At first I thought it was impossible but I was able to figure it out and it wasn't too difficult. I had a few issues related to the aiming. It feels nearly impossible to control how far the onbashira actually goes, and most of the time I just ended up spamming the shot until it hit my target. The hitboxes also felt wonky, again leading me to spam shots instead of trying to aim.
The visuals were great and the music was good too.
I really liked the idea and some of the dialogue was hilarious (especially Hisami). Bonus points for being the first game I've seen this jam to have ZanHisa. The visuals were really cool too, I liked the cardboard cutout aesthetic used for the danmaku. The music was good but could have done with maybe another song or too as it got a bit repetitive. The gameplay was fun but too easy; many of the patterns were too simple and static and I instantly figured them out. Others were very sparse and had slow-moving bullets. Overall the difficulty felt somewhere around a Touhou Easy. If there's ever an update, I'd love to see higher difficulties. I went for all the spellcards and captured them on my first try, but it could have been fun to try to guess all the items instead, since many of them could be figured out from the context.
I also encountered a few glitches. When pausing during the danmaku segments, it doesn't actually pause the gameplay. Sometimes when finishing a spellcard, the bullets would keep spawning for around a second and then go over the UI.
This was a really good one but the gameplay is really rough around the edges. The music and visuals are incredible, the character portraits in particular stand out. Some of the backgrounds clash a little with the character sprites, however, and some assets felt like they may be unfinished. The writing is good and relatively free of errors, though it was hard to tell where the story was going from the demo jam version and I had to play the full version to find out. The usage of becoming a magician as a metaphor for LGBT+ identity was interesting, and reminded me of another game in the jam, A Turbulent Tenkajin Tale.
My biggest criticism would be the gameplay. It just wasn't very engaging for me. A big part of the problem was that the engine was not made for being an action RPG. I felt the combat would have been better if it was turn-based. Each character only having one attack turned the combat into repetitive button mashing, and dodging enemy attacks was janky with how the engine worked. The characters were also not well-balanced; I ended up only using Nitori once I got her because her attack was the fastest and was ranged. Marisa felt the least usable because it was hard to hit enemies up close without also being hit. Alice was like Nitori with a slower attack.
Overall, this game had some of the better writing of the jam and amazing visuals and music, but was held back by the gameplay.
It was short and too easy but the dialogue was funny. The bomb was never needed as you barely lose any life from hit and I didn't notice any penalties for running out. Some of the enemy fairies fired so quickly it was hard to avoid them the moment you switched to a new screen. I had some issues with the camera and the Meira fight in particular seemed glitchy. Often her bullets wouldn't spawn, or she or Marisa's partner would go off screen and freak out before coming back.
The visuals were decent, but the screen barriers could have been more than just pink rectangles. The music was great and kept me engaged. The writing was funny but I felt there could have been more of a backstory. I have a burning need to know why those fairies were homophobic. Meira makes sense as the boss at least.
Overall, a short and fun game that could benefit from some polish to the gameplay.
The sound was way too loud - this was caused by every enemy on the map firing at once at the start. Once I had taken out a bunch of enemies the sounds weren't actually that loud. You could fix this by just having enemies not attack unless they're within range of the player.
There was no feedback when you got hit which made it hard to tell if I had dodged the bombs in particular. I had to keep looking at the shield and health.
The UI was confusing - I'm not sure what the text in the upper left was for.
The gameplay was alright, but more feedback on when you and the enemies are taking damage would go a long way to making it feel better.
I noticed a few typos and grammar errors in the intro, and the font was hard to read. I'd recommend a different font for story text, preferably one with lowercase and uppercase characters.
I ate two horses and found the spork.
It was a bit on the easy side because you can easily cheese it by finding the stairs, killing spirits until your health is low, going to the next floor, and repeating until you're invincible.
If you make an updated version let me know. It would be cool to have procedural generation, items, and an upped difficulty.
