東方Project 第14弾の情報です - Double Dealing Character

[Ikari]

My god, I just caught up.

> Sakuya
> Badass Shot Types
> No more crazy gimmicks
> No more TD life system

...Are you all trying to make me cry? WAS THAT YOUR INTENTION!?

brb sobbing joyfully in a corner.

[Imosa]

> Badass Shot Types

So, that hasn't been confirmed.

[Ikari]

So, that hasn't been confirmed.

There's a flamethrower and a dark spark. And Sakuya uses cards as options.

I'm incredibly easy to hype.

[N-Forza]

> No more TD life system

Do you mean the Overdrive system or the extra life fragments? Because I'm pretty sure I saw life pieces in the sidebar.

[Maiden Synnae ミ☆]

Do you mean the Overdrive system or the extra life fragments? Because I'm pretty sure I saw life pieces in the sidebar.

Me too. You can see it on the second screenshot, about Marisa's flamethrower.

[Formless God]

> No more TD life system

What do people have against this system? You still gain life at the same rate as before.
In EoSD, PCB, and IN you technically have several hundred fragments to collect per life. Hurr.

[CyberAngel]

What do people have against this system? You still gain life at the same rate as before.

No, you're getting them at a constantly slowing rate, and end up having less of them in the end. Maxing out is impossible, unlike any other games. True, that Trance thing can help with survival too, but the fact alone rubs some people the wrong way.

I have a suspicion we're back to SA system, but we can be sure only after we get the demo.

[Formless God]

No, you're getting them at a constantly slowing rate

This happens in the three games I mentioned too.

and end up having less of them in the end. Maxing out is impossible

This shouldn't be an issue. CAVE games are a quadrillion times harder and they only give you 5-6 per run.

I have a suspicion we're back to SA system, but we can be sure only after we get the demo.

Whatever it is I hope it isn't something retarded like "lol don't die to gain lives".

Just heads up in advance. We prefer not to see CAVE vs Touhou comparisons. Because they are tiresome.. --Hele

[CyberAngel]

This happens in the three games I mentioned too.

Not nearly as pronounced. You tend to get more points/point items in later stages, so it's justified there. And they have EXTEND items too.

This shouldn't be an issue. CAVE games are a quadrillion times harder and they only give you 5-6 per run.

Well, they are CAVE games, after all. And even though a perfect run in a Touhou game would be a no-miss one, there are a lot of players who can't do that and to whom lives matter a lot.

Whatever it is I hope it isn't something retarded like "lol don't die to gain lives".

Heh, that game IS hell in all aspects.

[Tengukami]

No, you're getting them at a constantly slowing rate, and end up having less of them in the end. Maxing out is impossible, unlike any other games.

This. Tired of being parsed out these itty bitty fragments here and there over long stretches of time. ZUN'a allusion to a "back to basics" philosophy makes me pretty hopeful.

Just heads up in advance. We prefer not to see CAVE vs Touhou comparisons. Because they are tiresome.. --Hele

Seconding this. I know this endless pissing contest is great fun on other forums, but we're all out of Care for this debate here.

[Zengeku]

No, you're getting them at a constantly slowing rate, and end up having less of them in the end. Maxing out is impossible, unlike any other games. True, that Trance thing can help with survival too, but the fact alone rubs some people the wrong way.

Die less, problem solved. If getting max lives offers you some sort of psychological effect, then make 5 lives the cap. Problem fixed.

[Sakurei]

okay, instead of cave vs touhou how about touhou vs touhou? PoDD is significantly harder with any shottype and still only gives you 2 extra extends for a grand total of 4 lives you generously may spend through 9 stages.

if you need to max out the life counter to clear the game, you probably either play the wrong difficulty (practice more, dude) or just started out playing touhou altogether.

the whole argument about how many lives you can get is dumb as fuck. touhou only has 6 stages regular, everything over 5 extends (plus inital lives) is generous, to be honest

[Zil]

Personally I like the complicated systems, though I can understand why others wouldn't.

What makes considerably less sense, however, is complaining about the maximum amount of lives you can actually get. You're not entitled to a certain number of them. Saying the game should give you more lives is practically the same as saying the game should be outright easier, which doesn't make much sense considering the game in question already gives you four different difficulty levels, one of which should be beatable by just about anyone on the planet.

[I have no name]

complaining about the maximum amount of lives you can actually get. You're not entitled to a certain number of them.

It's a different kind of difficulty, one that I find considerably less enjoyable.  You take what you get though and do what you can with it.

[CyberAngel]

"Die less", "practice more". Geez, easy for you to say. Just give me a few years and I'll catch up with you.

However, to be honest, I AM a relatively new player who only recently started feeling comfortable on Normal and stopped being afraid of entering Lunatic. And I have to say that my performance in TD isn't any worse than in any other Touhou game. It IS quite balanced with its resources, and if you use them properly the game isn't much more trouble than any other. While ZUN actually intended to show the value of lives in this way, and I take the lesson as it's supposed to be, there are still other people who are thrown off by that. Show some compassion to those poor souls who can't bomb in time to save themselves, will ya?

