Touhou 17 東方鬼形獣 ～ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature - Lunatic 1cc (No-Hypers)

New Touhou came out. First impressions of it are quite positive, I feel like it's probably the best Touhou in quite a while. Music and presentation for the 2nd half is very good, game looks great. I especially like how the final boss revolves around you running away from her. I haven't seen a shmup do that since Twilight Refrain. Difficulty-wise right now the game seems like it's very hard without hypers, but very learnable. Resources are also quiet scarce for a Touhou game. With hypers the game is really easy though, mostly because the otter hyper is very broken and can cancel everything.

Things I don't like though is that the bullet visibility is at an all-time low, it's actually kind of unacceptable. Even PC-98 was better than this. Spellcard backgrounds make the bullets blend in like mad, your own hypers cover the bullets like mad and in the final there are 50 tokens hovering in front of you distracting you and covering the bullets, to just name a few.
Also I'm not sure what to think about the last two patterns, since it seems like story took precedence over gameplay there. The penultimate especially throws almost walls at you and dodging it is stupidly precise. It's clear the game just wants you to spam hypers to get through it. Which is weird, because you can do the rest of the game perfectly fine without hypers.

The system this time around is like a weird mix of Gemini Wing and UFO.
At the start you choose whether you want a strong shot, a strong focused shot or a strong bomb.
Enemies will then drop animal tokens that behave like UFO tokens, except they move randomly and take forever to disappear. They switch between three variants, wolf, otter and hawk.
Getting three wolfs or three hawks will give you a very powerful hyper. Wolf gives a strong focused shot hyper and hawk a strong shot hyper. Otter gives you a shield that cancels bullets.
Getting five tokens without three of the same ones gives you a border. This doesn't give you any benefits besides extra tokens when it ends. The more tokens of the same kind you have, the longer the hyper lasts. Resources are gotten through dropped items that function through the token chain.

Hypers are insanely strong and the otter hyper is actually legit broken. So for this run I opt to only get borders.
Getting hit during a hyper/border will cancel it without losing a life, also called a roar break.
It's not possible to avoid picking up tokens. There are simply too many and they just never disappear.

Enemies are extremely tanky in this game, popcorn enemies have like a million health.
Power is also a problem in this game. You lose 0.50 power upon death and the difference between 4.00 and 3.00 power feels like losing half your power.

Scoring in this game seems easier than survival, which I don't think is a good thing. Scoring seems to mostly involve spamming otter hyper and bombing, which is just not very interesting. The movement of the tokens being random is also a major issue that makes it more luck-based than it should be.

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