Holy f*ck. Comuket this year had so many amazing things for sale. I unfortunatly can't aford the trip and still have enough money to buy everything that I would immediatly spend money on without a second thought of return trip money, so I just found all the stuff online about the tons and tons of new things out this year. I gotta say, I'm the happiest I've been in a long time. lol.
First off, like usual there was tons of new doujin manga, games, and CDs. There's tons of everything form anything you could want, but my main focus was of course on the two new Touhou games that came out at Comuket this year. I was amazed that there were two this year. I was only expecting Unidentified Fantastic Object, but they also had Touhou Project 12.3 Flawed Perceptions of the Natural Laws of the East: Unthinkable Natural Law Why is this title a paragraph long? lol). The game was announced only a few months ago, so I was extremely shocked to find out it was released last Saturday, but I found out why it had such a fast production. Basically the game is a new fighter, but it's a little smaller than the other two are. There's reasons for this though.
Anyway, UNL is really fun, and introduces five new characters to the fighting side games. The new playable characters include Sanae, Cirno, Suwako, Utsuho, and Chi.. I mean, Hong Kon... err, Hong Meiling. lol. Meiling was previously only available in the first fighter, Imaterial and the Missing Power, but only if you patched the game to include her when they made that available. The only bad thing about UNL is that other than the five new characters, you only have Reimu and Marisa to play around with, and that's it. The good news is, if you have the second fighter, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, you can adjust a directory file in UNL's folder to not only include all the 15 characters from SWR, but you can also fix the game to import all your cards unlocked for all the SWR characters into UNL so that you don't have to start over again. UNL also features a multiple deck set up that allows you to keep seperate strategies saved for any custom deck you want to build, and it also adds new crads, and new animations for the older characters. The new animations look cleaner, slightly higher quality, and the characters have more expressive reactions in their animations for damage and so on.
The game is a huge step forward in terms of side story games, and shows that they can handle alot of new ideas by allowing players to link old data to maintain all the work they had finished in the previous game. There is only two problems with the game. The first being that on day one, if you import your characters from SWR, the game will crash NO MATTER WHAT when you finish stage 4 of Sanae's story mode. This is manditory to do if you want to unlock the other stories, since you need to finish all 3 new ones to get Utsuho and Suwako for a few modes. Anyway, the next day (US Time Zone), there was a patch released that fixes this problem, so by the time anyone here could even legitimately get the game, the fix was already available for free anyway. Probly 2 on the other hand was that when you do import characters, the game doesn't bring the cards over automatically. There was also a simple fix for this. If you put the SWR game in the same folder you keep UNL in, it fixes itself for some reason. I dson't qustion it, I just accept that's how computers work.
Anyway, the new game is really fun so far. The online mode works perfectly with no lag at all. And finally, I get an actual official Team Shanghai Alice game where I can beat the f*ck out of Cirno as much as I want. lol. The new story modes are probly the best new addition. Sanae's is pretty straight forward. From what i could read, she is basically just doing the usual Reimu thing of trying to find the person causeing the incident, and then beating them up to make them stop. Cirno, I have no idea. It looked liek she thinks she is imortal, and gets tricked by Marisa a few times into fighting people for her. Meiling has what might be my favorite story mode in any fighter ever. Hers starts out normal. She is guarding the SDM from intruders, but as time goes on, you notice things in the background start to turn more and more cartoony. Like the hills in the distance look like something made in MS paint. Then the characters she fight start to change, and the clock tower starts to blur. And Finally, she ends up in a MS paint wasteland and her final boss is a giant catfish. I'm not even kidding, you have to fight a giant cat fish that can use dankamu. It's not even a catfish character like the other animism characters. It's just a gaint catfish that talks and fights you. Here is a pic. He isn't playable, but there is a spell card you can unlock to use him as suport in the game. lol.
