Touhou 19 東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost - Perfect Lunatic 1cc (Seiran) (NMNB)

A clear of Seiran's route on Lunatic without losing a life or using a bomb.
Doing the NMNB with a character that isn't game-breakingly overpowered and who can't cancel bullets this time. Suddenly there is an actual game here.

So character routes in this game differ WILDLY in difficulty.
It depends highly on how good (not shit) the character is and which bosses they face. Some bosses are wildly harder than others. Basically any character that faces Chiyari is an instant nope because that boss is just impossible. Just getting a normal Lunatic 1cc of those routes is already extremely hard.

Seiran is probably the easiest route that isn't Reimu?
She's one of the best characters in the game that faces mostly the easiest bosses in the game. It's weirdly balanced.
But yeah Seiran actually does decent damage and can actually kill enemies, something you can't say for most other characters.
But yeah the game is actually sort of fun when you can actually kill enemies? Who would have thought.

Basic plan of attack is to last out until you get hit and lose your shield, then immediately use a level 3 charge to get it back. Spam level 1's to do damage. Don't accidentally level 2 or you might just die instantly.

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New Touhou came out.
As always the music is great, the overall presentation is great, gameplay still somewhat of a wet towel. Sounds like ZUN is leaning into ZUNTATA with some of these songs, which I'm all in for.

After almost 18 years we're actually getting a new versus Phantasmagoria-like game, who would have thought.
At its base it's Touhou 18.5 but with added PoFV mechanics. Except nothing dies and you can't bullet cancel (except for some characters).

New things in the full game since the demo:
Full game is now 6 stages with 19 characters and routes.
You get 5 lives instead of 3, but they don't get refilled between stages.
To compensate for this, you get a one-hit shield at the start of each stage that you can restore with EX and boss attacks.

Besides from that everything seems mostly the same from the demo.
So I guess also see my description from the demo video.

Nothing dies in this game, like almost every character is absurdly underpowered and I don't know why. Being underpowered at all times really ruins the game flow for me, it makes your shots feel like they have no impact at all and it just feels very unsatisfying to play. No real design either, just a whole bunch of random stuff thrown together that gets repetitive fast.

Absolutely mental balancing going on here too.
Most of the characters are so worthless and weak they can't even kill the weakest enemy with their level 1 charge shots. Meanwhile Reimu is so overpowered it's actually game-breaking as she can one-shot all bosses and skip most of the game.
Stuff can also spiral so hard out of control it borders on parody.
There is so much undodgeable stuff thrown at you constantly that normally requires bullet cancelling moves to deal with, but here there are only 3 or so out of the 19 characters that have these bullet cancelling properties.
See also:    • The Game Said No (Touhou 19 Lunatic)  

Probably what this reminds me of the most is one of those silly old mostly-untested Ultra patches, specifically the one for PoFV. Just very unpolished and kinda unfinished stuff.
But this is just ZUN's MO at this point, to rush out games on an extremely short development cycle.

The added shield mechanic in the full game is 100% a Band-Aid in an attempt to fix this incredibly wonky balance. This would actually be unplayable without it.

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The game just completely lost score, even though there is a chaining system in place? Huh?
Not seeing much replay value in this, you mostly go through the 19 routes and that's it, you don't even have to 1cc anything either.
There is netplay, but last I heard the netplay was insanely unusable, with matches either running at 5 FPS or having unplayable input lag.
I hope it's not going to be one of those gimmick games that people play once, never replay again and then gets forgotten in a week.

~The continuing graveyard of lost Touhou features~
No Extra mode
No score
No replays
No Player 2 alternate color palette
No timer
No stage display
No boss healthbar
No boss enemy indicator
Only 6 stages for a Vs game
No Esc+R
No Esc+Q
No small Reimu hitbox
No boss movement manipulation

Anyway go play Twinkle Star Sprites.

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Buy the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/24...

00:00 - Stage 1 - Aunn
01:38 - Stage 2 - Marisa
03:44 - Stage 3 - Nazrin
05:39 - Stage 4 - Tsukasa
08:26 - Stage 5 - Enoko
10:54 - Stage 6 - Saki
15:55 - Ending & Credits

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