Another fact: shaming and ridiculing people into trying to beat the game makes it sound like a chore, and not an enjoyable one. Games are supposed to be fun to play. That's the point; winning isn't.
some (like myself) find out that the *skill exercise* (the path, not the win itself) required to win provides more fun than just playing the game without that goal, if the gameplay is good enough and involves actual skills.
Drake did a great job in demonstrating how this series give out more bombs and extends than most arcade shmups (and before anyone says anything about arcade shmups being cheap, made to devour your wallet, this series is among the ones that showed me that it's just their designs that were beyond my comprehension back then), and how people should spend them more. The fact that some of the games allow the player to bombspam like he did was just a bonus.
Whoever's complaining about his demonstration taking away the challenge of the games and/or dismissing the efforts that they've put in isn't being critical enough to themselves (as in, not analyzing when/where/why they're dying when they could've bombed or done something else, and what to do against it) and the game (as in, it's not really difficult to do well on the first 3 stages consistently enough to give you more chances of starting stage 4 with enough lives and bombs until then and then learn to play defensively through the remaining stages, and learn when you're dying the most times. For example, Marisa in SoEW. If you learn to bomb her at the right moments, she won't take as many lives. Does it reduce difficulty? Yes. But am I playing for score there? No.
at that time, I wanted to reunlock Extra. It took me something like 1 hour and half, with the 3 shot types.). 1ccing on Normal isn't as difficult as people may want to believe. There's really no shame in bombing a pattern that seems to be giving trouble to you in particular, and there's no pride in dying instead of bombing it.
Fact: Touhou is a game about not thinking you're a better player than you are. A lot of players who chronically die with bombs in stock do so because they think they can get through stuff they obviously can't at their current skill without ridiculous amounts of luck, and fail to see fluke dodges/captures as such.
true, also true for a lot of shmups. Players must learn to maintain control over the game, and normally, when we see gameplay videos, the player bombs when he/she has lost it, and wants to be safe, or dies because he/she accepted the risk, but knows his/her own current limits.
edit: I forgot to mention bombing for score, which usually reduces your survivability.
edit 2: forgot about preventive bombing too, when the player wants to avoid an incoming, foreseen situation of risk, such as difficult boss patterns, before they can represent a risk to the player.
