So thanks to @Rudie , I finally have the Aleste Collection, and I just 1cc’ed GG Aleste, and man that game rules.
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Despite being over a decade old, it was only today that I learned that someone made a Touhou clone of Mars Matrix.
And it’s great.
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These Cave flip phone ports are cute.
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I’ve been playing this game casually for at least a decade and a half but this is the first time where I’m ready to call Touhou: Phantasmogoria Of Flower View my favourite videogame. Building from Twinkle Star Sprites and ZUN’s own emulation in Phantasmogoria Of Dimension Dream, this game manages to somehow fuse the best elements of the danmaku genre that preceded it with a versus style that somehow dodges the repetition of even the best shmup’s shelf life (Rather than 5 stages you have 16 characters and 120 combinations of said matches).
Matches then range between complete washes and escalations that can last for tens of minutes as combos build up to unwieldly levels even by genre standards. It also helps that as a Touhou game there’s also a special care placed to the presentation itself as ZUN’s one real attempt at fanservice in his entire career (can you imagine anything else having this as a bullet hell theme?).
My biggest complaint about the game is that in order to achieve this you can really feel that ZUN had to dial down the difficulty. His use of scintillating light shows is second to none (something that always bothered me about CAVE’s work) but I can barely get through regular touhou’s on normal and can 1CC this on occasions due to the constraints of balancing various CPU patterns, which is understandable when you’re only selling triple digits of these at anime festivals but can be a tad disappointing playing this game as long as I have.
Anyway, last week I found out about ultra mode.
Watching gameplay you can see that high level chains are formed almost as soon as the rounds start, turning split second decisions into nanoseconds. This also lets the charge gauge play more significantly as camping for spell attacks is made less viable when the screen never gives you a safe path to wave through (bombs as necessity have never been better appreciated here outside of Psikyo second loops). This ricochet effect also increases the games tempo in a way that makes it exciting but never unplayable in ways that contemporaries have always struggled to balance (hell I managed to get to the final level with only a few blisters on my hands.)
Given the capacity of multiplayer, it’s a real shame that a successor is looking unlikely. ZUN released this on the series 10th anniversary as a cap before moving to Mountain Of Faith and hasn’t noted any desire to return to it. Nine mainline games have since been released and the idea of a Marvel Vs Capcom 2 / R Type Final level of characters is something I think only this series would be able to pull off. Alas, I’m still playing this 15 years later and that’s not going to stop any time soon.
Also, I really like the ending of this game. ZUN uses a really lovely watercolour effect for all the endings and the blotchy colours on the character outlines stenciled on a flower parchment gives a warmth after the games intensity that feels really pleasant as a cool down and as a style that he’d never reuse again. (The way the game’s credits freeze on the “and you” statement in the special thanks statement as the music quiets down really gets to me as well Touhou Windows Run - Phantasmagoria of Flower View - Credits - YouTube)
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Not officially but some fans modded it in! (https://aminoapps.com/c/touhou-project/page/blog/touhou-9-pofv-netplay-guide/r08z_LrNteuEnJdn8xPQrQz2ljmxlebXnN) I only play CPU & with friends because i’m Bad but there’s still an active community
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They should really call it Espgaluda 3 at this point
this is my first time playing galuda 2 but it stands out more to me than galuda 1, which never grabbed me. i enjoyed my quick novice mode clear earlier. maybe i will figure out these systems:
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got my first 1cc ever, mushihimesama novice/original. the babiest of baby steps but a step nonetheless! spending the past few months on and off banging my head against ketsui/ddp doj/espgaluda feels like it has tangibly paid off to some degree for the first time
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Hell yeah! Congrats!
I 1cced Espgaluda 2 Novice the other day and it felt good too.
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There’s a new video on M2’s Youtube with loads of footage of that Kyouyoku Tiger Heli collection. I won’t link it, it’s over two hours but here’s their page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1Yy0RpNVzDWFotP0ce2gLw
Does anyone have any experience with these games? They look pretty Raidenous. Might be a bit too old for me.
GG Aleste 2 and Power Strike 2 are real assaults on the senses huh?
and GG Aleste 3’s stages are too long (like all Aleste Games)
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GG Aleste 3 is great. I don’t think the stages are necessarily too long for the most part, though I can see it, but there are way too many of them. The 1cc of it is a marathon. It’s fun though.
GGA2/PS2 is probably the most difficult one there? I don’t know.
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Curious what you mean by this.
The stage length is too long = the game is too long?
or the stage length is too long, the games should be broken up into more and shorter stages?
When I’m playing games that are intended for a single sitting I consider the overall duration of a game and that’s an important part of the experience, but I don’t pay much attention to the duration of individual stages. I’m sure it has a subtle impact, but I don’t think about it usually.
For me GG Aleste and GG Aleste 2 were both good snappy short games.
MUSHA is longer, but the extended length doesn’t feel out of place, it feels like the right length for it. For me GG Aleste, GG Aleste 2, and MUSHA are three Aleste games that are about the right duration for what they are. Not sure if that speaks to what you are talking about or not though. I haven’t really given any thought to how long individual stages were which might be the important bit.
I didn’t find GGA2 expressly difficult but i did find it kinda jank in comparison to the other 2 - its why i like 1 more (that and the more considered stage design).
GGA3 is really cool but stage 5 makes me motion sick so i don’t think i’ll ever see beyond there. I don’t really begrudge the stage length but it would be nice if challenge mode subdivided them into 1a/midboss/1b/boss instead of stage/boss.
Have developed a serious respect for espgaluda2 but am frankly way too weak to play it. I’m satisfied having more or less understood the function (though not quite the execution) of its arcane multi stage mode-switching, bullet speed-manipulating, score-multiplying gem and gold economy, having witnessed the splendour of its character select screen, having had my handful of triumphant impossible pattern dodge streaks. Mostly it’s made me even more in love with esp ra.de., which is a sensationally enjoyable 3 stage shootingame for the normal human that i am (i will never beat stage 4).
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i recently picked up esp.ra.de after not having played it for years, and it’s nice to see how much i’ve progressed in the time between. it was one of my most played games in mame on my first pc back in 2005, but i struggled to get past the second boss. now i can get through the entire first two stages on a signle life, and sometimes even stage 3 too!
of course, i get wrecked immediately upon entering stage 4 though lol
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If this is zetsushikai: hold awakening when you have green and gold to make every enemy kill erase bullets, but also multiply them and give you combo for it. It ends up filling the screen with garbage lol. If you are close to bullets as you kill and trigger the erase/multiply, they are often erased completely.
You use it when you come to an area of a stage with lots of little guys because it racks the points up real quick.
I have also been deep into espgaluda 2 switch. I 1cced novice original with each fighter type first try, which felt really good. Was flying to BC and each run was one leg of my journey lol
Current high score in novice original is 259.8m
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Missed it earlier this week and haven’t tried it yet, but NGDEV’s upgraded Switch port of their 2014 (un-dumped) Neogeo-only release Razion is available now.
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