Touhou 18 東方虹龍洞 ～ Unconnected Marketeers - Lunatic 1cc (Sanae, No-Actives)

New Touhou came out.
The main mechanic this time around seems to be about many different ability cards that you either pick up or buy from a shop between stages.
Kinda like a mix of a shmup and a deckbuilding roguelike.

Changes from the demo I've noticed so far:
Shoplifting bug is gone (this got fixed in the demo later).
A whole lot more cards.
The shottypes got rebalanced.
See this for the new damage values (not mine): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachment...
Reimu and Sakuya got a pretty huge buff.

There are three different kinds of ability cards:
Active abilities: You activate these with the C key and they have a cooldown before you can use them again (like the hammer that can cancel bullets into money).
Passive abilities: These abilities are always active and power you up in some way (like increasing your maximum shotpower, or giving you a bigger deathbomb window).
Equipment abilities: These are abilities that get added to your arsenal, like different kinds of options.
There are 47 different ability cards in the game. Cards you have bought once can then be equipped at the start of the game.
List of effects: https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Unconn...
ZUN said he didn't really balance them much, so you can get some really outrageous combinations of effects.

Speaking of a shop, enemies drop money now! You use money to buy ability cards from the shop at the end of every stage. What the cards are in the shop is random though.
Enemies drop more items the faster you kill them.
Also worth noting that your point item value is the same as your current money count.

Overall pattern difficulty is quite high. Not quite LoLK but it's up there.
This is to accommodate for the card system. The idea being that you slowly unlock more cards and abilities to make the game more doable over time.
The difficulty curve is kinda bizarre though. It feels like a reverse curve starting from stage 4. Stage 6 is the easiest, then stage 5 and then stage 4 is the hardest.
All of the stage 6 boss spellcards are pretty easy. They're more about figuring out the trick to them, but once you do they're pretty easy.
Everything in stage 4 is just a nightmare (what is that midboss lmao).

Something else that makes this really hard (for the wrong reasons really) is enemy HP and power.
Enemies are really tanky, and power is a really huge problem, might be the worst ever actually.
Each death drops your power by a full 1.00 and enemies don't drop much power either. It takes like an entire stage to get one power level back. And the power difference between levels is really huge.
There are many cards about giving power or using power so I guess he wanted to make a big deal out of power. It's mostly just kinda frustrating though.
Some bad bullet visibility as well, like on the stage 3 midboss.

Decided to do this run without using actives, since a lot of actives kinda act like a bomb that cancels bullets.
Passives and equipment are cool though, probably the most fun way to play the game. Kind of in the same way Impossible Spellcard would let you use passives as well.
Used the wolf and Centipede cards for this run. Wolf increases your shotpower and the Centipede is unique in that it increases your damage the longer you No-Miss, No-Bomb (to a max of x1.8), you can see the current multiplier underneath the card. From stage 3 on I get the potion which gives you an autobomb for the price of two bombs. The autobomb does not break the Centipede item, which makes this combination really powerful if you can keep it going.

No cards at all feels pretty uninteresting if you ask me. Also mostly because every enemy and boss has absolutely gross amounts of HP if you don't have the wolf passive equipped. Wolf passive feels like the damage you should normally be doing.

Sanae used to be the most useful in the demo. She's still really good because homing is really useful in this game and she destroys the stages, but I think she's outclassed by Reimu at this point.
In the demo Reimu used to be the worst shottype in the game, but now she's back on top with the buff.
Can't have Sanae steal the spotlight.

Scoring seems pretty messy in this game. It mostly just revolves around using the mallet and not much else.
The game has also been counterstopped multiple times already lol.
It's a really low counterstop so I hope there's a counterstop patch at some point to not make scoring in this game already dead.
It's kind of a trend with newer Touhou games that counterstops happen much more frequently and much more earlier.

Intro: 00:00
Stage 1: 00:34
Stage 2: 03:48
Stage 3: 07:36
Stage 4: 12:27
Stage 5: 17:59
Stage 6: 24:33
Ending & Credits: 32:13

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