Touhou 19 東方獣王園 ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost - Lunatic No-Hit, No-Bomb (Reimu) (LNNN)

Aug 15, 2023

A clear of Lunatic without getting hit once (losing the shield), without dying and without using bombs.?

Was thinking of using Chiyari for this but it turned out Reimu was still easier.?

The fact that Reimu is still stronger than the character the AI literally can't dodge is pretty hilarious.

Chiyari has awful survivability and fights some awful bosses like Orin.

Reimu has:

- Very strong shotpower, can actually kill enemies very quickly.

- The most damaging level 1 in the game.

- The best level 2 by a long shot (does insane damage that one-shots bosses, clears bullets in a big radius, and chains everything with it).

- Insane walling potential with EX's and level 3's.

- Even if you send a boss there's very little the opponent can reflect back.

- Fairly easy bosses in Story and good card drops.

She literally just has everything. She has no downsides.

Marisa and Zanmu are the hard parts, with Zanmu being about 90% of the run's difficulty.

Zanmu has some pretty good anti-Reimu tech with her spears that can't be cancelled, you need to get a little bit lucky here. Because of the nature of the spears, the safest place to dodge them is near the top-middle. Use a level 2 to cancel everything else and then just focus on the spears. Dodging below will get you trapped very easily between spears and going to the sides makes it very likely a sideways spear will just spawn on top of you.

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New Touhou came out.

As always the music is great, the overall presentation is great, gameplay still somewhat of a wet towel. Sounds like ZUN is leaning into ZUNTATA with some of these songs, which I'm all in for.?

After almost 18 years we're actually getting a new versus Phantasmagoria-like game, who would have thought.

At its base it's Touhou 18.5 but with added PoFV mechanics. Except nothing dies and you can't bullet cancel (except for some characters).

New things in the full game since the demo:

- Full game is now 6 stages with 19 characters and routes.??

- You get 5 lives instead of 3, but they don't get refilled between stages.

- To compensate for this, you get a one-hit shield at the start of each stage that you can restore with EX and boss attacks.?

Besides from that everything seems mostly the same from the demo.?

So I guess also see my description from the demo video.

Nothing dies in this game, like almost every character is absurdly underpowered and I don't know why. Being underpowered at all times really ruins the game flow for me, it makes your shots feel like they have no impact at all and it just feels very unsatisfying to play. No real design either, just a whole bunch of random stuff thrown together that gets repetitive fast.

Absolutely mental balancing going on here too.

Most of the characters are so worthless and weak they can't even kill the weakest enemy with their level 1 charge shots. Meanwhile Reimu is so overpowered it's actually game-breaking as she can one-shot all bosses and skip most of the game.

Stuff can also spiral so hard out of control it borders on parody.

There is so much undodgeable stuff thrown at you constantly that normally requires bullet cancelling moves to deal with, but here there are only 3 or so out of the 19 characters that have these bullet cancelling properties.

See also: The Game Said No (Touhou 19 Lunatic) BV1u14y1i7GQ

Probably what this reminds me of the most is one of those silly old mostly-untested Ultra patches, specifically the one for PoFV. Just very unpolished and kinda unfinished stuff.

But this is just ZUN's MO at this point, to rush out games on an extremely short development cycle.?

The added shield mechanic in the full game is 100% a Band-Aid in an attempt to fix this incredibly wonky balance. This would actually be unplayable without it.

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The game just completely lost score, even though there is a chaining system in place? Huh??

Not seeing much replay value in this, you mostly go through the 19 routes and that's it, you don't even have to 1cc anything either.

There is netplay, but last I heard the netplay was insanely unusable, with matches either running at 5 FPS or having unplayable input lag.

I hope it's not going to be one of those gimmick games that people play once, never replay again and then gets forgotten in a week.

~The continuing graveyard of lost Touhou features~

- No Extra mode

- No score

- No replays

- No Player 2 alternate color palette

- No timer

- No stage display

- No boss healthbar

- No boss enemy indicator

- Only 6 stages for a Vs game

- No Esc+R

- No Esc+Q

- No small Reimu hitbox

- No boss movement manipulation

Anyway go play Twinkle Star Sprites.

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Buy the game on Steam here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2400340/Touhou_Juuouen__Unfinished_Dream_of_All_Living_Ghost/

00:00 - Stage 1 - Aunn

01:47 - Stage 2 - Nazrin

03:11 - Stage 3 - Marisa

04:56 - Stage 4 - Suika

06:19 - Stage 5 - Hisami

07:47 - Stage 6 - Zanmu

10:19 - Ending & Credits

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