This was a great game, shame I didn't get the references to previous games since I hadn't played them other than Immortality 101. Reimu was probably the hardest boss for me, with Kokoro being second hardest. The others I were able to beat without using dodge (excluding Koishi for the first attack) and without getting hit.
I really liked it, but the final battle was too difficult. There should have been an option to heal during a battle because the boss does so much damage it didn't feel possible to take her down before all of my party was defeated, even if I put debuffs on her with Mima.
The visuals and audio were great, and it had Keine in it in what might be the most creative use of a green character (no other game has used EX Keine that I've seen so far).
A great concept, but I found it a bit too difficult. It felt balanced like a regular danmaku game, not one where the controls are very restricted. I also had an issue with the shield, where it would cover bullets so I'd get hit the instant it ran out. The music is nice and I like the visuals of Shinmy running around the handheld.
I managed to beat it by using the hint book. I think it would be impossible for the vast majority of people without the hint book, or at least not something they'd have the patience for. The sound and music were great, as well as the writing, and the ending was cute. For the gameplay I have a ton of criticism but I will try to include constructive ways to improve it for feedback, because I don't want to just be putting the game down.
The biggest flaw with the gameplay was the fact that nothing interactable was visible until you moused over it. This took the pixel hunt, one of the greatest flaws of point-and-click games, and turned it into a nightmare of frustration. I understand that this is to represent Koishi's 3rd eye being sealed off, but it made the game borderline unplayable even with the hint book. I would have made everything visible, but kept the "wire mode" look of everything to represent the use of echolocation. The hitbox issues are also present on 2.5; it seemed like the problem was the hitbox being the exact shape of the object, so for objects with lots of lines it would be hard to figure out where to put the mouse so that it would stay triggered. The solution there would just be to have the hitbox be a rectangle slightly bigger than the object.
Another issue I had was with how progression works. Several times I had the idea to do something, but it wouldn't work. Then after doing something else completely unrelated, a flag would be triggered and now I could go back and do the thing I originally planned on. However, since it didn't work the first time, I assumed that what I did originally wasn't the solution. A good example is how you move Orin; I had the combined item you need pretty early on and was trying to use it on the spot you had to use it on, but it turned out you can't do that until you trigger a completely different event all the way across the map. This is the main reason I used the hint book, along with the visibility/hitbox issues. To fix this, I guess make it possible to do stuff out of order within limits. For example, as long as I have the needed items and have already tried to get Orin's cart, I think I should be allowed to do the thing that actually moves her. Having more freedom in the order you do things would have made the game a lot more intuitive for me, and I might have been able to not have to rely on the hint book so much.
The visuals were alright, though it was hard to tell what some objects were supposed to be, which compounded the issues with objects being invisible. A possible solution would be to use grayscale for object sprites, so you could have more details on them. The full color art in the ending was very cute and made getting to the ending worth it.
The audio was probably the best category; the music actually felt like the kind of music that would be in a classic adventure game. The very MIDI-sounding remix of Koishi's theme with a bit of dissonance stood out in a positive sense. The sheer amount of voiced lines was impressive. I did notice that sometimes a line would not be voiced that I'd be expect, such as a line in between two voiced lines in a Koishi monologue. Also, the audio quality on the voice lines was very inconsistent. I don't know if it was due to the VA's mic quality, or the sound files being compressed, but it sounded very crunchy and some characters I couldn't understand what they were saying without the subtitles.
The visuals were neat and I liked the "retro" filter, but I did have a few issues with them. The text was barely readable, which in a story-heavy game is a problem. The warping effect on the walls when you move was distracting as well.
The sound is minimal but I like it. The humming sound gave a feeling of anxiety, and the sounds of people outside added to it.
The story is kind of unclear to me. What exactly is Sanae depressed about? I couldn't tell how it fit in to the "official" story of Touhou as well, or whether it was an alternate universe or not. The writing is otherwise decent, and the only other flaw I noticed was that Haruhi should have been capitalized (when you check the bookshelf).
