Touhou

I sense shenanigans afoot. Mamizou and Suika both are plotting something more than merely whisking off an old man in the night or having somewhere to eat.

I, for one, is overjoyed to see Suika take a more active role. And, let's be honest, that smirk after she got Miyoi to agree to their little deal was anything but benevolent... Suika is up to something really mischievous.

The brewery is probably like the Three Fairies' house in the tree where it looks and functions completely different to them despite being just a tree. Well, at least, I recall that's how it was.

Edited by TiamatRoar on Apr 27th 2020 at 3:40:00 AM

New Cheating Detective Satori is up.

Haven't seen Ran and Chen do anything in a manga in ages.

Edited by rmctagg09 on Apr 27th 2020 at 9:08:52 AM

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Hey Yukari! No bullying Orin! That's against the rules!

Cheating Detective is so old school.

I think Chen has like, the same amount of appearances as friggin' Flandre + one extra brief appearance in the ending of Imperishable Night. Which is like, one B Ai JR article that everyone got, her initial game debut although I guess she did appear twice there at least, a cameo in Imperishable Night, and um... showing up in Yukari's moves in the fighting games.

Neat, full layout of Yuyuko's house. lol, that tree is like, right there.

Border of Investigator and Instigator is a neat character title.

Poor Rin. In a pro-wrestling taunting setting like Touhou, it's rare to see someone genuinely emotionally hurt like that. Ouch.

Haha, Yukari's "the original cheating youkai"

Edited by TiamatRoar on Apr 28th 2020 at 2:50:17 AM

This is what you hear when you're sent to Animal Hell

Continue the bloodline, Fujimaru!

ZUN-tastic take on Ghana Says Goodbye?

Song of the Sirens

Imperishable Night time.

Prince Shoutoku's pegasus

Song of the Sirens

Song of the Sirens

I don't think I can retrace whatever path led me to find it, but I have to say, you haven't experienced "Bad Apple!!" until you've heard it in the original Russian.

So we've got Russian covers of Japanese remixes, Mefomefo portraying the characters in Mexican costume, shangguan feiying using Mokou as a vehicle for Chinese internet memes... interesting world we live in.

Current earworm: "A New Journey"

Kidnap Patchouli!

Song of the Sirens

fan composers really stepping up their game

Song of the Sirens

Includes the actual hardest difficulty, commentary, and a download link

Okay, did a quick runthrough. Some comments:

• Life and last word thresholds depend on difficulty. Or are maybe just higher on ura? I had easier times getting both than Jaimers did, anyway
• Don't like the writing. It's bland and clearly written by otaku
• The harvest system is aggravating. It activates in the wrong place, you get nothing. You get hit or try to bomb, you get nothing. Wish it would at least autocollect harvest. And not let you cancel it. Literally no reason to
• The final boss really is a spaghetti factory of a fight. Her patterns have a lot going on and it's easy to get clipped because you were looking somewhere else
• Gimmick and writing aside, it's one of the more solid fangames, with consistently good danmaku
• The extra stage might have three difficulties (I only saw regular and lunatic), but none of them are a way for regular players to clear it
• The extra boss is Tamamo no Mae by a different name. Like, literally Tamamo no Mae by a different name. I'm not sure what the point of the name change is. Anyway, she has a bunch of unreasonable patterns that I only managed to see because it gives you a ton of lives in the stage portion

Edit:

Reimu-A: Decently damaging forward concentration. Bomb is Wild Exorcism Dance, and is long, highly damaging, and provides decent coverage

Reimu-B: Homing! Bit lower damage than the needles, but still almost broken in stages. Unfortunately, Fantasy Seal suuuuuuuucks in this game. Short, neglible damage, and almost no coverage

Marisa-A: High damage. Very high damage. Stardust Reverie is short and I'm not sure it actually deals damage, but at least it's a screen-clear

Marisa-B: As usual, the piercing is a small perk to make up for the lost damage, and what you're really after is Master Spark. A bit better shot than Reimu-A, but the bomb is slightly worse

Sanae-A: It's her serpents, with the usual quirks. Damage feels about on par with Reimu's amulets, but Gray Thaumaturgy not sucking makes this the better homing option, I'd say

Sanae-B: What the—? Why does this suck? Sanae is supposed to have a usable spread! Wily Toad is still very good, but that's not enough to carry her

Ryouko-A: It's another shitty spread shot with a good bomb, but with an orbiting theme. Probably a bit worse than Sanae's take

