start date: 8/15/23
normal 1cc: 8/15/23
written: 8/15/23
another day, another touhou off the list, although this time its far from being an easy experience.
nina's thoughts on Touhou 15 - Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom
Legacy of Duelist Kingdom features Yugi and the boys back at it again to defeat Pegasus! wait, thats not right... Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom features Reimu and the girls back at it again to defeat... somebody! LoLK is a very unique entry, having one of the biggest new 'gimmicks' of any of the touhous ive played so far.
LoLK's big new feature is a completely new way to play the game, the exciting PointDevice mode! (really just rolls off the tongue). as opposed to the standard touhou gameplay loop (which this game does have as well, under the name Legacy mode) PointDevice mode makes the game play sorta like doing a tool-assisted speedrun, apparently being inspired by I Wanna Be The Guy. in PointDevice mode, lives are removed, so if you get hit you're out, but as a tradeoff the game is filled with numerous checkpoints that you can infinitely continue from, for example pretty much every individual spellcard/phase of a boss is a unique checkpoint. this basically means you have infinite tries for every single spellcard but you HAVE to do each one no-hit (you get bombs to ocassionally cheat, but not very many and they never refresh since you never actually die).
this sounds like it would make the game super easy since you can just infinitely practice every section until you get it right, and you would be correct! unfortunately, ZUN was aware this made things easier, so the general difficulty of patterns and enemy spawns was jacked WAY up. i... really do not like this compromise. spellcards move way faster now and often require far greater perfection than usual once you get to the lategame, with multiple regular spellcards being pure survival sections where the boss is invincible, things usually reserved for climactic final phases. theres also a much higher amount of 'jumpscare' spellcards that suddenly kill you if you don't already know theyre coming, which in a normal run would be complete bs, only being justified here since you can just go again. ZUN definitely succeeded in making it feel like I Wanna Be The Guy, but thats not the kind of game i want to play. getting wiped by BS spellcards and having to do them over and over again got me genuinely mad at times, which has happened a few times in previous entries but it was typically me being mad at myself for screwing up, not being mad at the game itself like this one made me.
besides that, the gameplay is mostly similar to DDC, although once again they have changed how life/bomb pieces are dealt out. after each 'chapter' (basically wherever a checkpoint is in PointDevice mode) the game ranks you based on how many bullets you grazed multiplied by the % of enemies you killed, and if you got enough points you get a bomb piece in PointDevice mode, or a life piece in Legacy mode. this is probably my least favourite method of the ones that have been thrown around, since its really hard to organically tell when youve grazed enough, and during stages its hard to tell when a chapter will end. it incentivizes you to not kill enemies since you want more bullets to be onscreen so you can graze more, but at the same time if you miss killing an enemy and it goes off-screen then your chapter score goes down making the extra grazing still not add up, its a lose/lose either way.
for playable characters, we got Reimu and Marisa of course, Sanae is back (yay!), and Reisen appears as a playable character for the first time outside PoFV. Reimu and Marisa play exactly the same as their B movesets in DDC, so nothing new there. Sanae uses her two movesets from UFO but stapled together, so she shoots frogs unfocused and snakes while focused, which is maybe a bit lazy but i liked both of those weapons so im totally fine with it. Reisen has a strange weapon that has random angle spread shots unfocused, and heavy piercing vertical shots when focused. her most interesting feature though is her bomb, which gives you brief invincibility on activation, and then applies 3 shields to Reisen that block a death, although offer next to no i-frames. her bomb is probably really good in PointDevice mode, but i only had the patience to try that mode once and i went with Sanae. clearing PointDevice mode counts as a 1cc, even if its pretty much impossible to lose unless you just give up, but i dont think i care to try for a win in legacy mode. if you're curious. my retry total on my PointDevice run stacked up to 547 lol.
for the new characters, my favourite addition is probably
Clownpiece. more faeries are always good, and Clownpiece is a pretty interesting one since she's a Hell Fairy, whatever that means. for some reason shes themed after the USA, wearing a star-spangled jumpsuit and featuring the stars and stripes in her spell cards, and holding an eternally burning torch similar to the statue of liberty. the concept of the fairy of hell being an American clown who drives people insane is somehow kinda fitting lmao, even if its completely absurd.
besides Clownpiece, i can't say i really cared for the other characters. the rabbits and lunarians weren't very interesting to me in Imperishable Night and they still really aren't now. Doremy is intriguing, being a ruler of the Dream World, but her stage and fight really didn't sell me on the concept of it being a dream. if you took the dialogue out i dont think anyone would assume the level was supposed to be a dream reality instead of just, flying through real outer space to reach the moon.
so that was LoLK. definitely my least favourite one so far, and by a pretty wide margin. i like what ZUN was trying to do here, and maybe with better tuning PointDevice mode couldve been a really fun new way to play the game, but it just made the game a slog of trying nigh-impossible spellcards over and over again until you get it right. i might come back and try a 1cc on Legacy Mode, but having experienced how insane the lategame gets im not exactly chomping at the bit to go back for another round. this game almost feels like karmic punishment after i got a little too comfortable with the last 3 games. if theres one good thing about PointDevice mode, at least its that your victory is inevitable, so i can stop playing.
i hate for the tone of this review to be so negative, but i just did not have a good time with this one. i wanna do something to lighten the mood though, so heres a silly doodle of clownpiece i made in ms paint :P