This was an amazing concept but I had a lot of trouble understanding the rules, setting it up, and playing the game. Overall I didn't notice many typos in the rulebook, but the wording made it difficult to comprehend and was vague at points. The order that concepts are presented does not seem to be very conducive to understanding, and I had to jump around a lot more than I have had to with other TTRPGs. I'm not sure I can give concrete advice on how to improve the organization of the rulebook, beyond a suggestion to consider how it reads to someone who is completely new to TTRPGs, or at least has only passing familiarity.
Examples of rules and explanations that I could not understand or struggled with:
* Reaction points and perfect points. The use of the word "point" immediately thinks of points as in score, rather than what it refers to in this case, which are the ranges at which reaction and no reaction happens. I think using a word other than "point," along with having explanatory diagrams, would fix this problem.
* The order that reactions happen and are resolved. I'm still not clear on whether the reaction happens fully before the attack that initiated it is finished, for example. The page that explains it also refers to it in terms of player and enemy; I think it would just be easier to refer to the attacking and "defending" party, then the same explanation would apply whether the player or enemy is attacking. This is probably the part of the game I found the hardest to understand, and what I'm still the least clear on.
* The way wide attacks are described: "A Spell Card with Wide 1 will hit the space in front of you, and each space diagonally up and down from you in the same direction." A diagram would have helped, but I think just saying that it's above and below the space in front of you rather than diagonal from you would have made it clearer.
* There's nothing mentioned about what happens when a character gets hit with fling and would go off the edge of the playing field. When I did the Nitori fight I assumed they just stop at the edge of the playing field, without taking damage.
* Movement. The rulebook will say something like "The player can move X spaces..." but what is meant is "up to X spaces." This should be made explicit to avoid confusion.
I think the starter scenario is fine, and the writing for the story there is pretty good, but the boss fights felt kind of unbalanced. They seem to have been designed assuming two players (Aya and Utsuho); I'm not sure if either fight is even possible solo. This could have been improved perhaps by reducing the boss' HP if there's only one player. Even with two players, the bosses are extremely tough; Momiji in particular will just melt the Aya player within a few turns.
The enemies' patterns were confusing to me because they felt too vague to execute deterministically. There are situations where two or more options are possible according to the pattern, and the rulebook doesn't specify a method to use to decide on the enemy's action in that case. I just assumed it was chosen at random. The fights with the regular enemies seemed balanced much better.
I think this is overall a pretty good start for a simple TTRPG, but the rules need to be made more explicit on how various situations as handled, and the rulebook better organized, as well as some balancing done to the starter scenario.
I definitely bit off more than I could chew, and severely underestimated the amount of writing I would require. I originally estimated around 5k words and ended up with almost 10k. It probably would have been better if I avoided branching outside of the endings for the jam, so that I would have had time to actually make the story work.
> Any Disco Elysium inspiration probably went over my head
In terms of explicit references, the skills are based directly on DE skills, and there are some explicit references in the text that are basically all jokes and not important to understanding the story.
For inspiration, the overall writing style and content are heavily inspired from DE. The religion system was also meant to be like the politics system in DE, where depending on the choices you make you could "be" a Communard (communist), Fascist, Moralist (centrist), or Ultraliberal (libertarian). Unfortunately I couldn't fully integrate the religion system into the game in time for the jam. I originally planned to have it heavily affect the choices you could make in the dialogue with Utsuho, as well as having effects in dialogue and interactions throughout the rest of the story.
Unfortunately I had to cut out most of what I had planned for the religious alignment system and skills, but it still ended up costing a lot of time just to implement. Based on feedback from team members during development, I decided that having a complete story before the jam finished was more important than having all the mechanics fully used.
