Ten Desires. The newest addition to the Touhou lineup. I thought I'd take a moment to address my opinion about the game and explain it's features.
--Music
The music this time around is as solid as it's ever been, though it seems as though Zun's going in a completely new direction with it since UFO. Many of the themes stand out rather well and are quite catchy (Stage 1's theme, for example) and I find myself often booting up the game solely for the music if I don't feel much like playing it (which is often when I have "lazy" moments at my computer)
--Gameplay
Well, this is a broad subject in-and-of itself, so I'm going to break this into a few parts.
-Patterns\Spellcards
I've found that the majority (if not all) of the spellcards in this game are very nice to look at, and almost seem to convey their "meanings" a little better than some previous entries.
Though there are some attack patterns in the game, where I thought, "this could've been made a bit more interesting", or in one case, "why didn't you just use lasers?".
-Difficulty
Honestly, I feel right at home with the difficulty in this game. Not too difficult, but you definitely pay for your mistakes later on in the game (Stage 5-6 anyone?) Not to mention that the fewer extra lives given really makes you pay attention to your resources much more than in other games. I can't say too much about the overall difficulty scaling myself, however there seems to be quite a leap between Normal and Hard. (though at this point that's pretty much par for the course.)
-Unique Features
*Alternating Shottype
Playing as the four characters this time around seems less... time consuming, I'd say, as if you wanted to clear an entire difficulty, you'd need only do it 4 times, (as opposed to, say PoFV's 14(!). ) as there's no A-B shottype selection this time around. Instead, you alternate between strong shots as you press and\or hold the Shift key. (for example, Reimu fires Homing Amulets when unfocused, Persuasion Needles while focused.) I find this a pleasant change since I'd often find myself requiring a shottype I didn't pick during certain stages in previous games.
*Spirits\Trance
I don't have a whole lot to say about the whole "Spirit Item" thing as a whole, But it sorta goes like this. You'll want to be playing the game agressively, trying to kill the enemies as quickly as possible, as they drop more spirits that way, and when bosses are on screen, you'll want to risk staying as close as possible, so that they let out spirits faster. Spirits come in three varieties. Blue: these are what you'll be seeing a lot of. They serve to raise your "Item Value" a little bit. 10 points normally, 100 during Trance(More on this later.) Grey: These appear when you've managed to defeat multiple enemies in succession, and are similar to gold-bordered point items in MoF. These are worth your current full item value, regardless of your position on the screen. Red\Green: And these are where your resources come from. Red for lives, Green for bombs. That's really all there is to it on that :V
-Scoring
Recently, I decided to play this game for score as a little test, after I'd gotten the hang of how it worked. Honestly I found myself abusing invincibility frames on top of bosses for the bulk of my final score. To me, this seems rather counter intuitive, once you take into account that: 1. Bombing fails spellcards as well as dying. 2. If you're in Trance when a spellcard starts, you fail instantly. Granted, you could time your bombing\trancing so that you're not doing it during spellcards, but then you'd miss out on hundreds of millions of points. I mean, it turns out that capturing spellcards and playing the game well only results in, roughly 55% of my total score at the end of the game. (for example, 230m compared to 400m)
I felt rather disappointed that in order to score well, you pretty much had to throw away spellcards, it seemed at the time. To end this segment, I'll just quote myself from earlier today. "It's a good concept. It's definitely a good concept, but it needs better excecution."
On the whole, I think 10D is a worthy addition to the series. It's fun to play and whatnot, but the scoring mechanic needs work, I feel.
