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

I know. The walls are down. They've been down for a while.
All is lost.
Sorrow and defeat.

regardless of whatever the UT fandom is up to, gotta say I have a lot of respect for Toby Fox

guy's living the dream, got to befriend ZUN, worked with GameFreak to write music for Pokmon, even visited Masahiro Sakurai's house to play him at his own game and get Sans in as a costume

I kneel

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I did two playthroughs because someone I knew was going crazy for it and insisted I play.
Didn't get invested in the characters or world. Music was nice. I've never felt tempted to touch the game again and I never bothered with the sequel.
The same guy who recommended the first one is going crazy for the sequel but I stopped taking his recommendations years ago.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

The first one was random acts of belligerence and kindness. The second one I was told I needed to do the pacifist run and fight the demon thing that you can't even lose to at the end.

As for genocide, years ago me and someone made a wager. Whoever finishes their extremely slow creative project last has to do a full run of genocide. I was encouraged to try harder by this and I finished first. He still hasn't done the playthrough. I can't do a genocide run or it's like I didn't even win.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I already know what's in the game. It's been impossible to avoid it since people shove it in to everything. In the first run I had to fight the first genocide boss where they give you the shield because I mostly killing things and later decided to try out the spare option to see what it did.
It comes off like the genocide run was deliberately made tedious as a consequence of choosing to be evil. That sounds more like a decent Youtube video than something you'd actually want to play.

Touhou was nice because it didn't bother with the kind of tedium that ruins repeat playthroughs, you could just pick a character, pick hard or lunatic and just like that you're in. No long stretches of speech or cutscenes, the enemies are trying to send you packing from the word go.
It was nice that the following was all about re-interpreting things and building outlandish personalities for the characters too.

comparing the two makes no sense they're entirely different genres lol

kirbymuncher posted...

comparing the two makes no sense they're entirely different genres lol

It makes some sense.
They're tethered together in the eyes of a lot of people. Every now and then you get times like this where I have to explain how I can really enjoy one and not enjoy the other.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Story? Sure.
Simple patterns. Unsure, even when I was brand new easy mode wasn't that interesting. If you're playing UT for the story, it's like the gameplay's an obstruction to that, while with Touhou you probably went there specifically to try your luck at dodging rain.
Not gonna lie, I really don't like the combination of failing to find something new I want to play and praising games I don't want to play.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

The game, I said what I think.
Meanwhile the following, it seeping into everything, the whole overdone Sans Undertale/Megalovania/Ness stuff, sustained popularity meaning a gold rush for imitators/obnoxious Youtubers. No thanks.
Touhou's kind of similar at this point. The mystique's gone. I'm not really interested in whatever it's doing nowadays. If I do end up going back to them it'll probably be to get my UFO hard mode 1cc or try and beat something on lunatic just to say I did.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Simple patterns. Unsure, even when I was brand new easy mode wasn't that interesting. If you're playing UT for the story, it's like the gameplay's an obstruction to that, while with Touhou you probably went there specifically to try your luck at dodging rain.

I think your perspective might just be a little warped, if you've played any touhou at all before (even just easy modes) then yeah undertale looks quite unimpressive in comparison but it was definitely meant as a mass market appeal sort of game and I know plenty of people who find it difficult. though personally I mostly agree that the gameplay is not too interesting from a challenge perspective and is mostly just cool seeing how the patterns tie into the themeing of each character, there's a lot of personality there

as an ex-touhou player myself I think you should check out rabi ribi if you haven't before, that's the game whose bosses rekindled the joy of dodging bullets in me

I've been getting back into the games myself

Just bought 17.5 for the Switch (something to play while I'm out of town), and I'm pretty excited for the new Phantasmagoria game coming out soon

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

A lot of the time with story driven games, the gameplay has me wondering what's the point. You know how there's those games that make you walk forward and listen to someone talk. Or it's just performing very simple movements while the environment crumbles around you.
It's like someone saw a definition of gameplay and had a Desert Bus-like idea for a prank that inexplicably blew up and took over the industry.

