Only Erika and Rouga are playable, but at least it’s something. They’re clearly still working on… well… everything. It still doesn’t have boosting… music… voices… a title screen. Hell, throws aren’t even distance sensitive yet. Tap 4/6 C and a throw’s coming out. They’re also apparently completely reworking the movesets along with the engine. Rouga’s still got his anti-air grab, but his delay mine is now a shockwave. Both appear to have only one super at the moment too. Eri is unfortunately a little bit more of a joke than I was expecting. Stupid Shorko and body flop specials… Sigh. Thanks Setra for the head’s up. You can grab it here. Edit: Looking through the sprites, there are a ton of moves that are seemingly not implemented yet, as well as sprites for win/lose/intro/etc. Hmm.
In what may just be the most fortuitous guess in the history of guessing, Cyber Botti, the longtime makers of the Battle Fantasia series of magical girl SRW parodies has announced that their newest animation short for the upcoming Comiket is going to be titled Ice Fairy vs Shrine Maiden about well… it should be obvious. A shame that Aquastyle isn’t also making more, but they seem to be going all-in with their Touhou roguelike with a ‘prologue’ or expansion or… who knows really. It does look pretty. And just to annoy Fettgans, Orange Juice posted the new PV for Sora above. It’s looking… remarkably familiar…
I swear, the more PVs they release, the weirder this game appears… and that’s a pretty high mark for a game that started out with racing trains doing spins through the air. That is all.
Sanbondo put out a new PV of their upcoming Touhou SRW clone due to be released at Comiket next week. While it’s definitely nowhere near as impressive looking as BMW, it’s still done a good job capturing that old classic aesthetic of the PSX era SRW games. The eerie floating heads on the map display continue to creep me the hell out though. It’s like a swarm of those damn yukkuris crawling across the land. I also question the effectiveness of Youmu’s sperm assault. Moetaku’s Tendo Blade is also looking… well… like it’s picked up all the bad lessons from N-1 when it comes to RPG animation, but maybe they can polish things up and make it look a little bit better. Lionheart also announced Sanae Challenge Fusion and put up a bunch of screen shots, adding Utsuho’s nuclear power into their Sanae platformer. Grana Embrace is also getting a sequel/expansion, although I wasn’t a big fan of it to start with.
Some years back, Taito thought to themselves, "You know what Japanese arcade goers want to do…? DRIVE A TRAIN! Brilliant!" Thus they set up an arcade cabinet to resemble a train… uh… cockpit? And Densha de Go! was born. Then there was a comic doujin mixing Densha de Go! with Initial D, which has now apparently inspired an actual doujin game. About racing trains. Multi-track drifting is the least of the weird things about this one, although the manga panels presentation is kind of interesting. There’s even apparently a trial version, should you catch their site in one of the 3 hours a day when it’s actually up. Thanks to Setra for the original heads-up.
Not a ‘real’ new entry in the series, but another new Touhou game from Shanghai Alice due out at Summer Comiket next month. Apparently it’s some kind of bizarre survival game centered around a very fat Cirno seeking revenge against the other minor fairies by freezing their bullets. Oooookay. I think Zun’s alcohol poisoning is starting to affect his mind. It’s probably just an excuse to have someone else redraw Sunny Milk et all. Oh well. Hopefully it doesn’t mean that he’s creating an alternate ice fairy like he did for Aya with Double Spoiler. The world doesn’t need more Cirnos.
Area Zero (formerly Fly Systems, developers of Magical Battle Arena) finally put out a PV for their upcoming game, Touhou Sky Fight. It’s not the MBA clone I was expecting, but looks like a really fun little arcade brawler of sorts. I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of all the voicing choices, unlike MBA’s, which were pretty spot-on. At least the music’s still awesome.
You know, after how good Battle Moon Wars looked from start to finish, I’m starting to feel a bit underwhelmed by Werk’s latest offering. I’m also beginning to wonder if the are actually stages to this game or if it’s just going to be a series of boss battles. Hopefully Werk will surprise us… or at least still be using the same packing/unpacking tools as BMW so I can set a new record for quickest translation.
