I didn't realise the connection between the spell card backgrounds and the Hibachi background. That's a pretty good theory. ZUN pretty much makes Touhou games the way he wants it. The good thing about this is that he is giving himself more creative freedom and he can go against the grain of well-established practices in the genre, resulting in the games being as unique as they are. The bad thing is that a lot of these practices exist for a reason; going against them may result in introducing problems that are easily avoided. So to put it in another way, he doesn't really care what the players want. Now, I'm not saying one approach is better than the other. In fact, a balance of both is ideal; having a fully independent vision of what the game design should be gives you some room for innovation, while player feedback lets you know what QoL features to include. But because ZUN sticks to one extreme, he is neglecting the other side. If ZUN didn't get lucky with Touhou blowing up in popularity, I wonder how the series would have fared. The standards of the later Touhou games pale greatly in comparison to recent indie offerings, with very obvious design missteps (like poor bullet visibility) and missing QoL features that would be expected of other shmups (like tate support or better practice modes). You would expect that a game dev would improve their standards over time, yet Touhou is 18 games long (without even counting spinoffs) and somehow the standards seem to be going downhill instead. It seems like ZUN is taking things too easy since the series was so overwhelmingly popular, that he has kinda lost sight of the basic fundamentals of shmup design. And so, the series has started to decay. It also seems like we have different standards for Touhou as compared to other indie games, where we subconsciously expect each game to be "bad" in some ways, so we let ZUN off easy. Meanwhile, another indie developer that does the same thing would be heavily criticised. Honestly, if ZUN released EoSD today instead of 2 decades ago, I don't think Touhou would've lasted very long. So yes, as you put it, the series is really creative, but there isn't enough care put into it, and this lack of care becomes an even greater problem as the series progresses. I really wish ZUN goes back to his roots and give his games more care. At this point, I don't expect anything like Crimzon Clover from him, but he should at least go back to the standards of his earlier games. I know I've said us consumers shouldn't be too attached to any franchises, but it still hurts to see a game series you like slowly die off like Touhou, especially when it was the one which introduced me to the genre in the first place.
Excellent comment as always! Yes hibachi is the launching point for touhou, the connective thread between cave and zun :-) as for zun s career over the years, I d comment my thoughts but I m saving them for a topic vid :-)
I love this comment, specially when I feel the same way about the recent touhou releases and seeing how touhou was also the series that introduced me to the genre, looking how the new games are laughably bad is a painful sight to experience.
The thing with Youmu fighting you again is that it's storytelling through gameplay. She wants to protect Yuyuko, the stage 6 boss, so she fights you every chance she gets to prevent you from reaching Yuyuko. If one sees it as adding variety to the game, yeah, it's not that good an idea but that's ironically what makes her segments so effective at telling the story. You get tired of fighting her and that's the point.
The stage 6 fight with the Stage 5 boss is supposed to feel like an anime scene, like Youmu got defeated straight up, but even still, she has the pure will and rage to get up again and give everything to do her duty, to defend the final boss from being interfered with. I imagine the whole sequence as like a Fate Zero fight or something like that. So, that's why it's like that, I'm pretty darn sure. It's drama and feeling; moving her around just for "variety" would ruin all of that. Youmu is supposed to be special, and her showing up again after a whole stage fighting her is emblematic of that.
I really like how the finale song swells in sync with you defeating Yuyoko's resurection. It's not too often, but when Zun makes the music sync with the fight it goes very hard
When you mentioned the bullets starting out fast but decelerating, it makes me think that it's "compensation" for touhou not having significant slowdown like cave games do, which would create a similar effect.
Which is funny, because this is one of the only two games in the series that features slowdown based on bullet density. The other one being Imperishable Night.
7:10 Yup, ZUN makes a lot of cool backgrounds and plays quite a bit with perspectives. I don't try to make sense of the perspectives because it bugs my brain, but it looks really cool nonetheless.
Hell, it's about damn time this one comes out! lol patience paid off because it's a fantastic review/analysis. I believe 7 was the first 2hu I was able to 1CC on normal so it has a special place in my heart. However despite my love for it (I rank it very high in my 2hu favs), I don't play it as much either and I never knew why until you pointed out stage 5 lol. Pacing is SUPER important with SHMUPs. Regardless it's a fantastic starting point and is equally iconic as 6. Hope I don't have to wait as long for review of 8 (my SS tier 2hu favorite)!