The political views is a huge issue that Comfy Basilisk's comment really made me consider. I think having more detail in the ending, plus maybe mentioning the kind of activism Kutaka did before the story, would go along way, but I think maybe having a character who is part of the revolution who is meant to be taken more seriously would help too. Perhaps they would have been forced out of the revolution due to ideological disagreements, and either assists Kutaka or gets in the way but as they are no longer part of the revolution, dealing with them doesn't end it.
I had more I wanted to write on that conflict but the deadline hit me hard. Also I realized pretty late into it that trying to be nuanced about politics in a game I make in 3 days is going to be hard. If I redo it I will probably add other endings where Kutaka changes her approach or beliefs based on your choices.
I actually agree with your politics mostly, but I'm really bad at expressing it and found it hard to write into the story in the time limit. I wanted Kukata to not just be a self-insert of my political beliefs but the good ending works out too well so if I were to change it, I would probably have a mix of good and bad outcomes. Like if Kutaka ends up stopping the revolution but supports some aspects of it, maybe she does something that starts a new conflict. Or if she doesn't change the way she does her activism, then once she stops the revolution things don't change or get worse for birds.
I think having the religion system also made it harder for me to write Kutaka's political beliefs, since I made her unchanging in her beliefs even when it didn't make sense, in order to make it easier to write the religious parts. I think if I wanted to make the political parts work better, I shouldn't have overscoped with the religion and skill system that ended up wasting a lot of time during development I could have spent on making the writing better.
> so, no word of what kinds of activism kutaka got up to. just, "we did some stuff, and it got better." how?
I feel like I did mention a little here. Kutaka stages a sit-in that helps sway some humans to her side. Though rereading it again I could have went into more detail. I think it would work better if I broke the ending up into multiple passages and went into details about what happened in each one instead of having like two sentences.
You brought up a lot of good points and I'm going to take a lot of this into account if I make a significant update.
Thank you for the review! I don't know how I managed to write so much in 3 days either.
The side stuff didn't have a major impact beyond some extra text, and skill levels are fixed in the jam version. There was a lot I had to cut due to time constraints, unfortunately. If I make a post-jam update I plan on adding more skills, letting the player allocate points to them at the start, and add more side content to make it more like an RPG.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game.
This game was very fun but extremely challenging. I had played picross in the past but didn't know much strategy so I really struggled. I had to use the solutions as hints to solve most of the levels past the first set. Also, when you complete 3-1 the game goes to a black screen so I was unable to complete that set of stages.
The visuals are nice, with pretty images of Doremy and Sagume and multiple versions of Sagume representing her at different times in the past.
The music was good but got repetitive because the game took me several hours to complete.
The story and writing are good and I'm intrigued, but not exactly sure what's going on. That's exacerbated by the inability to progress past 3-1, so 1/4 of the cutscenes I never got to see.
I'm not sure how well the game actually ties in to the theme, since I'm not sure what's going on in the story.
The gameplay was a fairly standard horizontal shmup. It didn't feel like it was worth it to try and use the flamethrower as most of Kaguya's patterns kept you out of range. A hitbox indicator would have been useful though it wasn't hard to figure out the hitbox was Mokou's chest because aimed bullets would go towards it.
The visuals were cute, probably my favorite part of the game.
The sound was all taken from Len'en games, which I'm not sure is allowed. I read JynX's guidelines and it seemed to discourage it, though you could interpret the guidelines as allowing it because they mostly specified not using data from the official games in paid fanworks.
The game was entirely a shmup, so there wasn't much in the way of story or writing to review.
The jam theme doesn't really make an appearance beyond Mokou having infinite lives and the game featuring Mokou and Kaguya.
I really like the gameplay. You managed to capture what makes Vampire Survivors and games like it addicting in the 3 day jam period, which is impressive. This is probably the jam game I spent the most time playing.
The visuals and audio are all stock assets but they work for what they need to do.
The game doesn't really have much to do with the jam theme though. None of the characters are immortal and the concept isn't brought up in the game at all.
