Touhou

I don't know, but I know this much:

• There's a video of the band COOL&CREATE playing a rock version of the song.
• There's a video that's the same as above, except it's a live performance at some venue called "Flowering Night 2007".
• There's this super happy fun remix which is my favorite version. There are short and long versions of this.

edited 14th Sep '09 8:52:44 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

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Heian Alien vocal arrange.

Goddamn these remixes are made of so much win. Are they on iTunes or something like that?

This 'un's from nico nico douga, so I don't think so.

Oh well if they don't want my money then it's torrenting time.

I understand why we have so many topics on Touhou. I don't understand why every single topic on Touhou eventually becomes the same topic, aka silly fandom memes and awesome remixes. I mean yeah, those are the only parts of the series I'm interested in and probably so for most of you, but do we need two topics at a time for it?

Actually, scratch that. I do understand, I just don't thiink it makes sense.

That is also known as a Touhou Hijack.

Marissa stole the precious thread?

is it just me or Touhou fans never talk about the gameplay.

Gameplay matters? :p j/k

Admittedly the reason I stopped playing the one game I picked up had nothing to do with how it played.

They're actually pretty good games, although quite difficult. The music, memes, and ZUN's clever character designs are the biggest draws for me.

edited 21st Sep '09 11:24:05 AM by Zudak

I'm fundamentally opposed to any thread that devolves into a bunch of youtube videos, and Touhou is no exception. I like the music, but somehow I'd rather talk about the music than just see things spammed. So this sort of bugs me, although I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't already been the topic.

Anyway, I'd talk about the gameplay if other people wanted to, but I recognize that a decent amount of the Touhou fandom aren't particularly fans of shmups and may be uninterested.

While they are complicated, the difficulty of Touhou's fighting games is lower than for the Bullet Hell ones and they're certainly not too shabby game play wise. They also must be popular because a lot of people do youtube them and port the characters to Mugen.

Also Patchouli plays Super Mario Bros:

but I recognize that a decent amount of the Touhou fandom aren't particularly fans of shmups and may be uninterested.

.... So, they don't play the games?

Er... yes? A lot of Touhou fans don't play the games, sometimes because they found them unfun and many times because they've never bothered to look into it.

edited 21st Sep '09 3:19:15 PM by Clarste

That... that is mind-boggling.

Er... yes?

it may be just me but you seem to be implying that's normal.

Hey, when you've got whole conventions organized around your setting, along with actual musical artists writing and performing songs based on it, as well as ton of doujinshi, including non-pornographic ones, and even several attempts at fanmade anime, I think it's reasonable for people to forget the games exist. The Fanon feeds on itself in a self-perpetuating fashion. ZUN has truly created a monster, and I happen to find that awesome.

..I still like the games though. I've just met quite a few people who don't, and I don't think there's a compelling reason to claim that they're not fans in some sort of No True Scotsman thing.

Adaptation Displacement

edited 21st Sep '09 4:19:49 PM by Tzetze

I've just met quite a few people who don't, and I don't think there's a compelling reason to claim that they're not fans in some sort of No True Scotsman thing.

I don't want to imply those people don't have the right to enjoy what they do... but still, there's a difference between (dis)liking an hated/love installment/character/idea ect (As per the No True Scottman fallacy) and not liking the very foundation of the work itself. The Touhou fanbase is the first time I see this, I never saw a fan claiming to like everything about Mario Bros except the platforming, for example.

It's just an odd thing, I guess, but as a big shmup fan, it kind of piss me off.

edited 21st Sep '09 4:26:35 PM by Someguy

That's because most videogames live or die on their gameplay alone, and anything else is only occasionally more than a bonus. The exceptions? Well, RP Gs: Plenty of people will gush about the plot, music and visuals in an RPG while being mostly neutral to the gameplay (or even griping about it). Also, I've seen people who love Metal Gear Solid's mindfuck plot diss its gameplay (and visa versa; in this case it's hard to really say which is the core). And lord knows there's people who love everything about Silent Hill except the parts where you have to deal with actual gameplay. You won't find people calling themselves fans of Megaman while disliking the shooting, no, but that's because shooting stuff is its only real draw, as it is with a lot of games. Games that have other features which are at least as much of a draw as the gameplay, like plot or atmosphere, sometimes have fans who are fans of that more than they are fans of the gameplay.

The only difference with Touhou is that even though the gameplay is top-notch (unlike, say, most survival horror games and many RP Gs), it's in a genre which is fairly inaccessible to many people; only a certain type of player can ever complete one of Zun's games on normal, including "can stick with the thing long enough to finish without getting fed up" in my definition of "can complete". Most anybody who wants to see that plot can slog through Final Fantasy with enough grinding, but not everybody who would be interested in the plot, fandom, etc. can complete a Touhou game. Or would find it fun.

Speaking of this, I have definitely seriously considered buying SWR, and still may do so sometime. Unlike the others (to me), SWR looks fuuuuuuuun. Mostly I haven't because I'd have to navigate a lot of Japanese crap to do so, and I'm not sure if it'd work on Vista. And, you know, because there's always more things I "ought" to try than I can actually buy.

I don't think SWR is as good as Ia MP. Ia MP was an interesting fighting game that incorporated elements of danmaku into the system. Projectiles become very important as a way of both applying pressure and trapping people and whatnot. I'm not exactly a fighting game expert, but it was fun game to play with friends.

SWR was fundamentally the same game (the sprites are the same, for one) but introduced a lot of elements that made it less fun. First, the weather. The weather adds random effects to the battlefield, some of which have drastic gameplay consequences, like no flinching. This is rather out of place in a fighting game. Yeah, you can control the weather by paying attention to the order and knocking people down appropriately, but that's just annoying. It's hard to pick up and play with friends because I have to explain what all the weather does. Second, the flying. I don't know why this annoys me, it just does. Third, melee attacks have been messed with in some weird way. They took out guard breaks and some other things that made melee attack interesting.

Lastly, the cards. This deserves a paragraph of its own. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with the fact that I can't read Japanese, but I really dislike the card system. A) It's random, which is bad. B) You have to unlock all the cards individually by playing the game forever. You need at least four of each to to have all possible takes, which takes quite a long time and is similar to Drops Randomly. Not what I want to see in a fighting game. C) Each player needs to create their own deck, which again prevents you from just playing the game casually. If they use the default decks, they miss about half the moves of each character, And That's Terrible.

The latest expansion to SWR, called Unthinkable Natural Law (which is an awesome name) fixes some issues, but is mostly the same game as SWR.

edited 21st Sep '09 6:20:17 PM by Clarste

Oh, wow, that youtube clip... Aki Eda (whose depictions of most characters I find wierd), and the chocobo music weirded me out. Also, what's with Patchu being so huge in the game? No wonder she was having trouble, she was two blocks from the edge when moving forward.

Hey, can you Touhou fans switch fandoms with the Iji fans?

Because all the Iji fans ever talk about is gameplay.