It can whiff if you’re too close. 
Kind of a bump, but here.
http://www.youtube.com/user/HKrelight
Some decent vids here, and this guy comes out with new videos often it seems.
And holy shit after watching some Youmu vids I feel the need to pick her up. She’s fast as fuck and has some wicked combos. I’ll have to play around with her too.
Hey guys. I just got this game yesterday, looks alot more badass than IaMP as far as the gameplay goes imo.
This looks interesting.
What. :bluu:
i am in love sooooooooooooo hard with that bunny girl
so damn hard
:lovin:
LOL. I guess I could’ve expected a reaction like that from my previous post. Really I’m just saying that I’m liking the new Touhou game so far, after a couple of minutes of playing it of it. How are you guys liking the game so far?
It’s silly in a lot of ways, but again, it is what it is, and seemed like they really wanted to make a “Party Game” of sorts this time around.
Hopefully, Tasofro will patch the game soon. I feel silly using a ghetto-fab patched EXE to play the game without Weather, and then going back to the original one when I want to.
What’s the IRC server/channel everyone plays in? And does everyone play with the “no weather hack”?
You can read about my personal opinions on my blog, if you feel like reading/skimming, lol.
A lot of people are playing it, but the consensus is it needs to get patched a bunch for a few simple and logical reasons. The Hakugyokurou stage (snow covered Yuyuko stage) is unplayable, random weathers are highly disruptive to gameflow, and there are at least four game-breaking glitches we’ve found so far. Aside from that there’s other issues but I can only speak for myself regarding those.
irc.mizuumi.net #swr
There’s a cgi irc service on http://www.mizuumi.net/ if you don’t have an irc client.
The no weather hack use is mixed. Most people use it but there’s a few people who either can’t load it or don’t want to use it for various reasons.
Played for a couple hours today online. It was fun. I likey. :o
Reisen’s green gas, what?
I love this game because when I press buttons it feels like I’m doing something.
I’m really enjoying the spellcard system and weather effects. The weather does seem a bit overblown and hard to keep track of (the effects seem a bit too specific IMO) but I had a lot of fun fighting my friend in it.
I seem to have settled on Marisa.
Primarily a bugfix release, with fixing post-round KOs, sound effects not firing properly, etc. Background disappearing in story mode fixed, numerous characters’ 2P colors tweaked/fixed, spellcards fixed, random glitches fixed, etc.
The changelog doesn’t really mention specific chara fixes (Tasofro changelogs rarely do), but so far one player has confirmed Youmu damage being lower.
Noooo Youmu.
So yeah, revisiting my impressions of SWR with a good amount of play time. Here are the game’s problems.
Weather. As usual, this is the perennial complaint with this game. There are some people who scoff and mock those who complain about weather, saying that “it’s part of the game, learn to play with it”. That’s not necessarily a bad argument. What’s funny, though, are the few people who state that weather somehow deepens the gameplay. Anyone who has played this game above a beginner level will know that this is not true. Out of the fourteen weather effects in the game, there are quite a few that are benign or not game-changing. However, there are a few that do fundamentally alter the way the game flows in a fashion that reduces matches to degenerate, mindless play.
Spring Haze: Better known as “no-melee”. This weather increases orb regen rate and disables all melee normal attacks (you still have melee specials and spellcards). Now, for those not familiar with the way mixup in the game works, it centers around movement-based mixups between moving through a bullet or blocking it. If a bullet is thrown, you have a few options: 1) avoid it, 2) graze it, or 3) block it. Avoiding it requires usage of your dashes and airdashes so that you are not within a range where you have to deal with it or your opponent’s subsequent attacks. Grazing it involves going through it with a dash or airdash or flight, but opens you to the risk of being hit by a melee attack since you cannot block during movement. Blocking a bullet, on the other hand, puts you at no risk but leaves you open to further pressure because blocked bullets give the opponent frame advantage.
