Something like that, yeah.
The funny thing to me is how far out some of these interpretations are from the source material. According to the fandom, Touhou is not in fact a light hearted game about little girls saying dumb funny stuff and fighting with cards, but in fact an action/drama about the adventures of it’s incredibly sexy all female 18 year old cast.
Also: Wolverine confirmed for Toohoo fightars
Look at that sweet graze.
Just wanted to point out that this game is out now.
Honestly, this game feels a bit different to me than the demo, I don’t know. The only thing I’m pissed off about is that all the old characters are gone (Sakuya, Kampachii, Remillia, Hong Mei-rin, Alice, Patchicoulli, Cirno, etc.) I really do hope some of the return for a potential upgrade or sequel.
http://shinkirou.koumakan.jp/wiki/Touhou_Shinkirou
Most of initial online fights are happening at irc.rizon.net #shinkirou and iiiiiiits okay? Seriously, only played twice and its the usual playable in the same region, but a gamble on opposite coast.
Mamizou has the Persona gauge, anything she uses that’s actually is a Tanuki in disguise if it gets hit will make you lose a leaf.
Kokoro (Final Boss) isn’t playable.
Koishi’s yellow rose vine will break the game, so modify your moveset first.
Futo (Silver haired with a shooort skirt) has a unique system. Kinda like Frank West meets Arcana Heart. You break them with certain specials like your rock pillar, fireballs, arrows, and water fields, but they cause different effects depending on which why you break them. Your range and power also increases a lot as you gain more popularity and broken plates.
~ Arrow causes it to rain down as multiple arrows
~ Fireball homes into the plates for a ricochet effect. Set it up right and its a pretty easy 1/3 combo at least, especially if they’re all stacked in the same general position in the corner.
~ Water shield causes all plates to spill water, causes very long stun if you get caught into them.
They did release a patch yesterday which fixes the Koishi special crash.
Anyways, for those trying out Koishi, I made this simple combo video for her:
[media=youtube]BOdb_rdKapw[/media]
Quick little summary for Koishi is that she’s a character that relies on cornering your opponent.
That said, two quick and easy combos.
Universal: AAA2A U-Reflex Radar AAA6A X
Her universal bread and butter, but it changes a little depending on positioning. Midscreen, you have to move forward a little after activating Reflex Laser or you’ll whiff the second part of the combo. In the corner, you have to delay X a bit or your opponent drops out too early.
Corner only: AAA2A D-Reflex Radar AAA2A
Really easy and quick combo for the corner that isn’t too hard to do. It’s also the only corner combo you can pull off if you fish your opponent out with an 8B. More on this later.
Now to something about Koishi: she has a unique mechanic that makes her awkward to play in the form of auto-response moves in the form of her heavy melee, heavy projectile, and most of her skills. They all activate based on certain conditions.
Out of all these, one notable move is 8B, the upwards heavy melee and better known to players as the lightbulb (of doom). Now, the mechanic itself is pretty awkward to get used to, but this is actually a ridiculous move it’s ridiculously fast. Granted, the recovery is a little slow, but this recovery can be cancelled into her light projectile. This can then be chained into either a skill, or movement in any direction.
This can make it a ridiculous pressure tool with the right skills when it’s blocked, but it shines the most when it hits, especially in the corner.
Midscreen, it’s not as effective, but you can use a 6A ender to force your opponent into the corner, then follow up with a light projectile or her teleport (or both in succession!) to keep pressure up. Closer to the corner, it adds a lot of damage and can pretty much guarantee a stun with the right combo. Unfortunately, her universal BnB doesn’t quite work with 8B, but there are two full combos I know so far that work with an 8B starter:
8B 9 AAA2A D-Reflex Radar AAA2A guarantees the most damage, but requires that specific skill and the opponent be deep in the corner.
8B 9 AAA6A X 9 AAA6A doesn’t quite have the same damage output, but is guaranteed to work with every deck setup regardless of skills and allows a bit of space away from the corner. It’s important to cancel the light projectile and start the second combo quickly, or the opponent recovers before the second combo starts.
I could go into a bit more detail, but the game kind of confuses me so I’ll leave it to GPop.