18:37 The good thing with Marisa here is that if you're using her laser shot-type and you stay under Yuyuko you'll damage both her and the fan. So with her this fight ends up being considerably shorter than if you played with other shot-types. And the thing about Touhou having small hit-boxes to shoot I really don't see that as a problem. It's extremely rare to find a pattern that you actually need to dodge in the corners while being incapable of damaging the boss. From what I saw in the video, the moments that happened here were because you still didn't have the best/proper strats and ended up dodging on the sides even though you can do it under the boss just fine. I think this is just because you're too accustomed to arcade games, but once you play Touhou-like games more you'll notice that this is rarely ever a problem. And btw, why not include the Extra/Phantasm stage on the review? The early Touhou games have some pretty good extra stages.
I think the wandering small hitboxes of the bosses can be a little bit unbalanced, it's why the homing shot types are so good for survival clears. In regular arcade games this is less of an issue because the playfield is more narrow, in touhou though it can get real silly at times. I'll continue to keep an eye on this as the quest continues 🙂
@@TheElectricUnderground Homing often ends up getting the short end in many games because outside of bombing just making the boss not exist anymore is often the best strategy.
Aesthetics definitely made Touhou a thing. Wouldn't have had the insane amount of fan art and music without it, and that made the series a lot more popular than it otherwise would have been, especially when it was all made by one guy and a lot of beer. The credits have always amused me, how it's just ZUN 50 times in a row and then some testers. That's impressive to me. Normally people have a thing or two that they are good at, but he's just good at everything. People say that his character portraits aren't great, but I never had a problem with them. They're definitely adequate. His ability to design characters is really damn good, though, even if other people can draw them better. And his music alone is so good that even that alone would be impressive. People even get into the games because of the music.
Yes the aesthetic sense of touhou is very strong, that s why the series is so iconic! That being said, as the series progressed I do wish zun brought on more capable artists, like we see in the more recent fangames
The thing that I like about Touhou games a lot compared to other shmups is the variety of bullet pattern with different kinds of mechanics that tests the different aspects of your shmup skills...
@@Veranek I don't think it's "bad" per se, just really flawed, especially the new bomb mechanics and I just feel that SA has many of these flaws but just has better patterns, bosses and music. Lolk is cool tho, just wasn't my passion, it was perhaps the last Touhou game that felt "classic"
@@soooslaaal8204 I have mixed feelings with this Touhou gameplay-wise. I kinda agree with you with the game mechanics, but is one of the Touhous I enjoy the most. Said that, you cannot qualify or judge a Touhou just by this. The music, as a whole, for me is the best OST of all the series (or at least top 3), the characters it introduced, mainly Sanae, are staples of the series. And as Zun stated in/on an interview, this game was a like "soft reboot" for the series.
yeah I think it's a great gateway into the series for a lot of people. It was one of my first as well, but Mountain was the very first time I played touhou :-)
This was the first in the series I ever played and not even that long about a year ago when doing the Best shmups for Beginners video. And it was a good thing I chose it as my first, as it won me over pretty quickly. Music is always such a big deal for me in the genre and it’s not only great here, but it’s somehow relaxing without being slow. Something about the generally slow developing bullet patterns and music gave me the rare experience of feeling completely chill while playing, in this really cool zone, versus the usual edge of your seat feeling in most other shmups. I can’t put my finger on it but it’s clearly part of the aesthetic design of the game you mentioned. To be fair I wasn’t playing on Hard 😅. But I can’t recommend this one enough to anyone who wants a first 1cc or improve danmaku skills. It’s an exceptional trainer despite not being perfect, while putting you in a really good mood while playing. Like it’s impossible for me to get frustrated with it.
Yeah the music in touhou, especially in terms of composition is excellent! There s this great quote where the guy said something like ZUN is a musical genius that insists on using blaring midi trumpets XD
i feels Touhou 7 is the most balance difficulty in touhou game i have played so far. not too hard and not too easy either. fun and challenging at the same time. in stage 6 the reason why Zun adding Youmu(stage 5 boss) back in stage 6 because the story reason. because Youmu is Yuyuko(the final boss)'s attendant or student. but i think zun can add more attendant for Yuyuko but i think it makes Youmu character more abandoned. and i assume Zun want to make the relationship between Youmu and Yuyuko more close. Like Sakuya(Stage 5 boss touhou 6) and Remilia (Final boss touhou 6) where sakuya also fight in stage 6 as a mid boss despite she's a stage 5 boss but to be fair Zun can make another Spellcard style for Youmu with different pattern instead of re-use her stage 5 spellcards and modify it. oh yeah about yuyuko's fan effect on her back, there's touhou boss that also use that aspect. like in Touhou 12 and touhou 13 final boss where they're spread out some visual effect on their back. but i forget about their hitboxes cmiiw
My golden rule when it comes to game design is that story must never interfere with proper level design and such. Story can often be used for all kinds of crazy gameplay decisions (like backtracking all the way through mgs 1 for a sniper rifle), but there is actual no story reason these types of decisions need to be made. For example Zun could have this character pop up in a cutscene before the boss fight or handle the story stuff within stage 5, rather than having it bleed over to stage 6 as well.
