Touhou 東方聖戦影 ～ Forlorn Souls of Wicked Past (Demo) - Lunatic No-Bomb 1CC
430Crazed new western fangame dropped out of nowhere and just steamrolled everyone, with production values that makes even the Chinese fangames blush.
I can easily say this is already one of the best fangames.
It's one of those rare occurrences where everything just kinda lines up.
Graphics and presentation are out of this world, the music is a banger, it has tons of QOL and the gameplay is fantastic.
Stages are super varied, the system and presentation is pure dopamine and the bosses feel like a rollercoaster, the pace is just crazy.
It's just blowing everything out of the water that's currently on the market and it's only a demo.
What's also really innovative here is how bosses are synced to the music.
Like on Miko's 5th spell to sync the glowy explosion with the first musical climax, there's a cumulative countdown across the first 2 nons and 3 spells, and any needed filler time is fed or removed from the 4th spell timeout and buffing the 2nd non.
I've never seen anything done like this before and it's really interesting. The way IKUSAAAAAAAN! implemented it was by making everything a timeout, but that was not a perfect solution.
This does lead to strategic stalling at times, like what I do on Miko's opener to make the survival shorter and easier.
The system is lining up 5 tokens of the same color.
We have the familiar red, green and blue colors that give the usual rewards, with rare rainbow tokens that give all three, these also being rewards for capturing spellcards and timing kills on spellcards and nonspells.
Collecting tokens gives a small cancel and some i-frames, and collecting five of a kind gives a big cancel and 2 full seconds of i-frames, all of which can be used to chain multiple tokens together.
Getting a certain amount of these in a stage unlocks a Last Spell.
Most medium and big enemies shoot revenge bullets but you can seal them by pointblanking.
Also running into bosses makes them push you back lol.
You get some i-frames from doing that so I wonder if you can abuse that for some silly strats.
The system is kinda a combination of multiple things from different games.
We have the revenge bullets unless killed in a specific way from Elegant Impermanence of Sakura, we have the tokens that give bullet cancels from Blue Devil in the Belvedere Extra and we have the item i-frames from Phantasmagoria Trues.
The Lunatic in this is BRUTALLY difficult.
It took like everything to beat these first three stages lmao, it's like playing a Cave Ultra mode.
Very rewarding to learn though, and it's a kind of difficulty that with enough practice and skill you can overcome. There is only one pattern I'd say that is more luck than skill.
From what I understand they're going to rebrand the current lunatic and adjust easy-lunatic to fit more common expectations. So this will probably be the full-game's 'Overdrive' difficulty.
For negatives the shottypes are not balanced very well at the moment.
Reimu is by far the best even though she's kinda weak, Marisa has a huge hitbox and not enough extra benefit and Ichirin's focus speed is too slow to be useable.
The game is also a bit long. The full game is slated to be 45 minutes to an hour long and I feel like it could probably be trimmed in places. I'd say trim the fat but it's mostly all good stuff! Though for Miko you can easily trim 30 seconds of the fight by just removing that terrible Eighth Desire timeout.
Oh yeah did I mention this is made in Danmakufu??????
I almost didn't even notice, so besides everything else this is also a technical marvel somehow.
Get the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3138090/__Forlorn_Souls_of_Wicked_Past/
00:00 - Intro
00:21 - Stage 1 - Flood Strikes Hakurei Shrine
05:30 - Stage 2 - Brilliant Sun Shines on Senkai
11:01 - Stage 3 - Rupture of the Mausoleum
18:34 - Credits
--------------------------------------------
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaimersSTG
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jaimersstg