[Ikari]

I'm a pretty bad player, so more lives forgives more. Makes each silly mistake less frustrating. (TD to me was "Oh hey I ran into this bullet, I lost one of the 5 lives I'll ever get!")

But the number and the pieces thing isn't even what I disliked. They make the game more challenging, so whatever. No, what I loathed with my entire being, what I had hatred for beyond all bounds, was HOW you collected the pieces. EoSD, PCB, IN? Yeah, thousands of pieces you can autocollect or grab as they fall down. 80% of my deaths in TD are made by me trying to grab the sacred lives pieces the games gives you only every once in a while before getting rammed in by a fairy since the damned pieces end up at the top of the freaking screen.

And that's just my personal opinion because I just so happen to stick in the lower half of the screen most of the time. I'm not saying it's something no one should like; I'm saying I personally hated it with all my being and that I'm glad to have it disappear.

Side note, if you're gonna use the "Yeah but UFO had bouncing UFOs" argument, know that I loathed those as well. Much less, but still quite a bit.

[crotchpuncha]

I just like getting lives through points, and 1ups. Having to collect 4 of a specific drop to get extra lives is annoying. *shrug* I don't hate it, I just don't think it's a particularly good system.

[The Noodles Guy]

80% of my deaths in TD are made by me trying to grab the sacred lives pieces the games gives you only every once in a while before getting rammed in by a fairy since the damned pieces end up at the top of the freaking screen.

And that's just my personal opinion because I just so happen to stick in the lower half of the screen most of the time. I'm not saying it's something no one should like; I'm saying I personally hated it with all my being and that I'm glad to have it disappear.

I disliked the "collecting life pieces" thing. SA's collecting life pieces system (after nonspells/spells) was okay, collecting UFO's was boring, but the divine spirits thing was ughh. Like you say, when I attempt to 1CC, I try to pick up one of that pink/green divine spirits, one of that fairies decides it's the best time to use Tackle, and it's supah effective.

[Validon98]

I agree. Essentially, the whole concept of the lives mechanics of UFO and TD meant going out of your way to collect things, which other games didn't really had you do. It was either a score thing, a point item thing, or a survival thing (by that I mean SA). UFO was a big offender when it came to that, but TD also falls under that category. Even if TD is easier than UFO and SA, I haven't 1cced it on Hard because I can generally get through by tanking the harder sections, but in TD I can't do that... which is problematic when the spells get to the point where I can't always get through them, so... yeah.

[Critz]

I think that's more of a psychological sense of safety... or something. UFO showers you with extend to the point you can reach the cap by Ichirin, then proceeds to strip you from them all the way to Byakuren, where you have a few of them left. Which is propably why one or two lossy deaths on stage 5 don't hurt as much, especially since you get 2 bombs per life and can't lose more than two.

Contrast SA, where you get much less extends, shot types and bombs are relatively horrible, bombs are tied to power so you weaken yourself with bombing and you're deprived of extends if you die on spell cards. That, and if you have more than 3 lives and die on the boss, you have only 2 power and thus 2 bad bombs till the next death... unless you make it to the next stage with low power, in which case you get the chance to recover power and squeeze so much more from the current life.

It's just the matter of psychological pressure and the constant awareness than one bad death can start a domino effect of deaths and cost you a run, plus you're encouraged to risk up to 4 and potentially more bombs if you want to do decent damage to bosses. To me, Koishi's patterns felt doable, but the clear seemed completely impossible at first because there was simply no resources to do so. UFO's much more forgiving in that matter, as it feels you have to constantly play well as opposed to avoid fatal mistakes at wrong points (the cruel trick with S4 midboss Nue drop nonwithstanding).

[Kilgamayan]

Pardon me for not being sure because I haven't thought to check for the function in years, but does ZUN still let the player set their starting number of lives in the option menu?

[Validon98]

Pardon me for not being sure because I haven't thought to check for the function in years, but does ZUN still let the player set their starting number of lives in the option menu?

MoF onwards, no.

[Zil]

Show some compassion to those poor souls who can't bomb in time to save themselves, will ya?

Well, I'll agree with you that Zengeku and Sakurei are a bit off the mark, as what they're saying is essentially that you should just be good enough to clear the game without more lives, which of course isn't really true.

My own point is that the number of lives you are given barely has any effect on the actual gameplay. You'll be doing the same things anyway, at least for the purposes of a simple survival run. You're dodging the same attacks, handling situations the same way. Simply having more lives in stock isn't going to make the game any more fun in and of itself. It only effects how many mistakes the game will tolerate before giving you a game over screen, but then you can just continue immediately so that hardly matters either. (Granted, continues work differently in SA and UFO, but this is TD were talking about.)