Zun never made a bad game. His games are super polished. Yes , he repeats assets , but It is part of his style and identity. My problem with touhou is not having a moment where i feel like a super human dodging bullets. I don t get any adrenaline rush, and my Gameplay is completely mechanic. Still, they are great games and web can t deny how good they are , specialy considering it is One person. Zun hás a Legendary status, he hás a Carrer that reserves respect, even if starts doing slighty worst games people Will buy and his legacy Will bé maintained. I don t know if he hás other actibities , but surviving economicaly only with games is astonishing.
4:45 If you think the bullet visibility was bad here don't even get close to Touhou 16, 17, 18 and 18.5. The bullet visibility starting from 16 onwards is really bad.
@@annaairahala9462 Try seeing anything while using the hypers in Touhou 17. It's nearly impossible to see many bullets when you have either Marisa's or Reimu's shots buffed by the beast spirits. Also the beast spirits coming up during Keiki's last spell hurt the bullet visibility a lot and makes everything on the bottom a mess to focus. And in Touhou 18 it's about the stage 3 mid-boss and the visual mess that you can make if you choose certain types of cards, wich became an even more prevalent problem in 18.5.
I think it's because of the combination of brighter backrounds because of the setting and the higher resolution of the game display which makes the upscaled sprites of the bullet sharper and harder to read/discern...
Perfect Cherry Blossom is one of my personal favorites aesthetically - it's definitely extremely simple in actual visual complexity compared to say, CAVE's absolutely visually stunning Ketsui which released in a similar timeframe, but it gets a lot of details like color palettes extremely right, and the overall "snowy" atmosphere of the game is absolutely on-point. As for bullet visibility, I think it's a carry-over from his PC-98 games - in there, for example Mystic Square's Stage 4, there were some times where there were similar mistakes - but it was fine there, since stuff like "blue bullets in a blue stage" might have been a silly decision, but there was nearly no way to do it otherwise - either you sacrifice the stage's... atmosphere, I'd say, or you sacrifice visibility - palette and memory limitations and all that. But once ZUN moved on to Windows, I think there was a time where he was still getting used to it, so some places I feel like he could have definitely taken advantage of the far more powerful hardware to make things better - EoSD, the first Windows game, had a lot of stuff outright taken from the last two PC-98 ones and in general felt extremely like a sequel to those, especially in patterns. Then, PCB definitely introduced the elements that are associated with Touhou to this day and revamped a lot of stuff, but there were still quite a few things that stayed the same due to various reasons. I feel like Imperishable Night is where he got pretty much nearly everything right and the amount of good stuff in that game is really high, but that's for another day. I definitely agree that it would be great if ZUN made the TATE resolution an official option, and THRotator's developer did a great job. The Stage 5 boss in this game is definitely one of the stand-outs - I can't really say much, considering you have already pointed out a lot of the more interesting details. I think the problem with the Stage 6 midboss redundancy is just how absurd it is - it does the same thing as 6, except unlike even 6, the patterns in 7's final midboss feel like just edits of those Stage 5 patterns right before - it's incredibly jarring and considering that Stage 6 in of itself barely even exists aside from that midboss and the main bossfight, it's certainly not a very good choice. I love the final attack - it's extremely simple, but satisfying and I love how it has unique visuals and a music track, and I agree that making the boss a huge, screen-taking thing was a really good idea and I also wish that it was done more in Touhou. Great video!
Glad you enjoyed the vid!! So on the question of bullet visibility on the bright background, zun could fix the issue by dropping the contrast or by adding a black core or black outline
PCB was the first shmup i ever played. Really a special place in my heart. One thing to say a critic: You are playing on hard, and advanced difficulty, and complain that you need to know what will happen. The game thinks you should know this on hard and lunatic.
