Touhou Fantastic Danmaku Festival III - Day 1 Scorerun - Lunatic Mokou

The Touhou Fantastic Danmaku Festival III demo came out today! FDF II is one of my favorite Touhou games, if not my #1 favorite, so this is a demo which I've been eagerly awaiting for!

So far I'm finding this game a ton of fun! The FDF games were known for their high polish when it comes to presentation, and this one takes it to a whole new level. There's tons of different enemy types and bullet sprites, and the stages are filled with really memorable set pieces - just about every minute the game throws something new at you. And get this - there's actual background enemies! This really feels like an arcade-quality release. Mokou is a fun character to use too. She has a sort of DDP-style laser aura active at all times, in the sense that her wings have a hitbox and can easily kill zako. My only major complaint is that the game is perhaps too much on the easy side - the game absolutely showers you with lives and bombs, and the Lunatic mode patterns feel more like a Hard mode in my opinion.

I spent some time today playing around with the scoring system, although there's still a lot I don't understand. FDF I and FDF II's systems were (loosly) based off of their mainline counterparts EoSD and PCB, but this game breaks the trend and seems more like an evolution of FDF II's system, rather than being based off IN. It's not what I was expecting, but I really like FDF II's scoring system so I'm not going to complain. Scoring seems to mainly revolve around the Frenzy system, which acts a lot like Borders from FDF II. Grazing and collecting items fills your Frenzy meter - when it reaches 100%, you'll enter Level 1 Frenzy state. During Frenzy state, your shot gets powered up, and if you get hit, you'll exit Frenzy state instead of losing a life. The meter will steadily drain, but you can continue to refill it by grazing or picking up items. If you keep Frenzy state active for 10 seconds, then you'll enter Level 2 state. Do the same again to get to Level 3 state. Once you get to Level 3, you can no longer refill your meter. Once Frenzy Mode ends, you'll get a score bonus based on how much you grazed and how many items you picked up. Grazing during Frenzy will also increase your MaxPoint (aka Point Item Value), with grazing during level 3 being worth more (I think). All of this is exactly the same as FDF II.

What's new in FDF III is Rampage Mode. During Level 3 Frenzy state, a new red meter will appear. This meter can be filled up the same way as the normal Frenzy meter, but it's much, much more difficult to fill up. If you fill it all the way, then you'll enter Rampage mode. During this mode, you'll unleash a really powerful attack, but your movement speed becomes obnoxiously slow which makes it difficult to dodge (and getting hit during this mode will actually cost you a life). After Rampage Mode ends, your Frenzy meter will automatically refill to 50%. Aside from the Frenzy and Rampage systems, some enemies have familiars similar to Imperishable Night. If you kill a big enemy which has familiars, then all of the familiars will also die, and cancel bullets a small distance around them. Bullets cancelled this way also fill your Frenzy Meter.

In FDF II, scoring mainly revolved around timing borders at opportune moments so that you could take advantage of grazing opportunities during the level 3 portion. This is still true in FDF III, but what I'm not sure about is how the Rampage mode comes into this. At first I thought that you might get a larger score bonus if you finish a Frenzy state with Rampage mode, but after comparing some of my runs I'm not sure if that's true anymore. Additionally you can't really graze bullets during Rampage due to the fact you move so slow and enemies die so quickly during the mode. So I'm not sure if you're supposed to intentionally trigger Rampage mode, or if it's supposed to make scoring during Level 3 Frenzy state more risky. That said it does look cool and it's fun to find setups for activating it, so for now I'm trying to trigger it as much as possible.

One nitpick I have about the scoring is that the increase you get from playing for score is pretty small relative to just playing for survival. A lot of your score comes from the end-of-stage bonus. Obviously this more just a cosmetic gripe and doesn't have any effect on your routing. Plus I've only been playing for one day so I might be playing the game completely wrong. But it does feel nice to see big numbers! Aside from that, it'd also be really nice if they added TATE mode; I know Touhou games typically don't have this, but everything else about this game feels so high quality that it'd be a shame to not have to feature in the final release.

Anyways if you're a Touhou fan then you absolutely have to check this demo out! It's 100% required playing. Download it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/28...