Touhou 13 ~ Ten Desires

[Yasu]

Discuss.
[spoiler=OMIGOSH MIMA IS]
Not the last boss.
*cackle* *cackle*
[/spoiler]

[Larxene]

I'm just going to copy/paste the rant I posted about it on the Nuzlocke forums.

[spoiler=SPOILER WARNING.]
Anyway, impressions on Touhou 13...
Overall? Huge letdown. For a variety of reasons.

But hey! Let's talk about the things I DID like before I get all pissed off about it!

First off, I'm really happy to see Youmu back as a playable character. Only problem, she completely sucks. At least for me anyway, but oh well. I'm just bitching there.
Additionally, it's nice seeing Yuyuko again, as well as Kogasa and Nue. A little bit disappointing that Yuyuko is a stage 1 boss, but I don't care too much really. The thing about that which IS annoying, is the fact that all the morons in the fanbase will now judge her based on what stage she appeared in, and not how strong she ACTUALLY is. I really hate those fuckasses who judge a character's strength based only on what stage they appear in.
Another nice thing about this game is the fact that SPELLCARD PRACTICE IS BACK. Seriously this was the best thing about IN, and I've been hoping that this would eventually be brought back. Hopefully this time it's here to stay. Annoyingly, it makes my game crash and freeze when I try to play spellcard practice, but I'll probably just have to find an alternate download somewhere. Mine wasn't very reliable.
The music of the first half of the game (as in the demo) was great. I particularly love Yoshika's theme.
Finally, I like some of the new characters. But I'll get to that later.

Now, for my rant about the many things I HATE about this game~

First off, Youmu SUCKS. I know, I already pointed this out, but I felt like I had to say it again. Just getting that out of the way first.
Second, Mima is NOT in this game. To be honest, I never expected her to be. ZUN is too much of a troll to ever bring her back. Every game from this point on is just going to keep hinting at her and hinting at her, but never bringing her back. All the signs from the demo pointed to Mima coming back. From Yuyuko's dialogue to just the premise of the game as a whole, all just one big f***ing tease. Mima was never going to be in the game, but all the morons of the fandom bought it anyway. ZUN just enjoys pissing off his fans, and I really hate him for it, even if I do love a lot of things about the series. I just don't like him as a person.
Moving on~ Most of the new characters SUCK. I said earlier that I liked some of them, and this is true. But the problem? The only ones I like are Kyouko and Yoshika. (I f***ing love Yoshika.) The stage 4 boss seems okay at best, I guess. I don't know enough about the stage 5 mid-boss yet to form an opinion. The stage 5 boss kind of sucks. And I like the final boss's design, but that is ruined by the fact that her power is f***ing STUPID.
Don't believe me?
Her power is the ability to listen to ten people at a time. As in, hold ten conversations at once.
Yeah. STUPID.
A perfectly good character completely ruined by just one of the stupidest powers I have ever heard of.
Moving on to the Extra Boss. She is just the biggest disappointment of all. First off, she does NOT look like an Extra Boss. At all. She's a f***ing tanooki. A raccoon. Yeah, NOT EX boss worthy at all. She looks like a stage 2 or 3 boss AT BEST. (Personally I'd call her a stage 1 boss along the lines of Nazrin.) Also she is a complete ripoff of that one character from that fangame Deified Submarine Palace or something. You know ZUN is really running out of ideas when he has to rip off of fangames.
Hey ZUN, newsflash.
If you can't come up with any decent new characters, BRING BACK SOME f***ing OLD ONES. PLEASE YOUR GODDAMN FANS FOR ONCE.
Next up, the music. Normally you can always count on ZUN to create great, and memorable music for every Touhou game. Up until now that has always been the case. But hey you know, I LOVED the music in the demo, you'd think the rest of the game would be just as great, right? Well, it wasn't.
In fact, after stage 4, the music REALLY went downhill in quality. Especially the final boss themes and EX boss themes. If you don't believe me, you can listen to them for yourselves.
I'm not saying they're HORRIBLE, but they are just not up to par with the other final and extra boss themes of previous games. Not at all. The final boss theme in particular just does not sound like a final boss theme by Touhou standards, or ANY standards.
Enough on the music though, let's get down to the last thing on my list. The gameplay itself.
This was a problem I had noticed in the demo itself, but I ignored it because I figured that it would've been fixed by the time the final game came out. (Like was the case with UFO, which I had found to be ridiculous during the demo.)
Unfortunately, it wasn't. See, I wasn't too found of the UFO gimmick in the previous game either. However, I adjusted to it and was able to highly use it to my advantage. It was at least a somewhat interesting concept if nothing else.
With Ten Desires however... It's just stupid.
From what I noticed playing through the game, the spellcards and patterns are not all that difficult. Yet it's probably one of the hardest games in the series for all the wrong reasons. It's just fake difficulty.
If you want extra lives or bombs, then you have to get RIGHT UP IN THE BOSS'S f***ing FACE to get those extra life and bomb fragments. They no longer fall down toward you like normal power ups and point blocks. They just float there in place directly beside the boss until they eventually fade away. Sure, you can get a few during the stages as well, but if you were to completely ignore all the ones dropped by bosses and only got ones obtained during the stages, you would get one extra life at most probably. All of my deaths in my entire run against bosses were from the boss ramming into me as I tried to pick up those goddamn extra life pieces. I did have a few in-stage deaths of course, but you know what? Those were for the same reason. Trying to pick up extra lives from the top of the goddamn screen when an enemy randomly showed up and rammed into me.
At least with UFO you only had to worry about the UFOs during the stage, not against the bosses. UFO had some tough spellcards actually, and was a legitimately hard game. In fact after I had gotten used to it, it became one of my favorites in the Windows series of games. But you didn't have to constantly hover around the boss trying to collect pieces of extra lives so you could actually STAY ALIVE throughout the course of the game. And that's where Ten Desires really f***ing sucks.

tl;dr version: Ten Desires is the worst Touhou game in the Windows series since Shoot the Bullet. (I liked Double Spoiler. Just not StB.)
In fact, if it weren't for the fact that HRtP and SoEW were so broken gameplay-wise, Ten Desires would be THE WORST by far of every official Touhou game.
At least HRtP and SoEW had awesome music, and introduced us to two great characters.
Reimu and Mima.
Not Marisa. Marisa f***ing sucks.
[/spoiler]

[Great Unclean One: VK]

Never played it but from what I've seen of my friends it doesn't seem as good as the other ones.

[manji]

honestly im surprise that there is some sort of following of touhou on here. be that as it may i enjoyed the game got it the moment the downloads were up which was like saterday at midnight.