Leaderboard

Yeah this is true, I never liked that they changed it.

About the Cherry Border: This is a great mechanic for beginners. Having this shield remove the stress of losing a life if you get hit, so while it's there you can focus on just dodging. For score player, you can choose whether to keep the border and get bonus points, or release it on purpose to generate many cherry items and get another border shortly. You can also use unfocused-shot to charge to border more quickly, I used this often when a boss starts a spell card and I am close to getting a border. So yeah, there is some interaction with that mechanic, and I also like the fact that it make power items still useful once you reached full power, since all power items are converted to cherry items. In previous game, power items becomes similar to point items, except there value change depending on how many you collected, rather than the height at which you collect them. Oh, and yeah the "Enemy" indicator is indeed a blessing. About the soundtrack, while I also really enjoyed it, I don't like how some tracks have very-high pitched Zunpets (to the point it makes my ears bleed). Ran's and Yuyuko's themes come to mind. It isn't the worse game for Zunpets, that price goes to IN with the Stage 6 bosses themes.

So, what are you guys thoughts on the demo of Touhou 19? I have just finished the demo Story Mode with all 5 characters, and so far the game seems pretty much the same thing as PoFV, except slightly better/worse in some area. I did play in Japanese, so I might have missed some things. I didn't try to find out what the card did, so I can't talk about those. The goods: - Graphics are ok - Soundtrack is ok. Nothing groundbreaking yet. - Unlike PoFV, you now have 2 special attacks for your screen (Lvl1 and Lvl2 charge) and 2 special attacks to send to the opponent (Lvl3 and Lvl4). It's cool that the Lvl1 attack is now less powerfull. This could mean that we'd see less characters clearing all enemies with one attack. - Clearing a stage with a "Perfect Victory" gives you a different card. It might get frustrating to try and unlock these, but we will see in the full game how card play out. - Animals spirits seems to have various effect. This is cool, since the player can focus on taking down a specific type depending on the situation. The neutrals: - The slow mechanic can be good, but sometime it plays against you when you are trying to charge an attack Having a key for Shooting/Charging, a key for Slow and a key for Bomb might give more control to the player. - Bombs are limited. This can make bad RNG more punishing, but it also means the match will take less time (In PoFV, have rechargeable Lvl2 attacks that clears bullets could drag on some games, until the bullet speed become really fast) - This might be a Story Mode thing, but the character send a special spell card boss and when you kill it, the match automatically ends. If this is limited to Story Mode, it could be a nice thing since it makes the mode a bit more special. - There's no Character Balance, but at the same time it was to be expected that Reimu and Marisa would be stronger than the other characters. The bads: - I never really had this issue before, but sometime the screen can be pretty hard to read when there's a lot spirit+bullet+special bullets+focus area. It makes things a bit chaotic. - The controls. While you can now auto-fire, you can no longer use one key for shooting and charging. I think I'll get used to it, but being able to choose another control scheme similar to PoFV would be nice. - Had a visual glitch that made the background look weird, like the bottom half of the background was vanishing. Might be just me. - Bombs are pretty weak and don't clear much bullets. So far, the game feels like just more PoFV, so if you liked that game you may like that one.

Defeating the CPU in their boss attack ending the match is probably the single best thing added in for these types of games. It's a good way of circumventing the cheating AI opponents from phasing through literally everything. I really like a lot of the ideas going on. The graze points from 18.5 being used to charge your gauge is nice, as well as the inclusion of Cards from UM, and the various Animal Spirits from WBaWC. When it comes to the UI, I feel like placing your remaining hearts above the gauge instead of the top of the screen would've been better. My eyes are naturally drawn to the bottom half of the screen anyway. Never had any real issues with the control scheme, but I play these games with a controller. Might be a problem on keyboard, though. Overall, I'm largely indifferent to the Phantasmagoria-styled games, but I'll give credit to some of the new ideas for being pretty good. I'll probably buy it when it fully releases, but I'm not exactly hyped for it. Would've been a hard pass if not for auto-fire and the whole beating boss attacks winning the match system.

