I had a whole file on my computer where I was writing my thoughts on this and then I kinda fell off of it and have changed computers so whatever, look, I'll need to just get through this before I play the next couple games so I can write about them.
I liked this one a lot! Fun mechanic that is busted as hell in a way these games usually aren't, Sanae is playable again (hell yeah) and I felt like there was a lot I was interested in chewing on thematically. Also god Tsukasa is gender, too me. Oh and some real great tunes but what else is new. The levels stand out as particularly high quality this time.
The plot is that there's trading cards of everyone now so you're characters go out to start punching everyone they find over it since they're all purely reactionary forces who hate it whenever anything at all happens. This is all part of semi-complicated plan by a Chimata Tenkyuu, god of markets, to team up with a tengu and mine a bunch of special ore to make the cards and then they get sold and I guess the tengu makes money.
Given the timing of the release, there's a lot of 'oh it's about the blockchain' and 'oh it's about capitalism' and such but ZUN apparently said it's about Covid. Public places. Markets predate capitalism and all that, after all. So it's about people gathering and, honestly, just sharing their appreciation for Touhou. Like one of the endings the boss says this directly. Markets as a physical place, but more importantly as a real event that brings people together, and the good things that can result from it.
So the mechanic here is that there are a lot of ability cards, some of which are special weapons on a cooldown and some of which are passive. You collect money and get to buy one after each stage, and the baseline difficulty isn't tooooo bad so the availability of super strong abilities makes this fairly easy compared to the harder games. You unlock more and more item slots you can choose to start the game with, using any item you've used before. It's a bit roguelite-ish? From the scoregame perspective I think it probably makes this one worse but I don't care about that. Just watch out if you want to create some kind of ransomware that forces you to get a certain score before it decrypts your files I guess.
Alright that's it. Love the game, had to get this out of the way, still gotta play 18.5 which I think goes all in on the roguelite thing? That sounds fun.
I liked this one a lot! Fun mechanic that is busted as hell in a way these games usually aren't, Sanae is playable again (hell yeah) and I felt like there was a lot I was interested in chewing on thematically. Also god Tsukasa is gender, too me. Oh and some real great tunes but what else is new. The levels stand out as particularly high quality this time.
The plot is that there's trading cards of everyone now so you're characters go out to start punching everyone they find over it since they're all purely reactionary forces who hate it whenever anything at all happens. This is all part of semi-complicated plan by a Chimata Tenkyuu, god of markets, to team up with a tengu and mine a bunch of special ore to make the cards and then they get sold and I guess the tengu makes money.
Given the timing of the release, there's a lot of 'oh it's about the blockchain' and 'oh it's about capitalism' and such but ZUN apparently said it's about Covid. Public places. Markets predate capitalism and all that, after all. So it's about people gathering and, honestly, just sharing their appreciation for Touhou. Like one of the endings the boss says this directly. Markets as a physical place, but more importantly as a real event that brings people together, and the good things that can result from it.
So the mechanic here is that there are a lot of ability cards, some of which are special weapons on a cooldown and some of which are passive. You collect money and get to buy one after each stage, and the baseline difficulty isn't tooooo bad so the availability of super strong abilities makes this fairly easy compared to the harder games. You unlock more and more item slots you can choose to start the game with, using any item you've used before. It's a bit roguelite-ish? From the scoregame perspective I think it probably makes this one worse but I don't care about that. Just watch out if you want to create some kind of ransomware that forces you to get a certain score before it decrypts your files I guess.
Alright that's it. Love the game, had to get this out of the way, still gotta play 18.5 which I think goes all in on the roguelite thing? That sounds fun.
2 Comments
@Weatherby The secret is that ZUN is a really good writer, like he writes a story into every music album liner notes and it's always good. No fangame I've ever seen has measured up. The games themselves vary wildly in difficulty and are really different from like, a Cave game in that they're mostly about internalizing a pattern and just vibing. A beginner one like Ten Desires really supports skill levels from normal person level up to mid-level sicko.
Weatherby
8 months ago