It'd be really nice if they'd put a label on the front that tells you if a game's meant to be played like twice max before you move on to the next one or if it's an actual video game you can run laps of. At this stage I'd rather Youtube anything that I'm not gonna be able to put a lot of time in than play it, even then that's unlikely because why would I be interested?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

What do you mean specifically? The people who said they were fans but never played the games? Preoccupied with spamming 20 second edits, mangled versions of the songs and whatever's going on with those fumo things? Because the way I see it there's more of them than ever now that western and eastern internet culture has blended so much.

For me, the real thing was mostly trying to get better at the games, rummaging through Japanese musical arrangements, trying to figure out that Japanese alphabet they used to translate English words and watching them ytpmv every song. There were MMD videos and those animated music videos but they were just kind of there for me. It definitely felt smaller than it does now.

I like the games but there's so much story that's basically skill locked behind beating the extra stages. Even getting the good ending for the regular stages is quite difficult.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I have a really inconsistent time with RPGs in general, east or west. It really depends on how they balance the talking/fighting and what the gameplay actually is.
Usually there's something debilitating with these games and it all keeps me from going all in on the genre. FFX has unskippable cutscenes. Pokemon only gives you one save file and trade evos exist. Because Xenoblade takes itself seriously and because of spoilers there's barely anything I can talk about to get people into it. Even New Vegas crashes constantly.

I'm not sure what I could be misremembering about the game. Press the button to spare them, dodge basic pattern, sometimes you had to press different menu buttons to make them susceptible to being spared, eventually you win.
And sometimes it pulled up to do gags about overly complex puzzles or going on dates.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I remember it having a presence kind of like that before I cared, but I never had a lot of run-ins with it. There was McRolled, a few TF2 things, the occasional reference that went over my head and that was about it. I don't know if being a fan at the time was a worse deal but as a clueless bystander, it barely registered. Maybe post-heyday, pre-UT was the ideal time.

Nowadays you know how everyone's all about flaunting their interests as a personality, some people are dead set on communicating through reaction images. People feel compelled to bring up whatever's popular for the attention. The algorithm. Nowadays all this stuff is one big swirl, it's harder to isolate the parts you care about and stay away from the rest.

https://youtu.be/CxK_nA2iVXw

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Oh I was aware it was an RPG, I was thinking definitely there'd be more gameplay and reason to revisit considering the popularity it garnered so fast.
And for the record FFX had the long list of arena monsters and optional bosses, Xenoblade had the side quests and the grinding. Pokemon had the post-game, the Pokedex and online.
I factor stuff like that into the story/gameplay balance. The kind of RPG I stick needs to at least have a point where the story backs off and they just let you go all in on the gameplay.
Never happened with UT. UT feeds you story as you walk a linear path and then it just ends.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Oh okay, seems agreeable.
So what's the strat? What's the optimised way to express my distaste?

just leave those communities and find places you actually enjoy spending time in.

I love shmups, so I do like the Touhou shmups, but they are in a sub-genre thats not my favorite.

Its similar to how I love metal, but Dragonforce isnt my jam, even though I can enjoy what they do.

That's one of the great things about Touhou, it has fangames in any genre you can think of!

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I can't think of a lot of good games that game out around that 2012-2015 time in general so that makes some sense.
I'm not sure if you're trying to get me to play something or if you're expressing optimism that UT's following is slowly but surely getting into video games for real.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Maybe. A lot of the time if they show up hostile I'm more likely to ask them why they like what they like, see if they can explain it. If they start on about emotive experiences and immersion that tells you all you need to know.

With the non-hostiles, it's like you said. It's an entry level game for a genre. You meet someone who's a fan and it's a safe bet that you'd only really be able to talk about surface level video game things and a few popular fan works with that person. And then they start getting their hooks into everything. Makes you sigh.

Touhou 19 is now out

Still (probably) tomorrow until the Steam release

Who trying to get smacked up in that new Touhou game? I'm prepared to deliver hands all day and night.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Oh right. It says the game's coming out in pieces, one every few years. I'd still be hesitant to get invested in something like that. Even if the game's substantially more fun to play, video games and long waits are a bad mix.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

"We had a good conversation."
(Brief chuckle)
"You, you're the ringleader!"
(Unintelligible)

ViewtifulJoe posted...