Man, this game feels a lot better than the demo, I’m impressed.
It’s been so long since I played a Touhou game I forgot why I love the series,
the music is great as always and I definitely like these arrangements better than the ones in previous fighters.
My favorite character at this point is doubtlessly Byakuren, surprising considering I know next to nothing about the actual character since I never finished UFO and I figured she’d be a slower character like Yuyuko or Yukari.
I toyed around with the C83 demo when it came out six months ago and picked up the retail version of the game when it came out last week. Here are my impressions of the game thus far, partially influenced by #shinkirou@irc.Rizon.net:
Hopeless Masquerade was intentionally built to be similar to Astra Super Stars. It shares the same gravity system, control schemes and popularity mechanics. Astra and HM are both very simple games, which makes HM appealing to Touhou fans and those completely new to the fighting game genre.
The best way to think of flight in this game is to look at it as three extra ways to jump in an air-dash fighter. Instead of just neutral, forward and back jumps, you have those same three options mirrored below you. After jumping one of six ways, you can dash to maintain that height for some time before returning to the “ground”.
Due to HM’s prevalence of bullets, a graze mechanic exists on dashes and jumps. While dashing, you are immune to almost all projectiles but cannot immediately block after a dash. This is not a new mechanic; it has existed and works well in IaMP, Soku and most shmup-fighters.
The gravity system in addition to grazing makes run away particularly effective while hampering the potency of cross-ups, since you can easily jump down if your opponent tries to jump over you for a cross-up attempt (and vice versa). Cross-ups do exist, particularly for Koishi and Byakuren, but I wouldn’t consider them a focal point of the game or those characters as of yet.
In addition to weak cross-ups, traditional high/low mix-ups flat out do not exist. There is no high/low block; you only have block, push block (hold any button while holding back), and instant block (just guard), which as of now feels completely unnecessary when Push Block is as strong as it is right now. Throws for the most part are not an issue; only ~two characters have them (Koishi and Ichirin, IIRC?), one of them is a hit throw, and the other is teched by mashing any and all buttons. As far as I’m aware, they’re used during combos more than they are as an additional option in pressure/footsies.
Similar to Astra, controlling the bottom of the screen is exceptionally important due to the high presence of DPs and Flash Kicks. There is an overall lack of moves that are safer/more reliable when used above the opponent, and the few characters that do have them so far appear to be the same characters that possess powerful DPs or corner loops (read: they’re Week 1 Top Tier).
With the above in mind: the game is visibly rushed. Koishi’s Rose Vine crashed the game on release (now patched); Kokoro, the boss character, is incomplete and lacks specials and supers; the newer characters “feel” incomplete and are mostly considered* mid/low tier compared to the demo characters; the newer character stages are extremely plain compared to the older ones.
The biggest issue, however, is that Popularity was very poorly implemented, and is arguably the single biggest flaw with the game. Due to the lack of offensive options and extreme potency of run away and push blocking, you would assume Popularity exists to reward offensive fundamentals (in a game that has already removed so much of them), right? Wrong.
Popularity works as follows: whoever has the most popularity at the end of a time-out round wins. Getting the First Hit in a round awards +10% popularity. Getting counter-hits rewards a small amount on its own (around ~2%), and increases popularity gained from limit combos (the equivalent of knockdowns in a game with no floor). Limit combos on their own reward popularity roughly based on hits/damage done, usually around ~8%. Declaring a spell card (equivalent to an SF4 Ultra) adds +5%, and using it is another 5%.
You’ll notice that I did not mention any popularity penalties for turtling or running away. This is intentional, as the current penalties are minuscule to nonexistent. It is extremely easy to run away while moving forward due to the jump mechanics, and the penalty for holding back and staying in the corner doesn’t trigger unless you linger in that state for ~three or more seconds, far longer than the amount of time you’ll typically need to block while cornered and under pressure. The actual penalty, should you get it, is about -1% every two seconds.
Regarding guard crush: you will never see a guard crush in a match with two equally-skilled opponents. Chip on your spirit meter is far too low (typically <10% for a block string), and that is assuming that push block is not used. If it is, you can more or less freely kill any amount of pressure your opponent is applying in addition to giving yourself two angles of escape. I expect to find push block used even more liberally than it is now once more people get used to the game.
