Touhou 17.5 Gouyoku Ibun - Hard Mode - Flandre 1cc + TLB (No Deaths)

New official Touhou spin-off game from the usual guys at Tasafro.

Game has been in development hell for quite some time now. One of their main programmers ran into health issues and it was apparently a real struggle for them to get this game out.
You can kinda notice that they just wanted to put the game out after the numerous delays. The core gameplay and story is there, but it's missing basically everything else.

The game is quite unique and hard to pin down as a specific genre. It's like a bullet hell bosses-only beat-em-up with shades of Suguri/Sora. There are a lot of bullets but you don't really dodge things, you're supposed to cancel them or use i-frames to move through them, which most of your moves have. The theme this time is oil, and the art also has an oil painting motif. The game is quite pretty.

A lot of the difficulty of the game comes from learning the really unorthodox control schemes and gameplay rules, for which there is basically zero tutorialization. The game can feel quite jank as a result of that. But if you can get past the initial hurdle of figuring out all this obtuse stuff you can find yourself having quite a good time here.

Flandre's scenario is basically the 'true route' of the game and is the only route that has the TLB.
It's also unique in that it's the only route where you can choose between different bosses to fight. You can choose between three doors with the left being the easiest and the bosses getting harder the more you go to the right.
In order to trigger the TLB you need to choose all the hardest bosses.
The TLB has a unique mechanic where you need to cancel bullets into water to charge your special, which is the only thing that can hurt the boss.

The game has two difficulties, Normal and Hard. Differences being:
- You take half damage on Normal.
- On Normal bosses have half HP.
- On Normal spell cards take less hits to break/stun.
- Some attacks are removed entirely on Normal.
It's pretty clear Hard is the difficulty the game was designed for, with Normal just giving you more leniency. On Normal you can generally get past everything by just tanking and button mashing, but on Hard you need to actually learn the patterns and dodge them (for the most part).

Kutaka is easily the hardest boss here. I'm not really sure how you're supposed to dodge a lot of this, especially the final two spellcards. The second Yuuma fight plus TLB is also quite rough, you really need to learn the patterns so you don't lose too much health for the TLB. The big bubbles do an entire orb of damage so you really want to avoid touching them. Reimu is a pushover for some reason.

Flandre's biggest weakness is that she's really slow and needs to rely on her special moves to move around quickly. This eats up your special meter at the bottom, so it's always a balancing act to make sure you don't run out at a critical moment. Need to touch the ground at points to recharge it.

With all the issues going on, there's been some rumors that this will probably be their last touhou game and likely their last game period, which would be really sad if true.

First time Flandre returns to an official Touhou game in a meaningful capacity in 19 years.

Buy the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/14...

00:00 - Intro
01:18 - Stage 1 Yuugi Hoshiguma
04:31 - Stage 2 Murasa Minamitsu
08:07 - Stage 3 Kutaka Niwatari
11:32 - Stage 4 Reimu Hakurei
14:37 - Stage 5A Yuuma Toutetsu
19:48 - Stage 5B Yuuma Toutetsu
24:07 - TLB
27:35 - Credits

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