Post by CountVonNumenor on Nov 18, 2021 0:21:36 GMT
(I have moved the thread from The Lounge thanks to the proposal of Javier; however, now I do not know how to delete it from there)
I have been playing Touhou LW Global since day 1. I have never played a gacha game before, and never intended to do so due to me despising the genre and its way of working. However, I got hooked by this one mostly due to being Touhou themed I guess, and so stuck with it. In a way, it is sad that my only exposure to fan games has been a gacha out of anything, but I still play it because 1) it is free (unless you start whaling) and 2) there are a lot of characters you can get
Originally created as a thread on the Touhou community subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/qvf6v6/personal_experience_with_touhou_lost_word_part_1/
Note: I am very curious about getting into fan games due to me being an utter disaster even on easy mode at what is considered to be the most forgiving Touhou game, Perfect Cherry Blossom. If you know any other good fan game that has decent or good graphics, allows you to play with a variety of Touhou characters, is free or at least not very expensive and maybe has a good soundtrack too, feel free to tell me.
Anyway, back to Lost Word. The game has been rather fun until recently, when I honestly started feeling like having a sort of love-hate relationship with it. Thee are a few things now, 6 months after release that I would like to talk about from my own experience with it, and will probably split it into 2 or 3 parts. Today, I will be talking about the experience of collecting characters, what has been added into the game and how they did it.
I swear, one day really need to start a thread about Touhou Project as both a bullet hell series of games and extremely vast fandom that can take you down a deep rabbit hole into an actually interesting lore based on tons of cultural, folklore and religious references, tons of awesome fan, art, music remixes, fa-made games, comics and do on. This series actually made me curious about the whole concept of vertical scrolling Shmup games.
Note 2: I could have uploaded this thread on the dedicated subreddit, but I felt this would be a more suited place because of more balanced views, as well as this placing lacking that feeling people will defend NN no matter what decisions they would make and censor what I will say in here.
Anyway, one of the big problems in recent times has been related to the numerous complains regrading the higher pace at which LW Global works, trying to catch up with the JP version. They imagine we can catch up with a game that had a 1 year head start from the global version, and so many are frustrated about the quick pace of adding new things (which I will talk about when getting to the characters part). We are literally getting right now on the Global version characters that have barely been released on JP mere weeks or even days ago, thinking we can still get them as f2p-ers when the resources needed for getting them have been lowered. I do not want all of them, but I am highly concerned some of those I actually really want will be chained one after another.
People have been complaining that that game is slowly become less f2p than it was, while others vehemently saying that LW is still one of the most f2p-friendly gacha games out there. Could it be about the reduced company earnings on October? I have seen the discussion on the LW subreddit a few times already, and they said the game only earned 200K (dollars I assume) compared to the 500K in the first month since release.
But I do agree with the idea that the rhythm of deploying new festivals and super festivals in Global has been a little quick. And then here come the apologists if you say this on that subreddit, saying that you do not need to have every characters, especially is you are a f2p player or that ”you just need to know how to control yourself in totally not gambling praying, anon”.
Right now, I am honestly struggling to get Iku purely because she is among my favourite Touhou characters, but feel too scared to pull over the 20 attempts from until now, and feel even more scared that more of my favourites (Yuuka, Hecatia, Raiko and Eiki) are rumored to be added soon into Global as well. I have skipped (and plan to skip) all the new mecha characters since I am not a fan of their aesthetic that for me no longer looks like Touhou, but rather generic gacha (despite Mecha-Marisa being described as the most powerful unit ever added in LW Global), as well as the smol/chibi alts and EoSD alts (seriously though, why do so many alts exists when they could just be skins for already existent characters like they did with the school outfits thing from the first story chapter?).
This would be a situation of my top 10 Touhou characters, and how they would fit into the game situation (stats combining info from both JP and Global):
*For anyone unaware, a FES (or Festival) unit is a time-limited unit you can get from special gacha compared to the normal units from general pool. They are usually better (with some exceptions) than regular units, and their FES banner may come back months later after their first time-limited event.
A man just wants to play this game for the sake of collecting his favourite characters from the lore. Especially now that I have come to the conclusion I would rather collect waifus the series instead of just going for the strongest of the meta (there is the classic saying of waifu > meta).
Also, about the rush, since I think it was one of the reasons for adding alts (that, and likely gacha greed). I think both JP and Global just rushed their character releases. Had everything been done at a slower pace, there would have still been plenty of those over 140+ characters (low estimation) Touhou has to be released, and would have taken longer until they got to the need to actually create repainted, mecha/Arknight, loli or basically reskin alts as characters. And they you realize even on JP they still have to add characters from TH17 to the pool and have not touched TH18 at all.