Great story and usage of the theme. The writing was excellent throughout and seeing Marisa change with age while Enoko remained the same helped to establish how much time was passing.
The visuals were great, making this one of the best-looking games of the jam I've played so far. Both the 2D visual novel sections and the 3D gameplay sections looked stunning and show an impressive amount of work given the short timeframe of the jam.
The gameplay I felt was the weakest part. It was repetitive and frustrating to me. Your hitbox was too large I felt, and it made actually dodging nearly impossible. The strategy for most enemy waves felt like just shooting the ones on one side and hugging the walls to go around the others. The amount of downtime between getting hit and restarting added to the frustration. Worst of all, I encountered a bug where choosing "try again" would go to a white screen and the game froze. This happened to me three times and contributed to me almost not finishing the game. I only got one ending because I didn't want to play through the game again and risk that freeze.
The sound was good, the stage music was engaging and didn't get tiring despite how long I was hearing it. The remix of Enoko's theme that plays in the cutscenes was also quite nice.
One of the coolest ideas in the jam, and I'm impressed at how well the network play worked. I didn't have any issues with lag, lost connections, or the other jank that plagued my attempts to play Touhou 19 netplay.
The gameplay is pretty straightforward; it plays like a stage of the regular Touhou games, except co-op. Having lives shared between the players is a decision I'm not sure about, as if there are skill differences between the players, it could make going for a clear kind of annoying. The difficulty is also pretty low, I was able to get through Standard on my first try. Yumeko feels a lot harder than Shinki, even. There is a lower difficulty as well, and a good idea for an update would be to add a Hard or Lunatic difficulty.
Visually the game is fine, except for one major issue. Certain bullets appear *below* the player sprites. I noticed this in particular with the ellipse-shaped bullets on Yumeko. This can make doing tight dodges with these bullets very difficult. An easy fix is to just make sure all bullets are always rendered on top of player sprites.
The audio is very good. An energetic dubstep-type song plays throughout the game, which is good for getting you pumped up and keeping you going. I would have liked grazing sounds; the only indication of a graze is a little 20 that pops up by bullets when you graze them.
The story is practically non-existent. Mai and Shinki go through Makai and shoot up a bunch of fairies, then take on Yumeko and Shinki. I think a little intro cutscene (it could play before connecting, and be skipped) would have gone a long way to making me more invested in what's going on. It would also be a chance to improve the visuals of the game, by having more character art, and also incorporating the LGBT themes better.
The LGBT themes are also very light. Mai and Yuki work together as a team, but there's not really anything that hints at their relationship. They could be lovers, friends, or just temporary allies and the game would still work the same way.
Overall, this was a really cool idea that worked surprisingly well, but felt a little rushed. With some polish it would become something I'd want to try playing with other people I know who are into Touhou gameplay.
This is probably my favorite of the jam games. I played the jam version and even with some of the jank had a ton of fun.
The genre is a dungeon-crawling RPG, but there are no levels so the only "grinding" is in getting upgrades to equipment, new abilities, and MP boosts. Overall the gameplay was good, although a lot of skills I didn't have a good use for.
The concept is hilarious and I love the constant jokes throughout the game.
The visuals were very good, I loved the pixel art and character portraits. The mouths moving during dialogue were a polished touch I wouldn't expect from a game jam. The enemy sprites were also great. I think my favorite was the Fiery.
The music was great, but it did get kind of repetitive due to how much you hear the battle music. That's a problem I had with a lot of RPGs. I recommend turning the music off when grinding and listening to something else, and turning it back on when you go to make progress.
The writing was very good, and overall had a comedic tone that managed to almost make me laugh (it's very rare for me to laugh at something that's intended to be funny) at points.
