天下制覇

I am so not in the mood to separate the wheat from the chaff tonight. Something about princesses, sailors, and China fighting a whale. Or something. I’ll deal with it once the kerfuffle (44 points + double word score + 50 for over 7 letters) settles, likely tomorrow midday or so. 
A few more caps of possibly dubious legitimacy after the cut.

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Fettgans at Doujinsuki over in Franceland apparently more patience or drive than I do and has been compiling a preview list of ]the upcoming games at Comiket as well. Of note is his list of the Touhou themed ones that I didn’t find wading through 50 pages of random other Touhou stuff to track down.

List reproduced after the cut.

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It figures that fewer than 24 hours would pass since I did my little preview before Aquastyle posts a long promo for their upcoming animated short… or whatever you want to call them. The Sanae x Master Spark combination attack was hilarious. Nice to see the newbies getting some pre-emptive love too. And yes, I know Iosys released something about a week ago. It was really really lame.

 Oh, the places you’ll go…

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Tasofro just announced Touhou 12.3, including the three mentioned above. Given the name (SWR was Hisouten, soku means ‘near’, or a pun for ‘zoku’ meaning sequel), style, and that there was sort of a quasi-non-announcement about an SWR patch in the works, I’m going to assume it’s an expansion to SWR, moving the story up past UFO (out in a month, remember). It apparently adds, among other things, robots, and the story is something about fog in the middle of summer, not like it matters. Probably Suika getting too drunk to reincorporate. Really though, your guess is as good as mine right now.

Continuing from my previous semi-rant before… even though art and animation has been inarguably getting better across the board for last decade, direction really hasn’t. Many action shows think that they can get by with just grunting and stills, not that I’m looking at you, Needless, Basara, or any bloody Jump series ever. That makes things like Monty Oum’s machinima Dead Fantasy series all the more impressive. Sure, it’s fanwank to the extreme, but awesome choreography never goes out of style. No matter how well animated your grunting or yelling may be, it’ll never live up to real martial arts. Sadly, these days, real action sequences like you used to find in J2 or Tokyo Majin are the exception rather than the norm. I blame that drill show for repopularizing grunting, whatever it may have been called. I’m sure they’ll make a resurgence in popularity eventually. Probably at the point when people realize that extremely detailed background animation or falling cherry petals is actually very very boring.

Also, I’m glad that DoA got some love after the second edition was almost all Final Fantasy love.

Not content to just give us Ryougi, they’re also adding in a third (technically, 7th through 9th) version of Akiha in her school uniform. They’ve been uploading quite a few short clips to the official site, reproduced on youTube for your enjoyment. Ryougi actually looks she has a pretty similar moveset to Nanaya (well, F-Nanaya) on the ground and Warc in the air, albeit a bit slower than either of them, while S.Akiha, is… well… another Akiha with all kinds of new flame tricks. Her damage output also seems nuts, especially for an Akiha. 5K on a meterless BnB? Ouch. Maybe Ryougi’s just got crap defense though.

Man… the year long wait for the PC port is going to kill me. A few more vids after the cut.

Thanks to Setrajonas for the heads up.

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Man, I really haven’t been paying attention to the doujin scene lately… 

Anyway, MKV comes from NRF, who did the rather spectacular Big Bang Beat, and it wasn’t great just because it was based on AliceSoft’s stuff. Unfortunately… this one doesn’t really look anywhere near as good, but I guess we’ll see. It’s out next week. Maybe I’ll play some while waiting for Werk to fix the inevitable problems they’ll introduce with the Perfect edition.
Video shamelessly stolen from Bellreisa. He’s got a couple more uploaded. Go bother him.

Nice to see that Nanaya’s getting a new attack since his old ones are pretty lame. Otherwise, not really much else we haven’t seen before, aside from Magical Amber’s giant ass. Out next week. Hopefully they won’t putz up early files too much and I’ll be able to quickly get a patch out to encompass the new stuff. They’ve also uploaded a new demo, although from the screenshots they posted, it looks like it’s just the original act 1 demo with the new engine.

Edit: The trial is a free release of act 1 with the new engine and the new attacks for Takumi, Haruna, and Nanaya… but if you’re lazy… just watch this.

Famitsu is reporting that MBAA’s PS2 port will be released in August of this year, and if Act Cadenza is any indication, the PC version will follow about a year later. Edit: And who is that in the lower right I wonder….

Meanwhile, some NINE BLOODY MONTHS after they put out Act 4, Werk is finally getting around to releasing the "Perfect Edition" adding Saber Lily, Magical Amber, and new versions of Takumi and Haruna at the end of the month. Hopefully they won’t break the game again this time, or maybe even fix the inane number of bugs left over from their last update. A man can dream.