The Touhou "Continue System" in the mainline games doesn't makes sense.

[FluffyGensouDreamer]

Hi! I'm new to this forum (or website, I'm not entirely sure about how i should call it) and this is my first publication right here.

I also want to clarify that I'm not good in English, so have some patience please and if there's something you guys didn't understood, then let me know.

Now, yes. I'm going directly to the topic. Today i just wanted to share a weird opinion of mine, which is that I don't understand why Touhou uses the old continue game mechanic until this day.

I don't get it Because i feel that continues just ruins the experience and the games feels a lot more boring by not having to worry too much by dying and by discarding them, the experience could be not only more challenging but also meaningful.

Yeah, some can argue that you can force yourself to play without continues and that if you play with continues, then you will never get the good ending. However, we should take into account that not everyone is interested in the story or if you get a good or bad ending. And even if it's well-known that you could force yourself to play without continues... the feeling isn't the same as if the game forced you to win without continues. Imagine if once that you lose, then, the game immediately shows the bad ending and, thus, by completing the game without losing all of your life's, it shows the "good" ending (I said it in that way because the "good" endings aren't always good and sometimes they are likely more neutral than anything, for example, that happened with HSiFS, game where the incident isn't resolved but anything bad didn't happened yet).

Of course, I don't think the game should ALWAYS bring the bad endings everytime that you lose, but it could be shown the first time that you lost the game with a specific character and their specific shot (if there's any difference between both endings of any shots, of course) and I don't think there should be major problems with the game showing it only once in the main game, especially these days, where the most recent games haves the achievement section, section which you can see the endings any time that you want so, thus, I don't think there should be any worries about it.

Also, if Touhou didn't had the Continue system, then we shouldn't worry about the illogical and unhealthy behavior of some Touhou fans being harsh with new people trying to play the games (you know, that dumb meme where Tewi for some reason makes fun of you for playing in easy or/and using continues).

However, this is only a opinion of mine and I'm interested if you guys think the same, haves another opinion or even something that you would like to add to my arguments.

Thank you too much and see ya!

 

[Pinky Cat]

From the way I see it, if we look at the continue system from a gameplay perspective, then I say that continues serves two purposes within Touhou games:

Continues can act as an accessibility feature for new players. Players still congratulate runs done with continues if they felt their run was a fair challenge to them. And perhaps that be the motivation to go for a 1cc. Because if players don't have the motivation to keep practicing on the same game for hours, then they won't finish a run at all regardless if there was continue system in place. STGs and bullet hell games remain to be a niche genre due to their demand of effort these games place on players.

Continues can act as a "practice" feature. But in practice, players will use continues to unlock the stage in stage select mode, and spell practice for newer games. Personally speaking, the only time I would have wanted to use continues as a practice feature would be clearing extra stages in Touhou games without spell practice. Of course, that is more of an issue with how older Touhou games lacked better practice features and serves as a reminder on why thprac should be recommended to more players to ease the issue of failing only specific spellcards late into the stage. Otherwise, continues only act as a bandage to the practice system in place for official games.

Analyzing the continue system from this perspective it would seem that continue are a bandage to the issue of practice and motivation. In fact, a great example of the continue system being a bandage feature are the Phantasmagoria games. In Phantasmagoria games, continues are unlimited and I believe the reason for that is how the difficulty ramps up much more in later matches compared to earlier matches for the games' story modes combined with how danmaku is far more random in these games. If say, we had to play the earlier stages every time we wanted a shot to beat the final stage of each respective game, I say there be a lot less players completing those story modes since earlier stages fail to give challenges as practice for how to properly manage with the danmaku of later stages. This is an example of a design issue with how the battle system had to be adapted to single-player story mode and how continues act to soften this design issue in the Phantasmagoria games.

 

[Gri]

Honestly, this is a very weird take.
 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

I don't get it Because i feel that continues just ruins the experience and the games feels a lot more boring by not having to worry too much by dying and by discarding them, the experience could be not only more challenging but also meaningful.

This is just flat out wrong. Continues do not remove any of the challenge, as the moment you use one, you've lost. Continues are merely a way to switch from "real run" to "practice run" organically without kicking the player back to the main menu.