In a game where having bullet and melee interact with each other as core mixup, when you remove half of the mixup you are no longer able to hit opponents. Anyone with a reasonable amount of skill will not have problems grazing bullets thrown at them because without the threat of melee attacks, there is no reason for them not to graze. For people who say that you can still punish grazes with special-type moves such as DPs and walldives or whatever, this is not true due to the enlarged screen. All melee-type moves have a very specific, limited range in which they function and there is no reason for an opponent to willingly place himself in that range when he can easily fly straight up into the air and stay there for prolonged periods of time due to the increased spirit orb regeneration. Removing melee is akin to taking out throws in SF2. What’s to stop someone from blocking all day?
In addition to this, certain characters have degenerate strategies that arise from the increased rate of orb regen. Alice has the ability to simply fly to the top of the screen and throw down dolls all day. The move maintains her height in the air, and the increased regen recovers the orb she uses almost immediately. Doing this not only places Alice out of the way of almost every attack in the game but keeps the opponent in a position where he still has to avoid being hit by bullets. Even worse is Yuyuko, who can not only use this same tactic but has very fast bullets that home in on to the opponent, allowing her to launch a rather effective barrage of bullets with absolutely no risk to herself whatsoever.
The end result of no-melee weather is simple. The mixup potential is removed and the gameplay degenerates. Players claiming that it requires adaptation do not realize that the game flow is adapting downwards, not towards the complex.
Typhoon: Better known as “no-block” weather. Yes, you heard correctly. No-block weather. This weather gives everyone hyper armor in exchange for rendering them unable to block. Keep in mind that weather can trigger at any time, so a situation where you suddenly stop blocking your opponent’s rushdown is very real. This weather typically encourages two styles of gameplay: panicked runaway, and mindless buttonmashing, with very few compromises. Players who have a life lead will charge in and capitalize on their lead by trading blows until the opponent dies. Players who are behind will use flight and run away at all costs, and due to SWR’s screen size and weakened melee, it is really not possible to punish runaway.
I don’t think it’s really necessary to explain in detail why not being able to block is a bad idea, but here it is anyways: it basically reduces your game from zoning and careful spacing into that of mindless rushdown with no regard for consequences, getting in lucky hits that never would have connected otherwise, and promoting a style of play that requires one player to chase down the other. This does not deepen gameplay. This reduces it to something in which all basic concepts of fighting games - spacing, zoning, reads, and so forth - are thrown out the window.
There are a few other weathers which are disruptive but not as fundamentally game-breaking, which I’ll mention briefly: Sunshower, which instantly guard crushes an orb for blocking any move wrong; Snow, which damages your spellcards and permanently cycles them out of your deck if you take enough hits; and River Mist, which pushes players apart at close range and draws them together at far range. In a game as reliant on spacing as SWR is, having a weather that throws your own calculations out the window is extremely disruptive.
Weakened melee. This is a point that I think many players don’t fully understand because they have not played IaMP to advanced levels. Of course, the first point of refutation is going to be “this is SWR, it’s a totally different game, you’re just mad because it doesn’t play like IaMP”. Of course. But once again let’s examine the mechanics on which mixup in this game works.
As mentioned earlier, mixup in these games works two ways. You have high and low attacks, as well as bullet and melee attacks. Melee beats grazing; grazing beats bullets; bullets beat melee. This is a simplified version of how it works, but is basically accurate; this is a standard three-way mixup derived from the RPS concept of fighting games. On top of this you have moves that must be blocked low or high, and unlike traditional fighters, there are no telltale “overheads”; every melee move has a height associated with it, even the ones that start quickly.
Obviously this mixup would be impossible to react to if you took a hit for every move you blocked wrong, so an autoblock system was implemented. You are allowed to autoblock moves but received a spirit penalty for anything you blocked wrong. Once you blocked too many moves wrong you were left open to attack. IaMP’s spirit system is a bit complex to cover in detail so I’ll just go over the basic gist of it: once you ran out of spirit you weren’t allowed to autoblock anymore until it came back. This was changed in SWR, where losing all your spirit leaves you briefly vulnerable to any attack.
On paper this sounds good. However, there is one defining issue that weakens this system, and that is wrongblock pushback. In SWR, blocking a move wrong will generate anywhere from 2x to 3x the pushback the move normally has. You will take a spirit penalty, but it comes back almost immediately, and the extra pushback causes your opponent to be sent far out of range to the point where a blockstring will whiff. This has been demonstrated to happen with many characters already in previous posts that Xenozip and I made.