The only thing in the game that I really don't understand is that Sanae can use Kanako and Suwako as suport like Yukari uses Ran and Chen, but only Suwako is playable as aseperate character. Why not add Kanako? Was she just too big or too bulky of a sprite? And why can't I play as Ran and Chen yet? They should have had priority for that kind of addition. Anyway, UFO is also out, and the game is weird. I'll try not to spoil it (not like it matters) but I'm depressed that Mima is once again absent from the game. The basic story is that there is some treasure ship that the vilagers keep hearing rumors about. One day someone form the village goes near Reimu's shrine and she hears the story form them about the ship. She tells Marisa the next time she visits, and they pass it off as just some myth since they have never seen it. Later on, Sanae shows up to give her an excuse to be a playable character, and they tell her the story. After that Sanae conveniently points out the ship as it passes by overhead. The three of them take off after the ship, each one with a different idea of what kind of treasure the ship must hold. The problem is that the ship is so old and run down that there is a ton of confusion in if it even has anything in it anymore, or if it's just in bad shape because no one is able to find it to take care of it anymore.
So without spoiling too much, you find a girl who knows whats going on and she says that the UFO tokens (used as a bonus points, life fragments and bomb fragments supply gimick) that you have been collecting so far are used for some ritual to revive "big sister". The girl is dressed in what sort of resembles a Japanese religious outfit, and so it is later confirmed that she means big sister in temrs of higher rank than her. Basically, the final boss is youkai Jesus. As weird as it sounds, that is hat this comes down to from what little I could undertsand in the text so far. The boss is equivalent to a youkai version of Jesus, and she must be stoped for whatever reason. Maybe she is tryin to hide all the candy form the kids like Jesus did, and (insert character selected here) wants to stop them since the Easter Bunny gave his life in battle saving our candy form the original Jesus fighting to the death and can't be around to stop this new one (see my Easter Blog for this joke). Either way, the new characters are weird. Also, the EX boss is officially the first boss to ever appear as a midboss multiple times in one game and then be a EX boss. Ran appeared as a mid boss in the Phantasm stage after she was the EX boss in PCB, but this one is a mid boss around 3-4 times (I'm not posotive atm). Also, is it just me, or does the EX boss look like a mix of Aya and Goku (Adult version in the orginal Dragon Ball)? Something about the face and dark hair just looks way too familiar, but I can't figure it out. Overall, this game is fun, hard, and very strange at times. I'm sure it will make more sense when the English Patch is out.
One thing I'd like to mention, is a new inovation to games we needed for a long time. They finally made a color blind patch for a game. Yeah, that's right, now people like me can enjoy games wtihout trying memerize what off colors things are suposed to be. They made a color blind patch for UFO that was out a few days ago, and it's awesome. This is the first time I have ever seen this for any game ever, and maybe the first time in gaming history. The color blind patch will also be an optional instal in the English patch for the game. Since the main way to earn easy extra lives and bombs is based off of geting 3 UFO tokens of the same color, it makes it nice to have 5 different available color codes to fix the game. It affects nothing else in the entire game other than the UFO, and it works both in the English patched and original raw verisons of the game. I really hope the trasnlation staff gets some kind of recognition for their work, becuase while evry other dipsh*t is out there trying to rip off the motion sensing of the Wii and trying to find a way to get 360 fan boys together to make bannana wheels as convinient as possible, there are people out there coming up with new ideas that help out tons of gamers that no one ever even thinks about.
As a last note, since I didn't really talk about Comuket much, I'll add some stuff about a few of my favorites that I saw there. There is a new doujin Touhou CD, and the music is hillarious. They released this flash video, and atomicpuppy subbed it already. I doubt anyone reading this will get the the inside jokes, but the majority of them are pretty obvious. Utsuho's inuendos only get worse as the album goes on. lol. I have the raw version if anyone wants it. Also, one of my friends knows I'm a big fan of Rin and bought this mini figure they are selling at Comuket this year for me. (pics below) lol. They also have figmas of Touhou characters now, so I will officially be backrupt within the next few weeks just as a heads up. lol.
If you want higher quality pics of the figmas, let me know and I'll send them. The blog size shrinks them way too much.
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