KirbyComment | Violet Disaster @KirbyComment | Uploaded August 2018 | Updated October 2024, 5 hours ago.
It shouldn't be any surprise that so far this is the worst Touhou game.
Just to sum up my experiences on it for the 7 hours I played and what's wrong with it:
- Tapping focus to aim at the boss disables your ability to take a photo at all
- Holding Shift and the photo button allows you to be in charge speed in all other photo games, but in VD; as soon as you get 100% charge, you lose the ability to use charge speed and even holding focus allows you to take the photo. This means that more often than not your deaths may very well be caused by the change in movement speed you can't stop from happening
- Triggering a photo has delay and doesn't slow the game down. In fact I've seen it speed up in a few cases
- The teleport mechanic is super-awful. The inputs are autistic and almost no pattern is designed with it in mind, except for the ones that are absolutely impossible without it. The scenes where the teleporting is required, it's really hard even using it correctly, due to it requiring double tapping to activate. To top it off, in the heat of the moment that you're in need to do alot of dodging, you can easily accidentally make the teleport activate by accident, resulting in death.
- Clear quantity over quality; a wide range of the Touhou cast appears, but no single pattern is creative and all reused from other games. The third week also has 2 bosses on every scene, but every unique boss uses the same pattern over and over. They are randomly placed with another boss in one scene, providing little to no variety
- Since patterns are all reused from other games, they totally aren't made with photo-play in mind, meaning making high scoring photos is close to impossible on half of the scenes in the game, since they all force you to stay low
- Difficulty balance is all over the place. The scenes in Wrong-Saturday are the worst offenders of high difficulty, despite being situated in week 2 out of the 3 in the game. The plot-relevant scenes by comparison are a complete non-issue. And no, the tedium in the week 3 scenes does not count towards the difficulty of those scenes; it's artificial difficulty
- Retrying by pressing R breaks the game, making it extremely scoring-unfriendly
- The most recent games had this nice addition of instantly canceling bullets when the boss dies. This is not the case in this game, which has caused me to die while the boss was already dead many times, including the scene in this video, doing it the exact same way
- The duo boss patterns, which there are ALOT of, are all extremely tedious, even with speedkilling strats. Too much HP with usually not much going on so it's a drag. This is also because alot of them force you to stay low, making you unable to make photos of the boss to speed up the process
- Replays imply to allow for 12 characters even though you can only insert 8 when saving a replay. Good programming ZUN. At least it does allow for 25 replays because in DS it didn't do that right either.
Having said these things, this is definitely the most bottom-tier Touhou. Worse than TD, ISC, SA and the commonly hated SoEW, yes! I suppose that's what happens when your main character is from a fangame.
I might score a few worthwhile scenes once the mechanics are figured out and getting the 3 nicknames I'm missing, but once that's done, I'm never touching this travesty of a game again.
It shouldn't be any surprise that so far this is the worst Touhou game.
Just to sum up my experiences on it for the 7 hours I played and what's wrong with it:
- Tapping focus to aim at the boss disables your ability to take a photo at all
- Holding Shift and the photo button allows you to be in charge speed in all other photo games, but in VD; as soon as you get 100% charge, you lose the ability to use charge speed and even holding focus allows you to take the photo. This means that more often than not your deaths may very well be caused by the change in movement speed you can't stop from happening
- Triggering a photo has delay and doesn't slow the game down. In fact I've seen it speed up in a few cases
- The teleport mechanic is super-awful. The inputs are autistic and almost no pattern is designed with it in mind, except for the ones that are absolutely impossible without it. The scenes where the teleporting is required, it's really hard even using it correctly, due to it requiring double tapping to activate. To top it off, in the heat of the moment that you're in need to do alot of dodging, you can easily accidentally make the teleport activate by accident, resulting in death.
- Clear quantity over quality; a wide range of the Touhou cast appears, but no single pattern is creative and all reused from other games. The third week also has 2 bosses on every scene, but every unique boss uses the same pattern over and over. They are randomly placed with another boss in one scene, providing little to no variety
- Since patterns are all reused from other games, they totally aren't made with photo-play in mind, meaning making high scoring photos is close to impossible on half of the scenes in the game, since they all force you to stay low
- Difficulty balance is all over the place. The scenes in Wrong-Saturday are the worst offenders of high difficulty, despite being situated in week 2 out of the 3 in the game. The plot-relevant scenes by comparison are a complete non-issue. And no, the tedium in the week 3 scenes does not count towards the difficulty of those scenes; it's artificial difficulty
- Retrying by pressing R breaks the game, making it extremely scoring-unfriendly
- The most recent games had this nice addition of instantly canceling bullets when the boss dies. This is not the case in this game, which has caused me to die while the boss was already dead many times, including the scene in this video, doing it the exact same way
- The duo boss patterns, which there are ALOT of, are all extremely tedious, even with speedkilling strats. Too much HP with usually not much going on so it's a drag. This is also because alot of them force you to stay low, making you unable to make photos of the boss to speed up the process
- Replays imply to allow for 12 characters even though you can only insert 8 when saving a replay. Good programming ZUN. At least it does allow for 25 replays because in DS it didn't do that right either.
Having said these things, this is definitely the most bottom-tier Touhou. Worse than TD, ISC, SA and the commonly hated SoEW, yes! I suppose that's what happens when your main character is from a fangame.
I might score a few worthwhile scenes once the mechanics are figured out and getting the 3 nicknames I'm missing, but once that's done, I'm never touching this travesty of a game again.