Well, here we are, the last of the PC-98 games! I really love this one. In a way, Mystic Square, also known as "Shinki gets her home trashed by random strangers through no fault of her own", kind of feels like a culmination of everything the PC-98 games have been so far. It plays similarly to Lotus Land Story, which although I haven't played PoDD, I'm going to assume is the best of the previous PC-98 games gameplay-wise, and adds Mima and Yuuka as playable characters, each with their own distinct shot types and endings. Additionally, it's also a fair bit harder than LLS was - not as hard as most of the Windows games, mind you, but hard enough that my inclusion of the fact I managed to 1cc it as Mima on normal in this post is purely here for me to brag about being able to do that, as opposed to an attempt to demonstrate the game's lack of difficulty. Anyway, onto the game's story. Basically, demons from Makai have opened up a kind of tourist agency and are flooding into Gensokyo in unprecedented numbers, prompting either Reimu, Marisa, Yuuka or Mima to head into Makai to try and sort the situation out. Structurally, it is very similar to SoEW and LLS' stories of "strange new world causes incident, main character go in new world to solve incident", but the added dimension of the Makai incident being caused by a tourist agency of all things as well as the expanded roster adding extra dimensions to the story still makes this my favorite of the PC-98 stories. As you might have guessed, this game's story also doesn't take itself too seriously, leading to, in my opinion, potentially the funniest game in the series. Reimu and Marisa's stories mostly take themselves seriously, but Mima and Yuuka's might as well be glorified shitposts, and I kind of love them for it. Mima is just an absolute menace of a character who just wanders around Makai mercilessly bullying anyone she comes across, and when she's asked why she did all this by Shinki at the end of the game, she just says it was to "let off some steam" (thanks to this game I am now firmly a part of the "bring Mima back for Windows Touhou" crowd). The game also features a running joke where she'll consistently tell obvious lies and have them be followed by "(lie)" at the end of her sentences, which should not be as funny to me as it is, but oh well. Similarly, Yuuka is also mostly just here because getting to fight strong people sounds fun to her, and like Mima, is a pure demon with no regard for anyone's life but her own, with this game being where her infamous "genocide is just a game, after all" line comes from. Pretty much every encounter in Yuuka's story can be summarized as some unfortunate soul running into her, being either scared, confused or both by her intense bloodlust, and immediately getting curbstomped shortly after. My opinion that this game is one of the funniest in the series is largely carried by the fact that I find these types of characters really funny for some reason, so if you don't also find them funny then you probably won't enjoy a lot of this game's humor, but I still enjoy this game's writing a lot. Humor aside, the game's also just filled with tons of really cool set pieces that do a great job at conveying the tone and feel of their particular areas through visuals and gameplay. Stage 2's whole flying stars effect does an excellent job at making you feel like you're flying through another world, and is perhaps the single most visually impressive thing in any PC-98 Touhou game, and the rapid onslaught of enemies in Stage 5 excellently conveys the feeling that this entire world has suddenly come together all at once in a single combined effort to stop you from getting any further, contrasting excellently with Stage 6 being mostly barren, being potentially the easiest stage in the game aside from the first and using a single unmoving background, as if at this point Shinki is just throwing whatever she has left at you to get you to just go away already, but by now, you've already burnt through all of her most powerful forces. Additionally, I also just... really like a lot of this game's characters. This technically marks Alice's first appearance in a Touhou game, although she's very different in both design and personality (honestly I think I prefer Windows Alice), but aside from her, Louise's interactions with the main cast are all just generally really funny for one reason or another, Yuki and Mai's whole dynamic is really interesting to me, and still in my opinion the most well-executed version of the "fighting two bosses at once" concept the Windows games would go on to try out a handful of times, and although she's far from the best character in the game, Yumeko is basically a trial version of Sakuya, which at least makes her somewhat interesting to me. Also, Shinki did nothing wrong and deserved better, justice for Shinki. Moving on from the writing, I think it's worth noting that this is by far the most visually impressive of the PC-98 games, and it's clear that ZUN really wanted to push the engine to its limits with this game. The previously mentioned Stage 2 in particular has a really cool effect going on, and Alice's background in the extra stage is also particularly notable in this regard, but this added level of visual polish extends to most aspects of the game. Additionally, the soundtrack, like in LLS, still holds up excellently, and I'd put both games' soundtracks on a similar level of high regard, actually being more enjoyable to me than some Windows games (although I would rank this game very slightly higher than LLS). Grimoire of Alice is an overall great song, and potentially my favorite thing to come out of any PC-98 Touhou soundtrack, but it's far from the only banger this game has to offer, with End of the World ~ World's End, Legendary Illusion ~ Infinite Being, Crimson Maiden ~ Crimson Dead, and Last Judgement all being similarly excellent examples of why I believe this to be the best PC-98 Touhou game soundtrack overall. The Stage 3 theme is also another great one, perhaps my favorite in the game if we ignore Grimoire of Alice, although I have no idea why ZUN thought calling it "Romantic Children" was even close to a good idea. Overall, Mystic Square is an excellent game that still holds up perfectly to this day, and a great way to cap off the PC-98 Touhou era. Additionally, although I'm still largely convinced the LLS lag issue I had was purely something on my end, it's worth noting that this game for some reason runs perfectly fine for me, as does everything else in this series. It's not particularly relevant to the rest of this post, but it did feel worth mentioning, so I tacked it on at the end here. Anyway, Mystic Square absolutely slaps, go play it right now if you haven't already.

Tbh, I really am excited for the full game. It seems like it’s going in a great direction with essentially reduxing PoFV mechanics, like making the controls actually feel nice this time. The graphics are nice, I honestly love the new music(especially since ZUN remixed the better themes for Nazrin and Seiran as their stage themes ruled), and the new charge systems are really good. I definitely think screen reading is a slightly issue, but that was always a problem in this type of game. Overall, extremely excited for the full release.(You can probably tell my favorite mainline touhou game by this reply lol)