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As no one metioned this topic i think i should. What you guys think about the newest touhou? I think it's a great game and the best phantasmogoria type game in the series. Gameplay is much better than PoFV and character selection favours the less known characters and adds four new ones. The barrier mechanic is making this game feel lighter than the older games and i like it. It makes the game so much more lightweighted and encourages to more agressive type of gameplay. As for characters it was a pleasant suprise to see Mamizou as a playable character. The new ones all look amazing even with ZUN's goofy artstyle. Son Biten is a clear winner when it comes to design and is a new competetor in the smuggest 2hu competition. When it comes to music it's great. The new themes are all catchy and old ones are just as good if not better than before. Overall great game.

Thank you, for your reply. I agree with you, I am sorry, if my post was too offensive. ZUN said that he didn't expected Touhou to be popular in the West. In his view, fan translations would be better than official translations (he is not wrong, especially if you remember the official translations of fightings). Japanese auditory is his main target. You can compair views on different Touhou remix music channels and see that there are less views than several years agree. I agree that listening to the same tune is boring, but for this situation Touhou style music exists (the last somewhat well-known albums are IBP and CoUD but more new ones are less well-known). But the problem is that Touhou remixes popularised Touhou greatly. Most devs use Twitter for announces, but most of such announces are left unnoticed. Creators of one of those two games tried to popularize their game via youtube (mostly the game's ost was uploaded), but it didn't help. Some playthroughs of those two games had more than 1000 view, so I hope you know the names of those two games. To be honest, I noticed that something is going wrong when ASL was nearly unnoticed in Western Community (this great game has been in development for 5 years), while WWW and DLW got much more attention in the Western Community. About "passive" fans, again nothing was made to make them more active. And don't say it is because Touhou games are hard, then why there are a lot of Geometry Dash fans? Also there are a lot of fangames in different genres, so everyone can play what they want. I am bad in phychology, so I don't know how make them more active. Yes, the community could make a great "Phantasmagoria", but sadly, nobody makes it. Soku fans didn't wait, they just created Soku 2. There were some good attempts to create a new "Phantasmagoria": TH09x (my most favourite, because it add a lot of new characters), 幻想戦劇夢 ～ Wonderful Battle Dreamer (good), FRI (not bad). But those projects are not well-known. And because the community us passive now, I am not sure the new ones will appear. I agree with you. I wish he would make patches like in old days. (and mods are very stable nowadays even if they turn Touhou into another game) From what I know, just a little bit better. They wrote a lot of mails to ZUN (and posdibly BeatMARIO), but ZUN's reply was something like "yes I know about the problems, I could fix them if they realy bother you". Also there was a tournament, where nearly everyone played as Chiyary, and ZUN saw the process. So, nothing really changed. The only active community now, is Chinese one. Oh, there is a new game with new characters, the next weekend there will be scripts with more patterns for them. Oh there is bad netcode, we will fix it. At least Western Community fixed bugs and balance. Here you are. I would be glad if more people knew about Touhou modding.

You can't really blame the Western community to think that Zun won't listen to them. Despise the demand for it, Zun has never bother to add english translation to the game (either by doing it himself or by hiring someone). This alone shows that Zun has little interest in Western community. In the end, yes you are are right, they could try to reach him, but we would need a great number of people sending "proper" email to Zun regarding issues with the last game, and we would need the japanese community to do the same. This part is another topic completely. I wouldn't say that "Touhou remix" are less popular, more like some fan have heard enough (there's only so much remix of "UN Owen was her" you can heard before being tired of listening to the same tune). For fan games, that's up to the dev to announce their game. I haven't play much fan-game, but I make sure to leave review and talk about the game if it is good (which is what people should be doing, but there a lot of "passive" fans which just listen to music and look at artwork. You can't force them to be "active"). Playthrough of a game and stream are actually a very good way of making a game known. This is actually an idea I had when seeing how UDoALG was "unfinished" and "broken", and when seeing the many comments of "Why is character X not there?". The community could come together and try to make a truly good, competitive Touhou VS game. Not need to wait for Zun to do it, he won't (this requires maintenance and updates, which Zun never do aside from very rare post release patch). This would be a BIG project though, since it would "serve" the whole community (so, a lot of pressure to whoever will want to do it). Mods are all well and good, especially for making old game playable, but for new game it just feel like doing the work that Zun should have done in the first place (Modding takes a lot more effort than simply changing the game's original source code). Paying for a game you have to "patch" yourself turns off a lot of people, even if thcrap is easy to use (there's always the possibility of breaking something with too much mod). Pirating is an option, but always risky which turn off more people. So, even with Mods, you can't fix all of UDoALG issues. Only minors ones. For things like missing Extra, Replay and Score, even asking Zun wouldn't work, since he'd never implement these feature post release, since this is how that game was designed. He'll only consider this for the next game, and I doubt it will be a VS game, making the whole thing a bit pointless. I am curious: do you know how the japanese community is reacting to Touhou 19, and if they tried to get things fixed? EDIT: On another note, thanks for sharing the mod list with everyone.