I never went as far as to tie my hands behind my back with no bombs like that. 8 had a spell card practice mode which was close enough. I tied my willingness to use bombs to the strength of the character I was playing. The consequence of losing a life is getting de-powered, catastrophic for some, others laugh it off.

And it depends on the spellcard. Some, like Nue's last spellcard just felt like random bullets flying around at high speeds, so I went in less interested in trying to capture it and more interested in bombing for invuln frames and getting the win.

If the game has a busted strat like the malice cannon or MarisaB or that TH14 Marisa bomb loop though, I'm gonna use it. I got a real anything goes vibe from these games.

Yeah, I definitely made the game harder myself but it felt pretty thematic with how capturing cards is presented in other media. Might've also been a habit since you needed to capture enough cards (basically had to do multiple difficulty levels, even up to Hard if you couldn't capture every single one in Easy and Normal) to unlock Phantasm in PCB.
Final spellcards of final bosses/extra bosses are way too much though. I have caught a lot of them by chance but I took 2 hours alone on Byakuren's on Normal, which was more than it took to beat the entire Extra. I think hers might be harder than Nue's.
Haven't touched Steam in 4 years but I might open it up if people are playing 19.

Also Undertale/Deltarune are certainly on the easy side but they're still fun romps imo.

GiftedACIII posted...

Might've also been a habit since you needed to capture enough cards (basically had to do multiple difficulty levels, even up to Hard if you couldn't capture every single one in Easy and Normal) to unlock Phantasm in PCB.
Final spellcards of final bosses/extra bosses are way too much though. I have caught a lot of them by chance but I took 2 hours alone on Byakuren's on Normal, which was more than it took to beat the entire Extra. I think hers might be harder than Nue's.

Oh I'd agree, Byakuren is probably the toughest stage 6 boss on normal. When I was going for 1ccs that was a roadblock early on. Kanako's mostly gimmick spells you can learn, Utsuho's mostly spectacle with the huge bullets and then Byakuren shows up with curved lasers, the blue zigzag and that last spell.

I like the idea of getting an unlockable every time you capture enough spellcards. If he didn't already, he should bring that back.
I haven't looked at 19 yet, I heard he made it like 3 and 9. Meh.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Oh I'd agree, Byakuren is probably the toughest stage 6 boss on normal. When I was going for 1ccs that was a roadblock early on. Kanako's mostly gimmick spells you can learn, Utsuho's mostly spectacle with the huge bullets and then Byakuren shows up with curved lasers, the blue zigzag and that last spell.

I like the idea of getting an unlockable every time you capture enough spellcards. If he didn't already, he should bring that back.
I haven't looked at 19 yet, I heard he made it like 3 and 9. Meh.

Absolutely. Barring Junko of course. Actually a shout-out I have to give a lot of people don't mention is Shinmyoumaru. She still gives me a lot of trouble and I can only consistently catch like one card whereas most stage 6 bosses I can catch 3-4 (including Byakuren, her first two spells and that air dash one I can relatively reliably catch), Hell, even Shinmyoumaru's non-spells are hard.
And yeah, 19 is a phantasmagoria. But it's multiplayer! We could get a lobby or something

GiftedACIII posted...

Absolutely. Barring Junko of course. Actually a shout-out I have to give a lot of people don't mention is Shinmyoumaru. She still gives me a lot of trouble and I can only consistently catch like one card whereas most stage 6 bosses I can catch 3-4 (including Byakuren, her first two spells and that air dash one I can relatively reliably catch), Hell, even Shinmyoumaru's non-spells are hard.
And yeah, 19 is a phantasmagoria. But it's multiplayer! We could get a lobby or something

Good luck getting the netcode to not desync your game within 10 seconds. You're probably actually better off trying parsec or something for touhou 19.

Lobinde posted...

Good luck getting the netcode to not desync your game within 10 seconds. You're probably actually better off trying parsec or something for touhou 19.

I've dealt with PoFV online before, this can't possibly be worse

Lobinde posted...

Good luck getting the netcode to not desync your game within 10 seconds. You're probably actually better off trying parsec or something for touhou 19.

Damn is it really like that? I played Antinomy of common flowers online a few times and it was actually really fun.