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Currently, the two big Touhou fan-games going with the gacha formula are Danmaku Kagura (a rhythm game with gacha elements) and Touhou Lost Word. Since I do not know very much about the former, I will focus on the latter. Feel free to add your opinions or whatever you want to share about DanKagu. This thread comes from the point of view of a person who never touched a gacha game before Lost Word, and so am not very used with many of the ethics of gacha games. So yeah, there is this one thing going. Due to not personally playing DanKagu, I will not be able to say much about it, so this will predominately focus on Lost Word. Also, it will more than likely turn into a long rant about how the character system works, so there’s that too. Since the last LW thread seems to be from June 2021, it might work well as an update too, now that we are in March 2022, and almost 1 year in since the Global version was released. I am nothing more than a casual player, who does not intend to spend any money in this and just wants to collect a few characters I am interested in (currently got 6 out of the 10 from my list of favorites). Touhou as a series is known for having a large cast (over 140 characters). Until now, Lost Word has added a large part of them, the JP version lacking only the TH17.5 and 18 characters, as well 1-2 other characters here and there. In this situation, it seems like the creators have gone the following route(s) in order to not fully exhaust the cast: - create alt versions that fit with the story told by the game - in a way, they make sense, I guess, since the game revolves around travelling in various alternate universes of Gensokyo (and the Moon, going the Hifuu story-line) - create character alts in the form of chibi-fied characters - until now, we have chibi versions of Yuyuko, Yukari and soon Junko. Yuyuko has been fine, given the fact they gave an explanation on why that version of her ended up chibi-fied, but the other two apparently came to be only because Yuyuko had success in sales and tried to capitalize on that - release of "classic" reskin version of the important characters - the name says it all. Normally, the versions of the "normal" characters you can get are design-wise a sort of a blend between all their iterations in official materials. However, these reskins come to cover a specific game version of the character (like MoF Kanako, PoFV Aya (with MoF spellcards), EoSD Reimu, Marisa and Sakuya, MoF Nitori, UFO Byakuren and so on). The biggest problem with this kind of alts is that many of them seem to be a lazy attempt at grabbing some more money, instead of buffing characters that actually need the buffs. Developer A: "Kanako and Byakuren are very weak in their "vanilla/normal" form. Bottom tier even. Should we improve them like we did with Meiling?" Developer B: "Nah, let them be. Better release some reskins of them that solve the problems, and totally not induce power-creep" My problem is not that these "classic" characters exist. My biggest gripe is that they decided going for them as individual units instead of having them as skins. And skins in the game are already useless, nothing more than just for "waifu looks cute in new clothes". I think it would have made getting a new costume for your character more interesting. It is also impressive how quick they managed to exhaust such a large cast. There is still at least 1 full game they need to add, then they are done (even if PC-98 is uncharted territory outside of of an alt version for Reimu and Marisa). In a bit over a year, it seems like the cast has been added. 150 unique characters (at least according to the character sorter) can be added into Lost Word. Out of these, 29 characters are missing (6 from TH18 and 23 from PC-98 - hope I counted right), so we have a total of 131 unique Touhou characters. It has been 662 days, or 94 weeks and 4 days since the original game release (April 20th, 2020- JP). This brings the average of releases at 5 days between each new character. With all the alts, this beings the average even lower. So I think they did rush a bit to release so much content through these almost two years, and now they ran out of what to release. And since Lost Word is a gacha game, you always need to provide fresh content, otherwise people get bored, no longer play and you lose money. I am not a great expert in RPG games, but from what I know, the costume or armor your character is wearing determines some of the stats and abilities. It would have been interesting if this was implemented in Lost Word, skins offering some new attack or elemental abilities that could fit in one situation or another. Right now, they offer you nothing but a different look and, best case scenario, a 2-3% bonus for points collected during specific events. Another problem with gacha games that makes me ask is the genre works with Touhou is the gameplay itself. Danmaku Kagura is the kind of rhythm game in which you have to hit the correct notes at the speed of the game. Perfectly fine, even if it makes the game look just like a rhythm game with Touhou skin. On the other hand, Lost Word plays like any other gacha RPG - you go through a long cut-scene explaining the story, then touch 1-2 buttons to order attacks, win battle, watch another cutscene then repeat. After a while, it just turns into a farming simulator with Touhou characters, made even more so by recently added auto-farm feature. Just leave your phone in a corner while doing something else, and leave the game auto-play the same battle for a specific number of times. And with the recent additions in Lost Word, numerous ties it has been a long series of cutscenes with little battles (the kind of 6 stages chapter, out of which 4 are long cutscenes and 2 are actual battles). I did like the Hifuu story until now, I got so bored at all the cutscenes. Only the presence of Maribel and Renko (with some beautiful in-game portraits), two characters I really like, has helped me bear through all of them. Last but not least, it would be the question of meta, power-creep and in-game purchases. In a way, I do not feel this is really in the spirit of Touhou games. Usually, the games require skill, patience, and sometimes just a bit of luck. However with gacha, you can just whale some money into it, get a meta character or card or whatever, and basically get yourself a "Press to win" button. I still keep playing Lost Word thanks to the large variety of characters you can get. I am not very interested in getting the alts, but I am looking forward to complete my list of top 10 characters: - already have: Youmu, Akyuu, Yuuka, Iku, Junko, Hecatia - still need to get: Eiki Shiki, Raiko, Mayumi, (it is quite unlikely Maribel and Renko will ever be added as more than just NPCs) Only after getting all of these, I may think about getting anything more meta-related. I think there might also be some good things though. Both games (DanKagu and Lost Word) have made it possible for music groups to get their music featured to a larger audience. Also, I find it cute the use of fan-art in order to illustrate things like "story-cards", and it is also good that in most cases they also give the names of the artists, which in turn creates some more exposure for the artists themselves. More than once I have tried looking for an artist or a specific music arrangement used in the game, and found out more stuff I ended up enjoying from those creators. But what do you think? Do you consider there is room for gacha-style games in the world of Touhou fan-games? Why/why not? And how would you try create such a game to stay in the spirit of Touhou games? For further reading, MegaPig9001 had done an overview over the topic of combining Touhou and gacha games. His video is from November last year and might need some updates here and there to better reflect the current situation, but still brings an interesting view in the whole problem: https://youtu.be/4yxsoiOIItE

Time for the news roundup. News and updates This week, "In the West Nothing New" (or as everyone knows it better, "All Quiet on the Western Front")... I mean nothing new happening in regards to LW Global. However, JP seems to be having a little bit more activity: It looks like LW is trying to blue-ball us again with a PC-98 character. Again, do not expect her to be playable in the nearby future. If anyone from PC-98 will be playable AT ALL, given the uncertainty of the answers given by LW staff during the AmA session. Besides her, there is also a new Hifuu Space War character. Meanwhile, Relic Festival Sakuya has been announced, and will soon be part of the game. There is also a new event, which may finally make sense why in the Morby story, Kagerou, Sekibanki and Wakasagihime were all dressed like each other (during that event on Global, there was no explanation or context to what was going on): Community discussion and memes Not so much in terms of discussions this week, but there are memes: