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.