All in all, this penalty does not discourage turtling or defensive strategies whatsoever, and until it does the end result is that players will play hyper-defensively while fishing for First Hit pop gain to gain a small lead, and then running away for the rest of the round while occasionally punishing the disadvantaged opponent (the one that has to go for the kill before time runs out). And because popularity carries over between rounds, it could be reasonably said that an entire match is decided should one player acquire and maintain a ~30% popularity lead.
While I don’t consider character balance to be a particularly meaningful discussion on Week 1, I would like to say that Reimu is currently considered the best character in the game as she exploits all of the flaws I have mentioned above. She is one of the strongest zoners in the game, is extremely capable of generating popularity while turtling (arguably better than the character specifically designed around popularity gain: Miko), and has a no-charge Flash Kick that is very hard to punish on block due to its extremely low amount of recovery frames. In #shinkirou, her dominance is entirely undisputed… as of Week 1.
Lastly: this is Nitori, the one new character that is considered Top 3:
Overall, the state of HM is not unexpected. IaMP and SWR were released in very similar states, so this is par for the course for Tasogare Frontier (the developer). It is unabashedly clear that Tasofro made this game strictly for their target audience, so I would not recommend this game for well-vetted fighting game players looking for something deep and meaningful to focus on. This is a casual game at best.
That said, the game’s flaws are not impossible to fix. Should popularity be reevaluated to reward offense, and should guard crush somehow become a real threat, I would feel a little better about telling those curious about fighting games to try it despite the base of the game being somewhat shallow.
I do, sadly, feel that alternative engines have built much stronger shmup-fighting games in the past, and that choosing Astra’s mechanics over something similar to Senko no Ronde, Acceleration of Suguri or Psychic Force was a shot to the foot more than anything else. Suffice to say, I am very surprised that this game received a front-page article on SRK.
TL;DR: This game is literally Hopeless.
Heres some Mamizou play
where can I get this game cheap?
I noticed the only English website (Akiba Hobby) that is selling the game cost 35.44. Whereas on the Japanese websites it cost 2625 yen which on Google translate to 26.13 dollars.
wtf is akiba selling it for 9.31 more?!
[details=Spoiler]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6c3ovccN7s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g59erRTluo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bNFvnI4DSc[/details]
I wouldn’t say the game is Hopeless
But I will agree that the Popularity system REALLY needs to be revised. I don’t like a lot of the choices (auto 10% for first hit), and it doesn’t punish enough for turtling entirely. I feel like popularity also rises way too slowly, but then I saw that Nitori/Mamizou match and it’s probably because I’m not that good enough yet.
Despite how casual it feels, the game will still be considered competitive to both the fandom and some fighters. Both SWR and IaMP had decent-sized tournaments that can be found on youtube and had really great gameplay in it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if HM follows the same.
[details=Spoiler]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13lriocJPjs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agcTiw7SzHw[/details]
[details=Spoiler]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=927_rimtK34
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBii_fH46u4[/details]
What I’d like to see in upcoming patches that I think would be a good start to fix this game is having the popularity system start rewarding blockstrings and the guard-crush be more prominent. I really do think there is good potential here.
Does this game have mixups yet? Because if not I still don’t care. Also punishing people for turtling in a game built around projectiles is the dumbest idea ever and I can’t even begin to fathom how they thought it would work out.
Has anyone had any luck in getting this game to work with joysticks that don’t have an analog toggle? As far as I can tell, even if you config the directions to the PoV hats, the game still expects an analog signal to move the cursor around on the menus.
This game chugs like a mother fucker, and makes my computer run hot as hell, so for now, I’m done with it. I’ll give it another show when I have a computer on the first of never.
Still disappointed Yuugi didn’t make it. Wanted to pwn mofos with Knockout in 3 Steps.
You can graze through them though. So despite all the projectiles on the screen it’s not like you’ll be locked down like MorriDoom.
[details=Spoiler]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0NHVA9sgU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRhz7Mq__sQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqPed4anKFQ[/details]
Which begs the question why they try to punish playing defensively. Also I’ll take that as a no to high/low existing.