The wrongblock system was implemented only in SWR. Why this decision was made is still beyond me, because it basically means you can choose to block a move wrong and be rewarded far more than if you had blocked it correctly. In many situations, blocking rushdown correctly means you will continue to be subjected to it. Blocking it incorrectly will send you out of the opponent’s range and allow you to counterattack. This is completely backwards in logic.
To add insult to injury is the implementation of the Border Escape system. Border Escape is a mechanic added to SWR to escape pressure at the cost of self-crushing one of your own orbs. You basically do a high jump or a dash in the middle of a blockstring and have no collision box, so you can pass through the opponent and move to safety. However, a crushed orb takes approximately 13 seconds to recover to normal, meaning that during those 13 seconds you are working at limited capacity. On the other hand, wrongblocking a certain melee attack in a blockstring will give you the pushback you need to escape most of the time - and wrongblocked orbs recover in only 1-2 seconds, essentially rendering Border Escape a subpar option. Yes, the option designed to escape pressure is actually not as good as another mechanic that rewards you for doing the wrong thing.
Not to say that Border Escape is useless, because there are certain situations and a few blockstrings in which you must use it to escape as wrongblock pushback will not always save you. But in general this is the exception rather than the rule.
Increased escape options. This point actually ties in with the weakened melee point, in that the overall nerfing that melee attacks received promotes a runaway playstyle. To understand this we have to examine some technical details of how the game flow works.
In IaMP, there was a very clearly defined hierarchy of mixup, evasion options, and counters. Simply put, blockstrings consisted of an amalgam of melee and bullet attacks. You were allowed to escape during the bullet attacks by either dashing or highjumping (both grazed), or by using a graze attack (a dashing attack with graze frames on it). One of the dominant options was HJ8, or high jump straight up. HJ8 gave you height that HJ7 and HJ9 did not, allowing you freedom to reset the momentum but also leaving you vulnerable as the opponent could exercise a number of anti-air options. HJ8 was also a risky option because almost every character had either a move or a blockstring that would counter it, typically being 22A (a high guard crush attack) or a HJC9 j.A/B blockstring.
In SWR, weakened melee promotes easy escape tactics. Guard crush attacks are still in the game but in highly nerfed form, and are no longer viable to use to counter HJ. Because of the single melee button, you no longer have a variety of pokes that you can use to mix up your blockstring: your blockstring only has a few options, many of which are escapable. In order to stop people from backdashing out of blockstrings midscreen or HJing them in the corner, you have to stagger rapidfire 5A attacks to cut them off during startup animation or rely on relatively risky, low-reward HJ counter strings to stop them.
Certain characters can’t even take advantage of this, such as Marisa. Previously, using HJ8 against Marisa was extremely risky because she had a number of moves that would counterhit the HJ8 into a high-damage combo, or moves that could stagger melee and guard break someone trying to jump out. In SWR, Marisa’s melee options consist of 5A (a rapid fire jab), 2A (a low kick), 3A (a low broom sweep), and 6A (an air-based butt tackle). Any blockstring she performs will be escapable at the point where you perform a bullet, and the only punishment she can really deal out is with HJC9 j.A (because HJC9 j.2A is too slow). She can stagger into 3A, but opponents can jump out of that for free. She can use 6A, but if she guesses wrong the opponent can punish her on block for free. 6A can be cancelled into j.22BC, but beyond point blank range the move has too much startup and won’t come out in time before she lands, leaving her open during the startup animation. If she does somehow land the HJC9 j.A, the most she can really do is tack on a j.6A and some bullets and possibly a spellcard, or a j.8A if the opponent is higher. The resulting damage is fairly lackluster and an acceptable loss for getting out of the corner if one has a decent enough life advantage. If the player doesn’t want to sacrifice the life he can simply block low, which would avoid j.2A, cause pushback from j.A and 6A should they be used, and really only be susceptible to 6[A] which is extremely telegraphed with both an animation and a charge sound.