The long awaited sequel! I Totally agree with him, once you get a route for Stage 5, you can pop all those aggressive ghost fairy things before they do much, so the entire stage ends up basically just being Youmu, and then when she pops up again it's strangely annoying. I say strangely because Sakuya shows up a few times in EoSD and should be annoying too, but she isn't as annoying because EoSDs stage 5 is both faster and has more interesting things to dodge. Though I'm surprised he didn't mention the length of Stage 4. It's beautiful how the music syncs with the patterns, but it definitely feels really long. As to hitbox size, I know exactly why it should feel annoying, but for some reason I'm only ever annoyed when it's a boss who moves around like a fly who's had too much coffee. (Maybe it's just comforting to think to myself: "gosh dang it, I know there's a safe path somewhere in this 2 inch row" but as to whether or not that's a good thing...., it's probably not too good to heavily encourage Marisa mains to limit their their movement so heavily. Though it does feel really, really good to stubbornly dodge inside relatively thin space that like a maniac. What's more disappointing is that I can't blow up segments of things. That's where the real endorphin rush is.
Oh awesome comment my dude! Yeah there are so many ideas that touhou never really attempts or plays with, like destructible parts in boss fights, that would be really cool
Good video, I liked to see how someone that started with arcade games review this game. I was introduced to shmups last year with Touhou 7, and my first 1cc was also in this game so I am a little biased here, but it is one of my favorites shmups. I actually didn't play a lot of other touhou games, so I can't talk about the entire series. It is a little interesting how we see things differently with some aspects of the game. For example stage 5 has my favorite boss in the game, i really like the bullet time mechanic. It feels a good mix between classic shmup design and "touhouness", I don't like when you go too far on the puzzle-like elements so this mechanic is just enough for it to be cool. Reading people's comments I realized that the bullet acceleration also works as an fake "slowdown". As a novice player, I reacted a lot better to the acceleration bullets than the classic slowdown with frame rate drops. It felt more polished, because on other genres slowdown usually means that the game was badly optimized. Today, I just like the acceleration bullets because their patterns feel a lot more creative, I don't remember seeing games using this as much as Touhou 7. I also realized that I actually like the enemies on touhou being small. I usually choose Reimu B on Touhou 7 because I like the challenge of aiming for the bosses while avoiding the patterns. It feels like a mix of classic and bullet-hell shmup design, and I lose some of it with the homing characters. About the thing that you mentioned about touhou having beautiful patterns, I also like that, it feels like some kind of abstract painting a lot of times, sometimes it even syncs with the music and it is really cool. It actually feels really rewarding to see the patterns in their full glory when you keep yourself alive.
Yeah I think it's a cool perspective because touhou has been largely ignored by the arcade gaming scene (while influencing it to some degree) but at the same time it has it's own insulated world that tends to not evaluate the games compared to other shmups.
The best thing about PCB other than the gameplay, it’s the music! Yuyuko’s theme (yeah Yuyuko is my waifu) really kinda hit me so hard to the point I can feel the emotions and could possibly cry, especially Yuyu’s Final Spell theme (Border of Life). And ZUN possibly makes his game while drinking beer.
@@TheElectricUnderground BTW, before you review Imperishable Night, it is said to be the easiest Touhou game ever! (maybe one of the easy Touhou games.)
Heh, really like watching the touhou quest! No offense lol, but do you think we will get more than 1 episode per year? You talked about eosd last year and it would be cool to see more of this series!
man, you shouldn't skip some dialogue, sometimes it explains why you have to fight a boss again, with Sakuya on Touhou 6 for example, if you just skip her dialogue you won't know she's there to make you waste resources.
Slightly surprised you didn't talk about the "pauses" in the game more outside of the brief mentions in text. Touhou's no stranger to taking it's time of course, but this is the only one I've played where it actually bothers me. Especially early on, there are just too many instances of it here. It's a little odd even, stage 2 is the worst offender if I remember right, having the longest stretch of nothing in the beginning, but throughout the early game there are multiple boss patterns where the enemy will do this weird wind up noise at the start before shooting at you, and there's one pattern on stage 2 where I'm pretty sure she takes almost 10 seconds to shoot a bullet. It almost seems unintentional. Despite everything else being as good as it is, this alone drags my desire to play PCB down a good bit, cause every restart is all the more painful. I do actually like the pause at the end of stage 4 though. A little breather moment after a hard fought part is nice to collect yourself I think. That illuminati-looking eye on the wall is kinda weird though lol Different subject, but I definitely suggest playing checking out the Extra stages in Touhou at some point, even if not for these videos. Being over 10 minutes, the extra stage/boss make up a lot of the game's content, and not being constrained by the difficulty curve of a full game leads to them having a very different feel. ZUN seems to put a lot more of the puzzle-like patterns here instead of the main game, which is probably for the best. They're fun to work through as something separate. The pattern shown at 14:10 is definitely inspired by a pattern from this game's Extra/Phantasm stages, though the safe zone in this game isn't as rude as the example in the video with it's sudden movements.
