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So I bought both of the Sanae Toumaden X games after randomly finding them on steam because they are action platformers starring my favourite touhou character and looked pretty cute/fun from the trailers. To summarise, both of the Toumaden X games are unpolished as all hell, but still pretty fun games with a lot of love and passion put into them.
Comparing this to the first Sanae Toumaden X game, X2 is a more refined experience on the whole: there's a 16:9 aspect ratio, you start with a projectile attack and airdash, the visuals are cleaner and there's more (and better translated, albeit still clearly machine translated) dialogue. There's also more direct references to the mega man games this time around which will maybe give it more appeal to fans of the actual mega man games.
However, it feels like the developer over-corrected on the flaws of Toumaden X, which makes X2 a similarly flawed game but in different ways. In X, the screen is a bit too zoomed in, but in X2 the screen is ridiculously zoomed out to the point that it's hard to tell what's going on at times. In X, bosses move slowly and go down too quickly with normal attacks, but in X2, most bosses move around at light speed (whereas Sanae moves slightly slower this time around!), have a metric shitfuckton of health and some bosses can even camp you out with no limits. In X, stages are pretty simple and there's a shortage of meaningful setpieces, but X2 is setpiece-driven to the point where some stages are literally just straight line corridors where you fight the same miniboss with slight variations over and over again. The result of this to me was that X2 had higher highs than the first game, but more moments of frustration at the same time.
I still recommend both of the Sanae Toumaden X games if you are a fan of touhou and action platformers and can put up with high amounts of jank and occasional frustration. Like I said at the start, the developer put a lot of love and care into these games and the result is fun despite the dev's clear lack of game design experience. Certain touches like the intros for each stage being unique references to different retro games and the scarlet devil mansion stages being big castlevania homages is just great. The music, while none of it being original for the games also goes hard af. I also love the use of text to speech voices in X2 lmao.
PS. If you want to try this game out, complete rin's stage first. The air slash upgrade you get from her is OP and completely shreds most of the other bosses.
Comparing this to the first Sanae Toumaden X game, X2 is a more refined experience on the whole: there's a 16:9 aspect ratio, you start with a projectile attack and airdash, the visuals are cleaner and there's more (and better translated, albeit still clearly machine translated) dialogue. There's also more direct references to the mega man games this time around which will maybe give it more appeal to fans of the actual mega man games.
However, it feels like the developer over-corrected on the flaws of Toumaden X, which makes X2 a similarly flawed game but in different ways. In X, the screen is a bit too zoomed in, but in X2 the screen is ridiculously zoomed out to the point that it's hard to tell what's going on at times. In X, bosses move slowly and go down too quickly with normal attacks, but in X2, most bosses move around at light speed (whereas Sanae moves slightly slower this time around!), have a metric shitfuckton of health and some bosses can even camp you out with no limits. In X, stages are pretty simple and there's a shortage of meaningful setpieces, but X2 is setpiece-driven to the point where some stages are literally just straight line corridors where you fight the same miniboss with slight variations over and over again. The result of this to me was that X2 had higher highs than the first game, but more moments of frustration at the same time.
I still recommend both of the Sanae Toumaden X games if you are a fan of touhou and action platformers and can put up with high amounts of jank and occasional frustration. Like I said at the start, the developer put a lot of love and care into these games and the result is fun despite the dev's clear lack of game design experience. Certain touches like the intros for each stage being unique references to different retro games and the scarlet devil mansion stages being big castlevania homages is just great. The music, while none of it being original for the games also goes hard af. I also love the use of text to speech voices in X2 lmao.
PS. If you want to try this game out, complete rin's stage first. The air slash upgrade you get from her is OP and completely shreds most of the other bosses.
Basically what it looks like, a kinda janky Touhou fangame that heavily pays tribute to the Mega Man X series. I bought this not realizing it was a sequel (I guess the fact that 2 is in the title should've tipped me off), but it doesn't really require that much understanding of what happened in the first game. You're basically Zero in this game, and have to go through several stages with a Classic Touhou Girl at the end to fight. This one specifically pays a lot of tribute to the PS1 entries in the series, using the X5 countdown scenario and X4 title cards for each boss, but just borrows from a lot of different iconic setpieces throughout the series. Like the X PS1entries, it's also pretty brutal in difficulty, with the added effect of the game not controlling very gracefully and bosses that can go on for a long time due to the low amount of damage you can deal. It also doesn't help that I've barely played any of the X series, only knowing what I know of it through watching other people play them because every time I've tried one I've been pretty bad at them. But as someone who's always curious about Touhou fangames, since they can be literally anything, I wanted to give this a try. It's very charming, the group behind it has a clear love of retro games and side scrollers in general, and the art is all fun as well. The main reason I bought this game though is the Steam description for it:
All stage is Rogue-unlike stage. Stage design by human.
Rogue-unlike upgrade system. Anything you get in stage will not lost.
Soul-unlike attack system. It don't have stamina limit. You can attack unlimited times if you like.
All stage is Rogue-unlike stage. Stage design by human.
Rogue-unlike upgrade system. Anything you get in stage will not lost.
Soul-unlike attack system. It don't have stamina limit. You can attack unlimited times if you like.