Touhou Thread

Sagume Kishin: She’s a high-ranking Lunarian and a god. Both ULiL and the invasion in LoLK were planned by her. Essentially it’s an emergency evacuation of the moon because Junko (the final boss) is laying siege the Lunar Capital with impurity. The plan was to recreate the Lunar Capital in Gensokyo as a last resort. In the meantime, the Lunarians are living in the Dream World (but most of them don’t know that because they recreated the Lunar Capital out of dreams).

The connection to ULiL comes from her power. She’s basically a super amanojaku whose words are always lies. Not because she’s a liar though, but because the world hates her and will change itself to make what she says false. If she says the sky is blue, it will turn red. This is a terrifying power, so she speaks very carefully and never makes public appearances. Anyway, she put a fraction of her power into the Power Stones of ULiL, which allows them to make false words (urban legends) into reality. The ultimate plan was to spread a rumor about the Lunar Capital, which would materialize the Lunar Capital in Gensokyo and kill everyone who lived there. But she wasn’t planning on actually carrying that out. It’s just insurance. When the protagonists show up with Eirin’s drug, she recognizes them as part of Eirin’s plan and lets them pass.

Clownpiece: She’s a fairy from Hell who was sent to the moon as part of Junko’s plan. Technically she’s a minion of Hecatia (extra boss), but they’re all working together. The moon has no life or death, so it has no fairies. Conversely though, bringing fairies to the moon will bring life and death to it. Junko plans to lay siege to the Lunar Capital by threatening it with lifeforce. Clownpiece has been “purified” by Junko’s power and is now pure lifeforce. She’s basically just hanging out on the moon being a fairy, for the sole purpose of pissing off the Lunarians. She lives outside the Lunar Capital, so there’s no air or water or anything, but she thinks of it as a relaxing vacation from Hell.

Edit: It’s been pointed out to me that Clownpiece’s power (”to drive people to madness”) is very similar to the lampades, which are nymphs under the command of Hecate. So she’s most likely a Greek nymph, which is apparently the same thing as a fairy.

Junko: A former Lunarian turned embodiment of vengeance through her own power: to purify anything. She had a grudge against Chang’e (Lunarian who doesn’t show up in this game, eternally imprisoned in the Lunar Capital) because of the death of her son and her husband, but then purified her grudge until the reason didn’t matter anymore. She can’t get to Chang’e as long as she’s being held in the Lunar Capital, so she came up with a plan to force the Lunarians to move, giving her an opportunity to attack while Chang’e is in transit. She enlisted Hecatia’s help for this plan. She’s kind of a strategic genius or something, who was bored by how predictable the Lunarians were until the protagonists showed up.

Hecatia Lapislazuli: Goddess of Hell, presumably the Greek Hecate. Necessary to Junko’s plans because she has unlimited fairy minions and can freely travel to the Dream World and harass the Lunarians there with more lifeforce (since Junko predicted they’d run there). She can freely travel to the Dream World because she has three bodies in three worlds at the same time (the Moon, the Earth, and the Spirit/Dream World). She agreed to help Junko out of sympathy for what she lost, and also because Chang’e’s husband shot down the sun way back when, which hurts Hell goddesses because you need light to have shadow. Also she’s related to Apollo, who is also the sun, so there’s some weird multicultural crossover myth vengeance going on.

"I must say that I am a bit disappointed with the full game especially since the demo seemed so promising.
This game was rushed and it most definitely shows. The game is very unbalanced, has many uninspired patterns and has numerous issues with it.

Before release, ZUN released a demo update that changed the chapter bonuses in Legacy mode to life pieces instead of bomb pieces. This changed the game drastically since you could get maximum lives at the stage 3 boss now. ZUN said at the time that he would fix the demo's lives issue in the final version but instead he made it even worse.
Instead of 5 life pieces it now requires 3 to get an extra life which means you can get max lives as early as the stage 2 boss now.
I can't even imagine how many resources you can get in the game once people actually start to develop routes for it.
I played terribly for the first three stages and I still got max lives by the end of the third stage.

Sanae's bomb is really good because she can graze bullets during her invincibility time, this helps a lot to get the amount of graze to pass the chapter bonuses. During some hard attacks you actually get rewarded for bombing since normally you don't get enough graze to pass the bonus for them.

A lot of patterns feel like they were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced with real patterns later down the line but he apparently ran out of time.
The final boss fires tons of patterns that are just bland rings of bullets, which is the first thing you learn to code in Danmakufu.
Tons and tons of patterns in the game become incredibly stupid if the boss moves low on the screen. In SA there was one attack that had this issue but now there are like 20 of them.
One of the spellcards of the stage 4 boss seems impossible to capture with Sanae because her shot makes the bombs explode right in front and next to her.
Speaking of unbalanced in a different way, the stage 5 boss final on Lunatic feels like a Normal pattern.
I was quite shocked by the final boss because it really is bad, it has no fun patterns to dodge and instead is obsessed with shooting bland sets of rings at you that require bullshit pixel-perfect micro-dodging to get past.
I don't really know why ZUN does this since theoretically he should have all the time in the world to make a game and not have to rush something half-baked like this out of the door.

On a more positive note he seems to have fixed the addictive blending mess of the stage 2 boss final which I can appreciate.

Yeah it's one of the hardest in the series but maybe not for all the right reasons."

I'm seeing lots of talk about tons of trial-and-error gameplay and some people find that the simple-but-difficult gimmick the final boss (or at least the way it's implemented) has is anticlimactic \ boring.

I have seen a playthrough of the game and I do agree that it seems to be the hardest game in the series thus far, even if it does hand out extra lives like candy on Halloween.

It's been a while. The weather over here has suddenly gotten hotter.
On the last day of Golden Week (May 7), I will also be participating in Reitaisai.

The work I'll be presenting this time is below.
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Touhou Project 16th
　「東方天空璋 (Touhou Tenkuushou) ～ Hidden Star in Four Seasons.」

I'll be selling the trial version at Reitaisai (if I make it in time). The full version is planned for Summer Comiket.
Please speculate about the story from the screenshots. Doing a 180 from the last work, I'm going for a really light and refreshing feeling, I guess?

The protagonists this time are; Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, Tanned Cirno, and Aya Shameimaru.
What kind of adventure is this even supposed to turn into, I wonder.

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Something like this.
Right now I'm in crunch time, so the screenshots are highly likely to change, but it'll probably stay an STG.
I'd sure like to release the demo for Reitaisai.

This time I'd like to return to my roots with something that simply aims to make you feel good to play. No twists; the somewhat fabled "ordinary STG" might be the thing we need right now!

And with that, IT'S TENKUUSHOU-TIME!

Etarnity Larva (Yes, her name is actually spelled like that in-game.) [Butterfly Fairy]

EDIT: Some of the translators are arguing that the above is a genuine typo and not a deliberate misspelling. Evidence is that her name is misspelled in a different way in the manual that comes with the demo (Etanity Larva) and that there's nothing in the way her name is written in Japanese to indicate any kind of unusual spelling. Her name seems like it should just be Eternity Larva after all.

Nemuno Sakata [Mountain Hag]

Aunn Komano [Komainu]