Anyone who plays the game seriously enough to be involved in this kind of argument should realize the purpose of the games is not to simply "beat" them. They're not RPG's. You're not "supposed" to win. Nobody just plays through the games once then never touches them again. The attraction is the gameplay itself, and the number of lives you get is not preventing you from playing in any way shape or form. It's just telling you the number of times you can die without getting the "bad ending." And this is why it bothers me when people say a game isn't fun because it doesn't give you enough lives, or if they call it "artificial difficulty." Wanting more lives isn't wanting anything that effects gameplay, it's wanting the game to be easier to beat.

(And I'm not trying to accuse you C.Angel, or anyone else here of anything particularly egregious. I'm just blithering in general now. Also a million people posted while I was writing this but I'm posting it anyway.)

[Helepolis]

Nobody just plays through the games once then never touches them again.

Actually, this applies to me. The only game I have beaten on lunatic (and bothered beating) was IN. I tried Hard for TD. I have beaten pretty much all games either in Easy or Normal and basically never touched them again nor have any personal reason to do so.

The attraction is the gameplay itself,

And this is pretty much applicable to any game you're playing, not just Touhou. If a game isn't cunning and attractive, one will not bother replaying it in a different style.

and the number of lives you get is not preventing you from playing in any way shape or form. It's just telling you the number of times you can die without getting the "bad ending." And this is why it bothers me when people say a game isn't fun because it doesn't give you enough lives, or if they call it "artificial difficulty." Wanting more lives isn't wanting anything that effects gameplay, it's wanting the game to be easier to beat.

I do have to agree with this partially.

[CyberAngel]

Zil, thank you for a level-headed response.

I admit it's true that the problem some people have with TD's lives is psychological if anything. It's irksome to know that the only time you'll see all 8 spare lives icons lighted up is in stage practice. So is having to meet some outrageous number of pieces to get an extend, especially the one you know you won't get by the end. But the worst is getting far and having to continue, and extend requirement stays the same. Honestly, no other game taunts you that much. Of course, the key is to learn not to think like that, but until then it's annoying.

Also, while Touhou games certainly aren't the ones you should try to "beat", and going for no-miss and/or scoring is the next goal one should strive for, 1cc is still an important stepping stone, the inevitable first goal everyone strives for. And it's this first goal that colors the whole experience with the game. How fast it's possible to accomplish and how "fair" is the challenge - those are what creates the game's reputation. And while definition of "fair" may be subjective, it's still important for how a player views the game.

[Validon98]

Also, while Touhou games certainly aren't the ones you should try to "beat", and going for no-miss and/or scoring is the next goal one should strive for, 1cc is still an important stepping stone, the inevitable first goal everyone strives for. And it's this first goal that colors the whole experience with the game. How fast it's possible to accomplish and how "fair" is the challenge - those are what creates the game's reputation. And while definition of "fair" may be subjective, it's still important for how a player views the game.

I agree with that. I've never really considered 1ccing a Touhou game to be "beating" it. I've always kept trying new difficulties and, in recent times, challenge runs. I mean, I guess you could say you can "beat" the game if you do everything there is to do, but is that really "beating" it? There's scoring challenges and survival challenges to try out, as well as other crazy stuff like 90 FPS runs. But of course, if a player gets frustrated with the game from the get go because of the game mechanics, then it kind of makes that experience impossible. It's why I'm not really going to be trying for harder runs in UFO or TD.

[Karisa]

It's irksome to know that the only time you'll see all 8 spare lives icons lighted up is in stage practice.

Are you sure?

[Zengeku]

Well, I'll agree with you that Zengeku and Sakurei are a bit off the mark, as what they're saying is essentially that you should just be good enough to clear the game without more lives, which of course isn't really true.

I meant that you should seek to BECOME good enough to do it. Memorization, practice, planning. All tools there for you to use if you need them. Of course, this is just my biased viewpoint. I've been here a long time and I know how stuff works. It just irks me when I see people complaining about not having tons of lives and such.

I didn't mean to be rude towards C.Angel, I just wanted to poke him into learning how to make do with less amounts of resources as that'll make him a better player overall. I'm sorry if it came out insentitive. It happens and I apologize.

[Kosachi]

Are you sure?

woah

I agree with that. I've never really considered 1ccing a Touhou game to be "beating" it. I've always kept trying new difficulties and, in recent times, challenge runs. I mean, I guess you could say you can "beat" the game if you do everything there is to do, but is that really "beating" it? There's scoring challenges and survival challenges to try out, as well as other crazy stuff like 90 FPS runs. But of course, if a player gets frustrated with the game from the get go because of the game mechanics, then it kind of makes that experience impossible. It's why I'm not really going to be trying for harder runs in UFO or TD.

I guess it really just boils down to one's perspective of the game. Some people may still view video games as beating the main story and it ends there. Others may strive for the 1cc in order for them to consider the game "done". Then there's those others who may not be able to let the game go until the 100%; all is seen, said and done. Essentially, a game is only done when you feel you finished it.

Thats just my take on it.

[Limian]

Contrast SA, where you get much less extends

For what it's worth, unless you time out a pattern or let the life piece drop offscreen, you get at least 8 extends, which is the third highest amount after PCB and UFO.