I know! That's why I ended up adding it in the text because during the voice over I was trying to slam in all my thoughts in real time, but during the edit I was noticing how long and drawn out the patterns are. I'll keep an eye on this though in future quests to see if it gets worse or improves. That is the nice thing about having the reviews be a series, I can carry over discussions between the games.
Hi mark I was wondering if in your touhou quest are you only gonna evaluate every main game or are you thinking in also getting into the spinoff (like scene games, and GFW, I truly hope you play at least GFW as it is a very unique game) and maybe some fangames (you showed one at some point of the video so maybe you can try some like Ikusaaaaaaan) cheers!
When you said that "In the newer touhou fangames you have to know how the puzzle works" I was thinking "Oh here comes the boxes!... wait for it..." And there they were.
Could you play Antinomy of Common Flowers in the future so I know what the hell is going on in it? I bought it based on the cute spritework and hybrid gameplay but can barely make heads or tails of it.
I wish they would put the Touhou games on Steam so I could play them, I've never played a Touhou game. I also wish they would put more Cave games on Steam. It seems like they like to put these games on the Switch so it can run and control real bad instead of putting them on PC or PS4, consoles that have the power to run the games right and cut down on the input lag. But if they want to make less money and put these games on inferior hardware, go ahead, keep right on doing what you're doing.
They? You mean ZUN? He actually have put Touhou 9 to 18.5 on Steam (except for the first 3 fighting games, Touhou 13.5 and 14 5), it's just you never know about this before or don't care
I am slightly disapointed that you don't talk about scoring. The scoring system varies wildly between every instalment, and starting with 7, it really adds a lot to the personality of the games. Like in 7, you really want to use your unfocused shot as much as possible to get your border as often as possible, and once you get your border you want to gaze every bullet to raise even more the maximum point value. But then again, I finaly have another episode of Touhou Quest, so what am I complaining about?
@Thisrg Everybody just ignores the scoring in Touhou for some reason and it makes me sad. Even the Touhou community largely ignores it and prefers no-miss no-bomb clears, which are to my eyes so much more boring than being forced to interact with a scoring system that is crafted specificaly for each game.
yes I have heard perfect cherry scoring is really solid compared to the rest of the series. I'm not going to focus on scoring much in touhou quest though because the games are more survival based (even among super players). I can seem me doing a touhou game scoring system tier list vid in the future though!
@@TheElectricUnderground It's true that western superplayers focus on LNMNB, but that's already not as true if you start looking at the Japanese scene. And I by no mean want to imply that LNMNB aren't impressive, but the fundamental difference between a scoring run and a survvival run is that for one you have to take as little risk as you can while ignoring a large portion of the game design, or take as much risk as you can while using every tools the game gave you. I don't know, maybe I'm missing the appeal of LNMNB runs.
Oh that sounds cool! I remember when I interviewed the dev i pitched the idea of a touhou game for the system and he was like ... "nah." looks like he changed his mind in this case ha.
Yeah it's based on PCB, though it's essentially just a port of a fangame called Fantastic Danmaku Festival II, which you can get on Steam. The only difference I've noticed from watching footage is that the Exa version is a lot more stingy with resources (you only get like 1 or 2 extends iirc?)
I have a computer to play this stuff but I haven’t since I’m not that much of a pc guy, I can’t wait to play it on the steam deck though. That’ll make me play pc exclusive games a lot more
I think it has the best soundtrack and atmosphere, Imperishable Night is a slightly better game, those two are the apex of the series IMO. I have the new EXA Touhou game, it's definitely better than the steam release due to actual tate support and a soundtrack which has been completely redone and now sounds more like Cherry Blossom.
@@TheElectricUnderground As I understand it, it's been by far one of their best received games with lots of interest. I'm the one who built an Imperishable Night dedicated arcade cab years ago, so there was no way I wasn't buying this.
Hey my dude! so I do the patreon shout outs by downloading the spreedsheet each month of active patrons, and I just noticed you weren't on there for some reason. So I did some digging and it looks like you payment might have been declined? No worries though I'll get you added back in for the next vid.
@@TheElectricUnderground oh thanks I’ll figure out I was just curious, oh yeah I know what happened I got a new card so I need to update it thanks for the heads up
A follow up on your feelings how Touhou 7 compares to Fantastic Danmaku Festival 2 would be awesome. The latter is a slightly improved re-imagining on Steam.
I usually only mention tate mode when it's missing ha, as I view it as a required feature. If there was no tate in there, you can bet I'd complain about it
