Info about 東方獣王園 〜 Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost.:

Official game description:
東方Project第19弾
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上海アリス幻樂団による対戦型弾幕シューティング！  
東方Project第9弾「東方花映塚」を踏襲した画面構成ですが、  
操作感や弾幕感はいつもの東方に近くなる様にシステムを再構築しています。  
常にアドリブ的な避け方を強いられるスピーディな対戦ゲームで、  
簡単に言うと、東方力が高い人ほど有利なゲームになっています。  
大量のストーリーモードは、対戦モードとはやや別のシステムで一人プレイで楽しめます。  
COM対戦も出来ますので、お友達がいなくても安心です。
〜 ストーリー 〜
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　市場が開かれた影響で、古の土地の所有権が無に帰した。  
　所有者を失った土地は荒んでいくだろう。  
　だが、心配することはない。  
　自然と霊達が土地に取憑いていき、いつも通りの窮屈さを取り戻すのだから。  
　そこに欲深き獣たちがいなければ話だが……

Release date: 13 авг. 2023 г.

Categories: Competitive Multiplayer, Bullet-hell, Single-player Story, Character Progression, Card-based Gameplay, Boss Fights


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Highly enjoyable and content-rich (weight 0.99): Players find the game incredibly fun, engaging, and a strong entry in the series, often praising its unique gameplay, extensive content, and high replayability. It's considered a satisfying experience for both newcomers and Touhou fans, offering a forgiving yet challenging experience across difficulties.
- Diverse, engaging character roster (weight 0.47): The game features an impressively large roster of 19 playable characters, including both new and beloved returning ones. Players appreciate the unique designs, distinct playstyles, and strong personalities of each character, contributing to replayability and overall enjoyment.
- Phenomenal and varied music (weight 0.32): The game's soundtrack receives widespread acclaim for its phenomenal quality, catchy melodies, and excellent arrangements of older themes. Players highlight the experimental nature of new tracks and how the music effectively conveys character images and enhances the overall experience.
- ZUN's refined artistic vision (weight 0.23): ZUN's creative direction is highly praised, with players noting significant improvements in the art style and character portraits. The music is also highlighted for its experimental nature and quality, demonstrating ZUN's continued skill and ambition. The story is considered one of his best.
- Engaging and rich storyline (weight 0.23): The game's story is consistently praised for being delightful, exhilarating, and deeply interesting. Players appreciate the well-crafted narrative, unexpected character interactions, and the way it explores relationships and reveals new facts within the game world.
- Improved gameplay over PoFV (weight 0.18): The game is seen as a significant evolution and enhancement of the Phantasmagoria of Flower View style. Players specifically praise the improved aura mechanics, shield system, and a more refined, less luck-based story mode gameplay.
- Robust, customizable VS Mode (weight 0.1): The game's versus mode is a welcome feature, offering highly customizable game rules and settings. Players find it a significant improvement over previous VS mode games, enhancing replayability and casual multiplayer fun.
- Satisfying spiritual power mechanics (weight 0.09): Players find it very satisfying to utilize full spiritual power to blast bosses' ultimate spell cards at close range, often leading to quick kills. This mechanic makes combat feel rewarding and allows for strategic engagement.