It does make "seeing all of the game" too easy (I have heard this take before), but the real challenge comes from mastering the game. Without continues, the player would be forced to "die'n'retry" from the beginning every time, only to die at a spell that they didn't know about cause they died in their last run early. It just makes the game more unfair at first cause the player doesn't know what to expect, but when the players get close to the end, then there's barely any difference between continues and no-continues.

Currently, the games are doing that for Extra stages, and those have the most tricky spell cards. Without continues, it's a real pain to start over the stage every time, only to die either at the same spell, OR the next one because you didn't know that to expect.

I'll say arcade game are a bit weird, cause you need to play through the game once in order to know what are the obstacles so that you can beat the game on you next go. Making the obstacle easier to react to or less tricky would "fix" this, but also remove a lot of the charm of those games.

 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

However, we should take into account that not everyone is interested in the story or if you get a good or bad ending

If the player doesn't care about getting the good or bad ending, then that's the same as saying the player doesn't care about winning or losing. In that case why play? The only case I can think of is people playing casually, and those are the type to use continues cause they just want to play as long as possible. If you care about winning and getting the good ending, then you will be using them as a mean of practice OR you won't use them at all (making practice probably more painful for you, but that's your choice).

 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

the feeling isn't the same as if the game forced you to win without continues

The moment you use one, you've lost. The game IS forcing you to win without continues. When you end the game with continues, you don't win (hence the bad ending and lack of Credit Roll), you've just practice all of the stages back to back.

The challenge is the same. Let me tell you that when you reach Stage6 on Lunatic with few lives and your close to 1CC, the tension is very high, because continues do not count as a victory, so those few lives are all you have to achieve victory. Continues do not factor into the possibility of winning. I only use them as a metric to see how close I was to victory, and as a way of seeing how much practice I need (If I only used 1, then very close. If I used 2-3, it was a bad run. If 5 or more, need more practice)
 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

Of course, I don't think the game should ALWAYS bring the bad endings everytime that you lose, but it could be shown the first time that you lost the game with a specific character and their specific shot (if there's any difference between both endings of any shots, of course) and I don't think there should be major problems with the game showing it only once in the main game, especially these days, where the most recent games haves the achievement section, section which you can see the endings any time that you want so, thus, I don't think there should be any worries about it.

That would be an improvement, but merely holding Ctrl for 5sec to fast-forward the bad ending will solve your issue (it really is that fast). They are many other more important thing Zun could add to the game, such as a Practice Mode on par with Thprac.

 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

Also, if Touhou didn't had the Continue system, then we shouldn't worry about the illogical and unhealthy behavior of some Touhou fans being harsh with new people trying to play the games (you know, that dumb meme where Tewi for some reason makes fun of you for playing in easy or/and using continues).

I've never seen anybody saying continues are for noobs. The Tewi meme only mention "Easy Modo", and I've never seen any version of that meme that mention continues. The people that makes fun of noobs are morons that should be ignored. I am playing Lunatic (and 2 years ago, I was struggling on Normal like any other new player), and I've yet to see another Lunatic player making fun of Easy/Normal player. If anything, pro-players will be happy that more people are trying the game. I am sure most Lunatic players have started playing on Easy/Normal before e.

Nuking the continues system for morons like that will just make the game less enjoyable for many people, and I am pretty sure these fake elitists aren't even playing the game.

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

Imagine if once that you lose, then, the game immediately shows the bad ending and, thus, by completing the game without losing all of your life's, it shows the "good" ending

That's what the games pre-MoF were doing. It had the annoying drawback that Zun had to make a very vague bad-ending, cause otherwise it would spoil the story to the player (Example: Marisa being stuck in Makai at the end of UFO when she fails to defeat Byakuren. If the players die at stage 2, Makai and Byakuren are complete unknown to the player, so the ending wouldn't make sense at all. If Zun changed it where the treasure ship is still flying in Gensokyo, then it doesn't make sense if the player reached that ship on Stage4).

 

16 hours ago, FluffyGensouDreamer said:

Yeah, some can argue that you can force yourself to play without continues and that if you play with continues, then you will never get the good ending

Yes and that's what you should be doing if that's what you prefer. The default settings in a video game are made to fit the majority of player. Just select "no" when being prompt to continues.

The only way I can see this being improved is that there's an option to disable continues in the settings, so that if you commit to play a run without continues, then you cannot go back on your choice. By default, continues would be enabled, and only very few player that don't want to bother choosing "No" on the continue screen would be able to disable them.