To address the inevitable counterargument of “you’re just mad because it doesn’t play like it did before”: that is not true at all. Changing the mechanics is not the issue at hand here. Changing them in a way that promotes easy escapes out of pressure and doesn’t give many options to punish these attempts is not a change for the better. There’s also problems that go beyond simple engine imbalance because SWR Reimu has all of the tools to make people stop moving and start blocking. Why they did not give these tools to the two other characters I’ve played is beyond me, and why they gave an excessive number of tools to certain characters is even more puzzling.
On top of this is the fact that the playing field is now twice the height that it used to be. While Tasofro changed all the characters’ moves to reflect the engine of the new game, very few new moves were actually added and the fact remains that the majority of characters do not have moves that hit upwards, allowing those with superior flight options (Yuyuko, Patchouli) free reign at greater heights. A lot of characters received an additional melee move j.8A meant to counter flight-height abuse, but it’s a shoddy solution at best and doesn’t work as well as it needs to.
Simply put, the screen is too large and the gameplay was not properly designed to reflect this. There is too much space to move around in and too many movement options. On top of that, weakened melee attacks ensure that hitting your opponent will be a difficult task, and even if you do manage to begin rushdown, it will not be too difficult to escape in a vast number of ways (wrongblock, HJ8, dash, border escape) and reset the momentum of the match to the point where the players are playing cat and mouse again.
Deck system: I will be fair and say that the deck system has grown on me, to the point where I think it only needs some rebalancing and tweaks instead of a complete overhaul. The idea of customizing your character’s moveset adds for a good amount of replay value and allows you to reflect your own style, though this is still a forced method of adding personality instead of allowing your tactics to speak. The main problem with the deck system as it stands is with the skill cards. Skill cards allow you to change your character’s moveset with alternate versions of moves. Some of these alternate moves are terrible and will never be used by anyone with any amount of common sense. Others are so good that there is no reason to not use them. Thus far there is very little middle ground with skill cards: they tend to be really bad or really good, and even lesser-skilled players can see the obvious differences. However, this issue is minor and can be fixed with some patching, which is why I’m not going to go on at length about it. As far as I’m concerned the deck system is a character balancing issue, not an engine-based issue.
People may claim that IaMP was not perfect in its initial release, and indeed it wasn’t. There were just as many bugs (and there still are, even in its final version) and issues to be ironed out from its beginning days. However, people forget to notice one important detail: the issue addressed and the tweaks made were mostly bugfixes, character rebalances, and changes made to minor engine details such as point item accrual, being able to HJC with the D button, and dashing from a crouch. At no point did the game ever receive a major engine overhaul to make it what it is right now. The concepts of mixup, rushdown, counters and punishes in IaMP have been there since version 1.00 and are still there now. The problems it had were based on its characters, not in its game flow.
The problems outlined here with SWR are in its core game flow. There are multiple ways to fix it, but it will have to go beyond a simple character rebalance (unless the rebalance means giving characters a larger moveset than they presently have, which strikes me as highly unlikely). At this point the game engine needs to change for it to be anything close to truly playable. Even at casual levels where the wrongblocking and evasion-dominant tactics don’t necessarily apply, the game deteriorates when select weather comes up, and most casual players aren’t gullible enough to believe that being randomed into a loss because the wrong weather came up at the wrong time is an idea of a fun, entertaining game. I’m personally hoping that a future patch will address these issues because from our contact with Japanese players they largely agree with the ones outlined, but we’ll have to wait and see.
tl;dr version:
weather sucks
runaway too good
melee is weak
screen too big
decks are ok i guess
iamp didn’t have core engine problems
waiting for patch to see what happens
Good write-up, overall.
Still, the thing is, it seems like the mainstream Touhou fans LIKE the game as it is, thus far. The thing they’re largely looking for seems to be in the realm is making sure that characters like Cirno and MeiLing get in a patch.
And that seems to be an issue at hand at moment…will they actually listen to the plight of the competitive players for the sake of giving the game longevity, or will Tasofro not give a damn thanks to the new demographic they’re reaching with a more casual game? That is what I think will be interesting to see in the coming months ahead.