Common complaints:
- Poor Game Balance & Polish (weight 0.87): The game suffers from significant balance issues, including character disparities where many feel underpowered or overpowered. Many players perceive the game as unfinished, lacking polish, and missing expected features, which negatively impacts the overall experience and justifies a perceived high price. Story mode also has balance problems, often favoring defensive characters over offensive ones.
- Unplayable Online Multiplayer (weight 0.73): The online multiplayer is severely hampered by frequent desyncs, game-breaking bugs, and severe lag, leading to extremely low frame rates and connection issues. Many players find it unplayable, describing it as 'broken' or 'rotten to the core,' indicating a fundamental flaw in its implementation.
- Key Features Are Missing (weight 0.4): The game conspicuously lacks several features considered standard or essential for its genre, such as a scoring system, replay functionality, and an extra stage. This absence significantly diminishes competitive replayability and the overall sense of completeness for many players.
- Uninspired Bullet Patterns (weight 0.35): The bullet patterns are frequently described as boring, slow, and overly simplistic, often reusing old designs without innovation. This contributes to a less engaging single-player experience, with some patterns being particularly frustrating or feeling like 'mindless bullet clusters'.
- Disappointing Series Entry (weight 0.25): Many players feel this game is a significant step down, potentially the worst mainline Touhou title, repeating errors from previous installments like Touhou 18.5. It's perceived as lacking the depth, replayability, and beauty of other games in the series, leading to disappointment among long-time fans.
- Flawed Card System (weight 0.21): The card system feels forced, stale, and generally unhelpful, often offering only passive cards without meaningful choices or impactful upgrades. This system frequently relies on bad RNG and fails to provide substantial advantages, leading to many characters feeling weak without specific card options.
- Tedious Character Roster (weight 0.09): The process of unlocking characters is seen as time-consuming and repetitive, leading to a sense of tedium. Despite a large roster, many characters are considered uninteresting, poorly designed, or have terrible mechanics, resulting in a bloated list with limited actual playability.

Gameplay feedback:
- Competitive bullet hell successor (weight 0.35): The game is identified as a competitive versus shooting game, specifically a bullet hell shmup that is a direct successor or spiritual continuation of the gameplay style from Touhou 3 and Touhou 9 (Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream and Phantasmagoria of Flower View). It includes Story, VS CPU, and Online VS modes, emphasizing its PvP focus.
- Varied player completion experiences (weight 0.17): Players exhibit diverse engagement with the game, ranging from dedicated 'Lunatic 1CC' clears across all characters (some reviewers spending 10+ hours on this feat) to casual play on Easy/Normal difficulties. This indicates the game caters to both hardcore fans seeking extreme challenges and newcomers exploring the story mode.
- Character enhancement systems (weight 0.17): The game features multiple systems for character progression and customization, including 'ability cards' that serve as equipment-based enhancements to make characters unique. These cards are obtained from bosses or selected in VS mode, though not in story mode. Additionally, players gather items and build an energy bar by defeating enemies and grazing bullets, which powers up characters and enables EX attacks.
- Deeply integrated with Touhou lore (weight 0.15): The game heavily references previous Touhou titles, featuring characters from most main series games and concluding an overarching storyline that began with Hidden Star in Four Seasons. It also incorporates gameplay elements like a card system similar to Touhou 18/18.5, indicating a strong connection to the broader Touhou universe and its evolving mechanics.
- Revised boss battle mechanics (weight 0.13): The game introduces significant changes to boss battles, including the removal of the boss attack counter system. Players now defeat bosses by surviving a set number of their attacks, rather than depleting their health, and CPU opponents can activate boss attacks regardless of their gauge.
- Concise story mode structure (weight 0.09): The game features individual story modes for each character, which are shorter than previous titles, typically consisting of 5-6 stages focused on survival and boss encounters. This indicates a streamlined narrative experience per character rather than a lengthy overarching campaign.
- Unique defeat conditions (weight 0.07): The game features distinct defeat conditions; players lose if their life reaches zero after continuous hits, emphasizing continuous damage. In story mode, victory is achieved by breaking all of an opponent's spell cards, rather than simply depleting a health bar, adding a strategic element to boss encounters.
- Lenient hit detection, skill recovery (weight 0.07): The game features a more lenient hit detection system where players do not experience instant death on the first hit. Instead, a skill bar flashes, and subsequent hits lead to defeat, but filling the skill bar during this flashing period allows players to use a skill to recover health.
- Lacking tracking/score features (weight 0.07): Players noted the absence of a score display at the end of stages and a lack of tracking for achievements like beating higher difficulties or completing runs without continues. This suggests a potential area for improvement regarding player performance feedback and long-term progression metrics.
- Rechargeable shield mechanic (weight 0.07): A shield mechanic is present in the game, allowing players to obtain shields from extra attacks. These shields can be recharged and utilized to tank incoming hits, adding a defensive layer to gameplay.

