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Touhou Project 17 「東方鬼形獣 ～ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature.」
Nimono:
--- Quote from: nintendonut888 on August 18, 2019, 03:49:40 PM ---Speaking of Keiki, I'm still not sure quite how to read her. Having read the dialogues and endings, I don't sense she's necessarily a bad person or is lying about her intentions to help the human spirits, but her dialogue and the way she carries herself doesn't really give off the impression of someone acting out of genuine love for humans, either. The way she threatens to kill the heroines to make new idols out of them, stalls for time to prepare her techniques even on routes when the heroines are willing to hear her out, and how she specifically points to "intruding on her territory" as her reason for attacking all raise a bunch of red flags, in my opinion. Given how the series is with unusual moralities, she might be acting to help the human spirits, but with a very different idea of what that means compared to, say, Byakuren.
--- End quote ---
From what I've read of all the dialogues and omakes that are translated, I think both sides are telling the truth. Keiki was summoned to protect the human spirits, she made the haniwa soldiers to assist in that, BUT she's also trying to take over the animal realm, and one of the omakes outright states the human spirits are in the exact same position as before- they traded one dictator for another. Instead of the animal spirits dominating them, it's now the haniwa doing so.
So the situation is basically Evil vs. Evil, like LoLK.
Marron:
At this point...I think it would be nice if there could be a chapter in a book or something like that, where a human spirit would talk to the heroines or some other charcaters for that matter, explaining their point of view about all that's happened and how they felt about everything on the subject.
Because, for now, we have everything about both sides who ruled the animal realm, but not the side of the story coming from a citizen of the animal realm that has experienced it all.
CyberAngel:
The infodump in one of the profiles answers that. They feel just as oppressed.
Lebon14:
Don't forget: WBaWC releases on Steam on September 9.
Handy Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079160/__Wily_Beast_and_Weakest_Creature/
CyberAngel:
Okay, finally had a chance to have some hands-on experience with the game. And sorry but there's no other way to say it - it is complete and utter trash.
First off, the story. The flimsy nature of the conflict and the usual characters' involvement in it has been mentioned before and that impacts the story too much. A lot of stuff about it is left unexplained and unexplored. That's nothing unusual to the games, frankly, but in this case there's barely any connection to Gensokyo or existing characters at all, and as a result very few ways this story can have any further influence on things. The same could be said about stories of LoLK and HSiFS except they WERE strongly connected to existing lore. This one is only loosely connected to an outsider character that hinted at events that were used as a background distraction for the main point of the story.
Stage 4 serves as a perfect example of how little care was put into making a coherent story this time. Again, the game structure where you fool around for 3 stages and then get pointed in the right direction is nothing new. And stage 4 boss is pretty much another Sagume, as far as using-characters-as-story-devices goes. Except this time ZUN literally didn't even try giving the players any motivation to follow the story. It's just that the stage 4 boss has a power to "persuade" you to help her. While Sagume could actually convince characters to follow along with her plan without the need to explicitly invoke her stated power, here they are herded the way game needs them to go because """"MAGIC"""".
Worst of all, the endings don't even add anything to the story anymore. They talk about surrounding circumstances and that's it. Not a single hint of the main conflict budging either way. Not a single stroke added to the bigger worldbuilding picture. Not even a single lesson to be learned from the events. Yes, you might be surprised, but older Touhou games used to have pretty interesting lessons in their endings. What's most disappointing is that this game COULD have that. I've seen people explore different interpretations of the story and what could be said with it. Except ZUN isn't even presenting any actual points behind the sides of the main conflict. Some events just happen in some other world and that's it. The story presentation feels very mechanical and soulless. Good groundwork for an actual story to be built upon but that's it. It's like he had an idea to make something different (and very non-Touhou-feeling) but that idea wasn't even fleshed out enough.
As for the other aspects, the soundtrack still feels horrible even after some time. It's generically boring at best and actively gets in the way of playing the game with any degree of enjoyment at its worst.
The gameplay itself is a huge mixed bag as well. There's barely any invincibility after hypers even though effects would make you expect otherwise. Hyper-powered shots and their effects cover the bullets. The patterns, while having some gems here and there, still have a lot of issues when they're not being carbon copies of the old stuff.
I guess I'm repeating a bunch of old complaints here but the point is that they didn't go away even after giving a full game a chance. So you know what, I say give this one a pass. If you're interested in gameplay just stick to UFO, you're not missing much. Unless you actually want to keep getting such bland uninspired experiences in future games, of course.