Lets take an example. Here is the number of alts Marisa has up this point (again, putting together everything we know to already be or come soon in both JP ang Global versions):
normal Marisa Kirisame
Scarlet Witch Marisa Kirisame
Mecha/Arknights Marisa Kirisame
EoSD Marisa Kirisame
PC-98 Marisa Kirisame
Besides the normal Marisa, each of the other ones are a different character (since LW goes with the idea of travelling in alternate worlds). However, instead of making them just costumes you could get for the normal Marisa, they have decided to split it into multiple versions of her you need to pray for if you like Marisa and want all of her versions. Insert here ”what flavour of X do you prefer”. I am not angry or revolted about it, but more like confused why this exists, which most likely related to exhausting too quickly the supply of characters the original games have.
They have also done something like this for my favourite Youmu, splitting her into normal, Hisoutensoku palette swap Mysterious Swordswoman Youmu, Mecha Youmu and PCB Youmu as for now.
But as I said, I think a lot of stuff came too quickly, and so lead to quickly running out of 2hus to add, and so invent things out of the blue. Some may think that a slower pace in adding new characters would just make the game boring and, you guessed it, slow paced, but at least it would take you more time until running dry of characters to add. Touhou in itself is not a series in which you could randomly pop up OCs like other gachas, so managing how you are going to spread the release of new 2hus out of a pool of over 100 characters for a decently long amount of time should be more of a priority. Or at least should have been... PC-98 characters could have also been option, but with the rumoured retro Reimu and Marisa alts incoming, idk.
Just my two cents on the characters and alts problem
If anyone has confusions regarding any of the words, terms and ideas I have talked about, especially related to actual Touhou content, I am very happy to respond. I feel like I have found a place that managed to help me be happy and pass over the hardships of the past year, while also motivating me to improve on things like drawing and even strengthen my friendship with my best friend irl
I have been playing Touhou LW Global since day 1. I have never played a gacha game before, and never intended to do so due to me despising the genre and its way of working. However, I got hooked by this one mostly due to being Touhou themed I guess, and so stuck with it. In a way, it is sad that my only exposure to fan games has been a gacha out of anything, but I still play it because 1) it is free (unless you start whaling) and 2) there are a lot of characters you can get
Originally created as a thread on the Touhou community subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/qvf6v6/personal_experience_with_touhou_lost_word_part_1/
Note: I am very curious about getting into fan games due to me being an utter disaster even on easy mode at what is considered to be the most forgiving Touhou game, Perfect Cherry Blossom. If you know any other good fan game that has decent or good graphics, allows you to play with a variety of Touhou characters, is free or at least not very expensive and maybe has a good soundtrack too, feel free to tell me.
Anyway, back to Lost Word. The game has been rather fun until recently, when I honestly started feeling like having a sort of love-hate relationship with it. Thee are a few things now, 6 months after release that I would like to talk about from my own experience with it, and will probably split it into 2 or 3 parts. Today, I will be talking about the experience of collecting characters, what has been added into the game and how they did it.
I swear, one day really need to start a thread about Touhou Project as both a bullet hell series of games and extremely vast fandom that can take you down a deep rabbit hole into an actually interesting lore based on tons of cultural, folklore and religious references, tons of awesome fan, art, music remixes, fa-made games, comics and do on. This series actually made me curious about the whole concept of vertical scrolling Shmup games.
Note 2: I could have uploaded this thread on the dedicated subreddit, but I felt this would be a more suited place because of more balanced views, as well as this placing lacking that feeling people will defend NN no matter what decisions they would make and censor what I will say in here.
Anyway, one of the big problems in recent times has been related to the numerous complains regrading the higher pace at which LW Global works, trying to catch up with the JP version. They imagine we can catch up with a game that had a 1 year head start from the global version, and so many are frustrated about the quick pace of adding new things (which I will talk about when getting to the characters part). We are literally getting right now on the Global version characters that have barely been released on JP mere weeks or even days ago, thinking we can still get them as f2p-ers when the resources needed for getting them have been lowered. I do not want all of them, but I am highly concerned some of those I actually really want will be chained one after another.
People have been complaining that that game is slowly become less f2p than it was, while others vehemently saying that LW is still one of the most f2p-friendly gacha games out there. Could it be about the reduced company earnings on October? I have seen the discussion on the LW subreddit a few times already, and they said the game only earned 200K (dollars I assume) compared to the 500K in the first month since release.
But I do agree with the idea that the rhythm of deploying new festivals and super festivals in Global has been a little quick. And then here come the apologists if you say this on that subreddit, saying that you do not need to have every characters, especially is you are a f2p player or that ”you just need to know how to control yourself in totally not gambling praying, anon”.