Performance notes:
- Controller detection bugs (weight 0.09): The game experiences various controller detection problems, including inexplicable failures and specific triggers like resolution changes or certain input methods. This detection process can also lead to significant frame drops, sometimes requiring workarounds like plugging in a controller or using virtual input, and also causes occasional unresponsive key presses.
- Display and launch issues (weight 0.07): Users encounter difficulties launching the game, experiencing black screens in both windowed and fullscreen modes. The game also frequently struggles with screen resolution settings, sometimes getting stuck at low resolutions or switching erratically.
- Unstable network performance (weight 0.07): Players reported initially non-functional and poorly made netcode, leading to unstable online matches. While an update reportedly stabilized online play, the initial state was a significant drawback for multiplayer experiences.

Recommendations:
- One of the weaker Touhou games (weight 0.54): Many players consider this one of the weaker entries in the Touhou series, noting it's not a strong traditional bullet-hell game. Reviewers frequently suggest playing other Touhou titles (like Touhou 8, 9, 15-18, or PoFV) or even fan-made doujin games for a more satisfying experience.
- Niche for Touhou fans (weight 0.48): This game is overwhelmingly recommended primarily for existing Touhou Project fans and completionists, particularly those interested in its characters, story, and music. Newcomers are generally advised to play other Touhou titles first, as this game's appeal is largely rooted in established series lore.
- Hopes for future improvements/games (weight 0.47): Many players express continued support for the Touhou series, eagerly anticipating future games (e.g., Touhou 20) and hoping for improvements to current game issues, particularly online stability and overall polish in upcoming titles.
- Enjoyable for story and lore (weight 0.25): Despite its shortcomings in competitive play or traditional bullet-hell mechanics, the game is recommended by some for its story mode, lore, and character interactions. It's described as a quirky and fun experience, especially if chasing high scores or competitive replayability isn't a priority.

Other player notes:
- Community essential for game experience (weight 0.21): Player community-made patches are crucial for addressing core game issues, including bug fixes, balance adjustments, translation, and stable netcode. These fan efforts are vital for improving the overall player experience, especially for online play and non-Japanese speakers.
- Niche series, tolerant fanbase (weight 0.14): The Touhou main series is acknowledged as a niche game with significant influence, often receiving positive reviews despite perceived flaws due to a high community tolerance. Players view its continued development as a 'miracle' and generally appreciate its consistent presence.
- ZUN's evolving development approach (weight 0.14): The game's creator, ZUN, now has assistance from other programmers and his wife, 'Kii-san,' who contributes character pixel art and ability card designs. While this expanded team has led to improved art, some players suggest it may have impacted gameplay optimization and character balance, despite ZUN's evident satisfaction with the final product.
- Varied and experimental music (weight 0.13): The game's soundtrack features a mix of new compositions and arrangements of past character themes, with some tracks noted for their experimental instrumentation. Some players found specific songs, like 'Corpse Voyage,' to be unusually distinctive or even 'scary,' contributing to a unique atmosphere.
- Intentional chaotic game design (weight 0.11): The developer explicitly aimed for a 'weird and messy' game experience, which has led to intentional imbalances and a design where traditional scoring systems are considered irrelevant. This design philosophy appears to draw inspiration from earlier Touhou titles like Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream.