Ryouko-B: The weird one. Her unfocused shot fires large slow-moving (and piercing) spheres at a low rate. Focused she consolidates the spheres into a very large sphere that has an even lower fire rate. The damage is decent when against a boss, but she's not speedkilling much. Her bomb spawns a sphere about the size of Magic Absorber's below her and it slowly moves offscreen. Clears a large area and lasts a while, but does no damage and gives no i-frames. Probably the worst forward concentration shot, overall

Oh, and it turns out that dialogue is exactly the same for the A and B versions. Stage 5 has some different spellcards depending on it, though, so you'll want to use a B type at some point to see everything

Edited by Hylarn on May 18th 2020 at 10:53:23 AM

I have played the Lost Word gacha game, and while the game itself kind of sucks I found myself surprisingly into the story. Instead of being the harmless fluff I was expecting, it dives deep into the lore and metaphysics of the setting. I'm honestly not sure if that's entirely appropriate for Touhou (as opposed to, like, the Nasuverse or something), but it did keep my interest.

Okay, did full test runs with all of the usable-looking shottypes:

• I was wrong about the writing, it's just Reimu who's boring
  • Marisa feels about right. Good-natured, lies and steals, all of that
  • Sanae is weird. I think they're aiming for her UFO characterization, but she ended up really spacey? There's still some good lines, but it feels pretty off in general
  • Ryouko is mostly that stoic and bad at talking archetype, but there's a fun layer of bloodlust as well. Her status as a youkai also means that she has the most unique plot
• Each character has unique passive abilities, but they're only told to you in the manual instead of the character select screen. Why
  • Reimu: Small hitbox, long deathbomb timer. Sounds really good, but the deathbomb timer is normally like half a second, so you shouldn't be missing many to begin with
  • Marisa: Better item collection. Should be good, with how important items are, but the effects seem to be rather small, and you usually get a chance to autocollect anyway. Marisa's real ability is having higher DPS than anyone else
  • Sanae: Fills the harvest gauge faster and builds the meter faster (the latter effect seems to be more pronounced). So she gets a lot of bombs. Unfortunately, she's still stuck with lousy shottypes. Tradeoff worked better than in TD, at least
  • Ryouko: Still gets a bomb fragment if she fails a card, larger graze radius. I think they just straight up doubled her graze radius? It's way larger than anyone elses. So she's almost definitely the best-scoring character, but she also gets nearly as many bombs as Sanae, and has a perfectly usable shot as well
• The B-specific cards are harder than the A ones, but the A ones are already hard enough that you're probably going to need to bomb them. I don't think it really matters
• In practice, I think the best shottypes for the main game are probably Marisa-B and Ryouko-B. Their bombs' issues really don't matter that much, and they have improved damage or bomb gain (respectively) over Reimu-A

Edit: Oh, Ryouko-B is busted in Extra. Her bomb only triggers the invincibility effect for the period where she's invincible. Lotta time where you can shoot the boss and she can't really shoot you

Edit 2: Beat Normal as Ryouko-B. ...One more death than my Easy run. I kind of expected this after the super-hard hidden difficulty looked easier than some Lunatics and the Easy mode was kinda hard, but the difficult scaling in this game is dubious. Don't really feel like anomaly-hunting or trying to clear Extra (though I probably could, for once), so I think this marks the end of my time with this game

Edited by Hylarn on May 20th 2020 at 11:02:50 AM

Her name is Mamo, which is short for Tamamo, apparently.

Song of the Sirens

Good news! MoF, SA, and UFO are coming to Steam next month.

I believe these are also the last of the mainline Touhou games ZUN has the source code for.

Lotus Eaters 7

I think this is the best chapter so far.

Mamizou threatening Miyoi feels slightly odd considering that it isn't like zashiki-warashi are unknown species, but I guess tall poppy gonna get the snip snip unless it benefits you.

Also Cheating Detective. Marisa needs to be put into quarantine.

Edited by TPPR10 on May 25th 2020 at 12:31:20 PM

Continue the bloodline, Fujimaru!

"You've got guts, little missy." "Thanks, my liver gets a lot of practice." This made me laugh.

Other thoughts: Miyoi being on the receiving end of weird supernatural attacks recontextualises her a bit, beyond what the story was doing by just making her sympathetic. Good thing that villager doesn't know the difference between beef ranches and dairy. Also I swear Mamizou's tail is her main body.

Edited by Prime32 on May 25th 2020 at 11:54:56 AM