東方恋物語 ~ Locked Together - 462 mil

An IaMP buddy of mine released a charming little Touhou extra stage game, and I've been having fun going for a clear/score in it for the past couple days. The visuals and audio are done in a PC-98 style, but it has some scoring mechanics inspired from later Windows Touhou games, which makes for a fun juxtaposition. I've been playing a bunch of easier games lately, so I was actually caught off guard with the difficulty the first few times I played it, haha. This run started pretty well, although I dropped all of the spellcards in the back-half of the fight. From what I can tell, there's two main scoring mechanics. The main one is the Risk meter - you fill up your Risk whenever you graze, and once the bar is full you'll start a chain. You can then keep the chain going by continuing to graze. Once your chain is over, you'll get a Chain Bonus based on how much you grazed. Keeping your chain alive during the stage is pretty fun, even though it doesn't actually affect your score that much since most of your score comes from the boss (where you can't carry chains between patterns). I think it'd be cool seeing this system done in a full game where you're trying to full-chain stages ala Dodonpachi. The other mechanic is the PIV (point item value), which affects the value of point items. This is increased by cancelling bullets (through clearing boss patterns or by bombing), or by grazing while you have an active chain. I think your PIV might affect your Chain Bonus too, although I'm not sure about this. Aside from that, the spellcard bonuses you get are pretty significant in this game too. I like the style of the game a lot - the sprites and instrumentation all lend to a nice, feel-good vibe. A lot of the bullet patterns are designed around grazing, and it's satisfying to try and optimize where and how to graze. One area of improvement is that I think some of the patterns can get a bit repetitive. Particularly during the stage, there's a lot of repeating patterns, and pacing-wise some of them can overstay their welcome. It's particularly noticeable if you're just playing for survival and not trying to graze (though to be fair, trying to balance patterns around both survival and grazing has always been a tricky problem for Touhou games). For my route, I spend six bombs and one life during the stage portion to build up my PIV. I assume in an optimal run you'd want to spend all of your bombs and lives to increase your PIV as much as possible. You also get a ton of score from grazing sp2 – between the Chain Bonus and how much this contributes to the end-of-game bonus, it ended up being worth almost half of my entire score, haha. With this route, 500 million is possible with more spellcard captures. I'm sure you could push even higher too with more optimal bomb usage and chaining. If you think the game looks fun then please check it out! I particularly recommend it if you're a fan of the PC-98 Touhou games. Purchase on itch.io: https://mugenri.itch.io/th-lt Purchase on Steam (available December 17): https://store.steampowered.com/app/42...