Emotions:
- Frustration (weight 0.22): Players experienced frustration due to severe character imbalance, problematic online netcode leading to lag and desyncs, and technical issues like performance drops and bugs. The game was also perceived as incomplete with rushed development, uncomfortable bullet patterns, and a lack of core features, making the single-player and multiplayer modes often unplayable.
- Disappointment (weight 0.19): Disappointment stemmed from missing core features such as replay and scoring systems, poor online multiplayer functionality, and overall game balance issues. Reviewers also cited bland or easy gameplay, unengaging story, and music that didn't meet expectations, contributing to a feeling of the game being a downgrade or having dubious quality.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.18): Satisfaction was derived from the game's engaging story, good music, and diverse character roster, which resonated particularly well with existing fans. Players also appreciated the improved game feel, accessibility features like being able to achieve true endings without no-continue clears, and the challenge offered by the gameplay, especially after updates improved online stability and game balance.
- Excitement (weight 0.07): Excitement was driven by the captivating and often chaotic story, the return of a bullet hell versus game mode, and the inclusion of specific beloved characters. Players found the gameplay deeply weird, challenging, and extremely fun, considering it one of the best Touhou games for its unique multi-line narrative and overall engaging experience.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.06): Enjoyment came from the game's unique and fun gameplay mechanics, interesting story, and good music that created a rewarding and hooking experience. Players found the game incredibly enjoyable despite its perceived 'jank' or imperfections, highlighting its ability to provide a fun and engaging time.
- Anger (weight 0.03): Anger was primarily caused by the game being released in an unfinished state with a 'god awful' and 'unplayable' online multiplayer experience. The poor game quality, disgraceful development, and servers not being suitable for a multiplayer game were significant sources of frustration, leading to a 'dogshit online experience'.
- Joy (weight 0.03): Joy was experienced through the game's fun gameplay and well-designed bosses, allowing players to have a great time, especially when playing with friends. The appealing music and the opportunity to see and play as many beloved characters contributed to the game becoming a favorite Touhou title for some.
- Appreciation (weight 0.02): Appreciation arose from the game's unique format, excellent music, and diverse character roster. Reviewers also valued its ability to attract non-bullet hell players, despite rough patches, recognizing its phenomenal musical quality.
- Love (weight 0.02): Love for the game stemmed from its status as a favorite in the series and its concise, short run times, making it highly replayable and enjoyable for dedicated fans.
- Skepticism (weight 0.02): Skepticism was directed towards the developer's (ZUN's) development choices, particularly regarding uncommendable character balance and attempts at implementing online functionality. Players held a pessimistic outlook on the future of the official online mode due to perceived past failures.
- Relief (weight 0.02): Relief was felt when game updates addressed critical issues, such as fixing bugs, unlocking achievements, and finally implementing a rebalance. Players also found relief in the game being relatively easy or allowing true endings even with continues, providing a less stressful experience.
- Anticipation (weight 0.02): Anticipation was generated by the prospect of future content, including the next Touhou game (TH20) and new works in 2025. Players also looked forward to potential fan translations and further developments for the current game.
- Concern (weight 0.02): Concern was voiced regarding the unfinished feel of the game and the severe imbalance making some characters too weak. There were also worries about powerful players giving up on no-continue clears and even a specific concern for ZUN's health due to visible errors in development.
- Hope (weight 0.01): Hope centered on the desire for more games of this type in the future and the potential for a future patch to fix the netcode. Players also expressed a desire for cute fairies to appear again in subsequent titles, indicating a fondness for specific game elements.
- Preference (weight 0.01): Preference indicated a lean towards other titles within the Touhou series or specific previous games. This suggests that while this game might have some merits, it didn't surpass the player's affinity for other entries.
- Sadness (weight 0.01): Sadness arose from the necessity of criticizing a Touhou game, a series deeply cherished by fans. This emotion stemmed from the game's perceived poor state, causing distress to dedicated fans of the franchise.
- Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement came from the humorous presentation of character balance issues and the lighthearted idea that the game might have been 'written by a drunk dude'. This suggests players found some aspects of the game comically flawed rather than purely frustrating.
- Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance was caused by a recurring bug that required manual input mode switching, disrupting gameplay flow. Some players also found specific music tracks unpleasant, contributing to a negative experience.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion was initially experienced regarding gamepad settings and issues with controls. This also included perplexing situations where problems were inexplicably solved, leaving players uncertain about the underlying causes or solutions.
- Caution (weight 0): Caution was advised specifically regarding the game's multiplayer features. This suggests that despite potential improvements, players still harbored reservations about the reliability and quality of the online experience.}