Game:

Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost (2023)

Duration: 18:59

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7

So, the new Touhou game is out, and I have quite a lot to say about it.

First of all, I do think this game is fun. I still don't fully understand how this game works, but it does feel like it plays more like a traditional Touhou game than other phantasmagorias do, which I found interesting. It seems like you clear a stage whenever you defeat a certain number of boss attacks. Mechanics wise it feels pretty much like PoDD but with focus, where it has proper bombs instead of a way to instantly use all your charge like PoFV had. I'm interested to see what kind of PvP scene this game produces, especially since PoDD never had one due to not having any option for online play (anc PC98 games being less played in general.)

However, I do have some concerns.

One thing that stood out to me a lot is that the difficulty balancing is an absolute disaster. The first 5 stages I felt were too easy. In fact, I got to the final boss on my first try, which I have never done in any Lunatic mode before, even though I haven't played Touhou seriously in almost 2 years at this point, and also never played the demo. The final boss itself though, absolutely crushed me. I had to use 3 or 4 continues to get past it on my first time there. I'm also fairly certain this game has outright undodgeable patterns (for example, the pattern Reimu's final boss uses on the 4th or so boss attack doesn't feel possible to me). No Hit is probably still possible, No Charge probably is too, and No Bomb absolutely is and has already been done, but I don't think all of those conditions are possible at the same time. Despite this, it still somehow managed to dethrone Lotus Land Story as the easiest official game to 1cc on Lunatic (in my opinion at least) and I can see why it was LNN'd just a few hours after release. I haven't played through with other characters though, so this might not apply to every shot type.

The complete lack of any scoring system or replays is also a big concern to me. With replays, yet another basic function of previous games we've had since EoSD is gone. I don't really know why this happened, PoFV had replays that worked just fine. As for the removal of the score system, I feel like that takes away a lot of this game's replayability, and leaves PvP as the only option for competitive play. (Although PvP has indeed become the dominant competitive scene for PoFV, a scoring scene for that game does still exist.) This concerns me for the future of the series and competitive scoring. Scoring systems have already felt like an afterthought post-DDC, but now we have our first game in the main series where score just simply doesn't exist. Guess we'll have to wait and see if it's there for the next traditional Touhou game.

So in short, this game has a lot of potential as a PvP game, but the bad difficulty balancing and removal of replays and score take away from the single player experience.

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