My opinion may be controversial about this topic. I just wanted to share my thoughts. I don't want to repeat others' thoughts, because everyone here gave good points about this game. UDoALG is not as good as we thought it would be and could be. It looks like the game was made in 4-5 months (for example, Chen's spinning animation had been done 5 hours before the game was sent to print). And we don't know whether most problems will be fixed. Let's hope BeatMARIO or somebody else would persuade ZUN to work more on Touhou 20 (BeatMARIO successfully persuaded him to add multiplayer in UDoALG and has already told ZUN about the problems with UDoALG recently). What actually surprised me is the community reaction. I'm used to traditional "it is over, Touhou is dead" (because people have been regularly saying that since TD) and "I buy games to give ZUN money for beer". And... that's all. Most fans just wasted their breath, but nothing changed. Some fans say: "ZUN does not listen the fans", have you tried to talk with him or send him a letter about the problems? There are cases when small Touhou doujin circles ask him to write music for their games and he agrees (so we have official Shinki theme remixes (not only in AUS) and more Rinosuke related music). And when they get such questions, what do they reply most often? "I haven't tried, but I am sure he won't listen to me". And it seems like most fans think in such way, because ZUN has no idea what is happening in fandom. He gets invitations to Reitaisai and different meetings so he might think that everything is okay. And he rarely watches Touhou-related fan content himself (I don't know why), so he doesn't have the complete picture. Well, let's imagine that ZUN is that bad that he doesn't want to hear his fans and makes Touhou only worse. But there is a problem: the fanbase is the one who creates Touhou. I offen hear the point that Touhou has enormous amount of fanmade content (especially in Touhou introductions), but there is the same problem: that's all, again. Most people just say that there is a lot of stuff, but it seem like nobody is interested in it or knows about it (and it is really a big problem, that fanbase doesn't know about the content it creates). Touhou remixes aren't popular now, Touhou style music is still not that known. Have anyone noticed those 2 good fangames which were released a few days before UDoALG's release? Anyone? I do not say that "anyone must create at least one fan works", but I'd like to see at least good advertising of the fanmade content (I can't call 3-4 playthroughs a good advertisment of those 2 games). So people would know about alternatives. This reminds me a similar situation in TBoI community. There were times (before Afterbirth+ release) when this game didn't have any good modding instruments and mods like Godmode were one of the best, but you could see that they are just fanworks. Then Antibirth was released and this mod looked like original TBoI but better and with more content. A few weeks after Antibirth the official DLC was out and it was not that good in compair with Antibirth. So Edmund (the creator of TBoI) had to fix everything and he cooperated with Antibirth developers. And after that the next DLC was actually good. What lessons can we learn from this situation? The community had the alternative and most of the community KNEW about it. The creator also knew what was hannening in fandom. And they didn't even need to make a new game, they modified the original one. A lot of old Touhou fans say that they would like to see Touhou 8 remake. Well, why won't they create the one themselves modifying the original game? Wait, modify original Touhou games, is it possible? Yes, it is for a long time, there are already a lot of good mods (for example loddk (th15, thcrap), umalt (th18, thcrap), subhatred (th11 (only extra), thcrap), DDDDDDDDDDDD (th14, standalone), epro (th17, thcrap)), which don't just change textures, text, music, but also change patterns and add new spells or mechanichs. There are already several guides and instruments to make the modding process simplier. But still a lot of fans avoid this part of community and it is still not that popular (Yomi tried to popularize it. His most popular video about Touhou mods has 61K views, but you see the actual result). So we returned to the same problem: Touhou community knows nearly nothing about itself. And after that the question arises: why the community of the game which does not rely on fanworks could fix the problems, while the community which is based on fanworks doesn't even want to try? This situation is quite sad and disappointing. Western Touhou community is very passive and we should improve the situation. I hope this post is not for nothing. GOOD NEWS for the ones who still play UDoALG or want to play it. There are already several modifications that can make your game process much better. All these mods you can install using thcrap (if you want to use the mods that changes gameplay in multiplayer, both players must have the same mods, otherwise 100% desync): Th19BugFixes (Fixes most bugs and crashes. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) lang_en (English patch, the game is mostly translated, but if you know Spanish or Chinese I would more recommend using lang_es or lang_zh-hans, because they are translated more than lang_en) Th19StoryBGMChange (Proper music for story mod (read ReadMe.txt in "alt" directory in the mod's directory for more info)) Th19Balance (Characters are much balanced. Also big nerf of Chiyary, and Rin fix. Read ReadMe.txt for more info. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19StoryBalance (Story mod is much more balanced. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19FixOrinLV2 (Fix Orin LV2 bug (included in Th19BugFixes). DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19BigPortraits (Changes portraits for attack animations (customizable, only boss attack animations with big portraits by default. More info in ReadMe.txt in the mod's folder)) Th19ExAttackResAnimFix (Fix some extra attack animations (included in Th19BugFixes)) th19pofvui (UI is like in POFV) visuals (Player's shots are less distracting) th19gohei (Reimu's player sprite is with gohei) th19oldspr (Changes some boss sprites to old ones) alphes (Alphes styled character portraits) BetterSoundClue (Changes some sound effects) SakuyaTouhou19 (Adds Sakuya) TESMgoofs (Meme, but with good boss attacks. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19Chaos (Unstoppable waves. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the netpatch for better p2p matches: https://github.com/RUEEE/th19p2vp