Right now, I am honestly struggling to get Iku purely because she is among my favourite Touhou characters, but feel too scared to pull over the 20 attempts from until now, and feel even more scared that more of my favourites (Yuuka, Hecatia, Raiko and Eiki) are rumored to be added soon into Global as well. I have skipped (and plan to skip) all the new mecha characters since I am not a fan of their aesthetic that for me no longer looks like Touhou, but rather generic gacha (despite Mecha-Marisa being described as the most powerful unit ever added in LW Global), as well as the smol/chibi alts and EoSD alts (seriously though, why do so many alts exists when they could just be skins for already existent characters like they did with the school outfits thing from the first story chapter?).
This would be a situation of my top 10 Touhou characters, and how they would fit into the game situation (stats combining info from both JP and Global):
1. Youmu Konpaku - already have her
2. Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu - FES (JP-only yet)
3. Raiko Horikawa - normal prayer (JP-only yet)
4. Mayumi Joutouguu - not yet in JP
5. Hieda no Akyuu - already have her
6. Yuuka Kazami - FES (JP-only yet)
7. Junko - FES (JP-only yet)
8. Maribel Hearn - most likely forever NPC (recently appeared in additional Hifuun / Lunar War storyline though together with Renko)
9. Iku Nagae - FES (introduced yesterday on Global)
10. Hecatia - FES (JP-only yet)
2. Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu - FES (JP-only yet)
3. Raiko Horikawa - normal prayer (JP-only yet)
4. Mayumi Joutouguu - not yet in JP
5. Hieda no Akyuu - already have her
6. Yuuka Kazami - FES (JP-only yet)
7. Junko - FES (JP-only yet)
8. Maribel Hearn - most likely forever NPC (recently appeared in additional Hifuun / Lunar War storyline though together with Renko)
9. Iku Nagae - FES (introduced yesterday on Global)
10. Hecatia - FES (JP-only yet)
*For anyone unaware, a FES (or Festival) unit is a time-limited unit you can get from special gacha compared to the normal units from general pool. They are usually better (with some exceptions) than regular units, and their FES banner may come back months later after their first time-limited event.
A man just wants to play this game for the sake of collecting his favourite characters from the lore. Especially now that I have come to the conclusion I would rather collect waifus the series instead of just going for the strongest of the meta (there is the classic saying of waifu > meta).
Also, about the rush, since I think it was one of the reasons for adding alts (that, and likely gacha greed). I think both JP and Global just rushed their character releases. Had everything been done at a slower pace, there would have still been plenty of those over 140+ characters (low estimation) Touhou has to be released, and would have taken longer until they got to the need to actually create repainted, mecha/Arknight, loli or basically reskin alts as characters. And they you realize even on JP they still have to add characters from TH17 to the pool and have not touched TH18 at all.
Lets take an example. Here is the number of alts Marisa has up this point (again, putting together everything we know to already be or come soon in both JP ang Global versions):
normal Marisa Kirisame
Scarlet Witch Marisa Kirisame
Mecha/Arknights Marisa Kirisame
EoSD Marisa Kirisame
PC-98 Marisa Kirisame
Besides the normal Marisa, each of the other ones are a different character (since LW goes with the idea of travelling in alternate worlds). However, instead of making them just costumes you could get for the normal Marisa, they have decided to split it into multiple versions of her you need to pray for if you like Marisa and want all of her versions. Insert here ”what flavour of X do you prefer”. I am not angry or revolted about it, but more like confused why this exists, which most likely related to exhausting too quickly the supply of characters the original games have.
They have also done something like this for my favourite Youmu, splitting her into normal, Hisoutensoku palette swap Mysterious Swordswoman Youmu, Mecha Youmu and PCB Youmu as for now.
But as I said, I think a lot of stuff came too quickly, and so lead to quickly running out of 2hus to add, and so invent things out of the blue. Some may think that a slower pace in adding new characters would just make the game boring and, you guessed it, slow paced, but at least it would take you more time until running dry of characters to add. Touhou in itself is not a series in which you could randomly pop up OCs like other gachas, so managing how you are going to spread the release of new 2hus out of a pool of over 100 characters for a decently long amount of time should be more of a priority. Or at least should have been... PC-98 characters could have also been option, but with the rumoured retro Reimu and Marisa alts incoming, idk.
Just my two cents on the characters and alts problem
If anyone has confusions regarding any of the words, terms and ideas I have talked about, especially related to actual Touhou content, I am very happy to respond. I feel like I have found a place that managed to help me be happy and pass over the hardships of the past year, while also motivating me to improve on things like drawing and even strengthen my friendship with my best friend irl