The weakest point of the game was the challenge. Most bosses were impossible until I got the upgrades for the floors I was on, then they became trivial. The strategy I settled on for most bosses was to inflict the blind status with Extending Arm, then use the dodge moves to reduce my chance to get hit. If you grind some of the secret enemies (hint: check the fishing spots), you can get equipment that completely destroys the game. This is a point in favor of the game, I totally love RPGs with broken items. It did get a tad bit repetitive to farm upgrade items, though.
The relationship of Hina and Nitori was handled in a way I liked. It also was incorporated into the game mechanics, as they become stronger as their love for each other grows. I kind of wish there was something that showed them being close at the end, but I guess the ending fits with the comedic tone of the game.
Overall, this would definitely be my favorite of the games with a bit more polish.
A cute but short game that reminded me a lot of Katamari Damacy.
The gameplay was simple and fun.
The concept was neat, I liked the idea of a small Suika gradually returning to normal size. In a game with longer development time, it would have been fun to see the items you pick up change as you get larger.
The visuals were decent, overall the style I'd describe as "cute."
The audio was great, very good music for a game jam game.
The story and writing were decent, but the writing was marred by some stilted grammar and capitalization and punctuation mistakes.
The LGBT themes were light but present; the relationship between Kasen and Suika could either be interpreted romantically or as them being close friends.
The concept is simple but works for what it needs to do. Tewi leads a team of rabbits against "angry bnuy" enemies. As your squad battles together, they gradually come to realize their feelings for each other, and love blossoms on the battlefield.
The visuals are amazing, I'm impressed with what was achieved in the short game jam. The fully 3D-rendered areas were cool to move around in. I did have some minor difficulties telling units apart based on their appearances. There were also some glitches with the lines drawn when mousing over units or moving.
The audio is a mixed bag. There is not any music in game, which is both a bad and a good thing to me. It makes the war simulation feel more "realistic" at least. The sound effects are great. The little voice lines were cute.
The game, primarily being a tactics/simulation game, is light on writing and story.
The controls are intuitive and the gameplay surprisingly straightforward for a tactics game. The enemy AI has a few issues; they tend to move up in your units faces which can make it easy to take them out. A few times they got stuck when moving and it took several seconds for them to "unstick" themselves.
This is one of the more challenging of the jam games. Making it through all three stages without losing a single rabbit is tough without relying on luck (there's a chance they survive with injuries instead of dying), so I was unable to get the ending of the game. However, I don't think the game is unfair or unbalanced.
The LGBT themes are present throughout the game (the yuri system that improves your units), but not reference too much. Since I couldn't see the ending which presumably shows what happens when all your units are all in love, I'll leave it at 3 stars.
This review is based on the original jam version + the changes made to the game so far.
The title screen music is so catchy, I could just sit there and listen to it for several minutes. The in-game music is also very good.
The graphics are fine, the enemy sprites are all recognizable Touhou references, especially notable since I played Mystic Square recently.
The concept is funny and I like the idea of Sanae being the one to go to Makai this time.
I'm not a huge fan of arena shooters. They often feel repetitive to me and this game ends up that way. It feels like you're just circle strafing the whole time while firing into the enemies. The mini-boss every 10 waves changes things up a bit, at least. It would be cooler if the enemies had a greater variety of attacks that played off of each other.
The weapons are mostly straight upgrades of each other. I ended up using the minigun the most, and using the gohei to take out big enemies once the smaller ones were dealt with.
There seem to be almost no iframes when you get hit. This means that if several bullets hit you at once, you can go from full health to game over before you know what happened.
The game sorely needs a mouse sensitivity slider in the options. I had to mess with my mouse settings to get it to a level where I felt comfortable; the default sensitivity was much lower than I am used to.
When I tried the story mode, I was able to see the opening cutscene but it never went into game for me. I assume that's related to the "buggy" label it's given in the main menu.
The LGBT themes are present (Sanae is implied to love Reimu in this game) but not really represented in the gameplay past the opening cutscene.
I like the character art in this the most. The music is also very good. However, the game is extremely challenging and the in-game tutorial and game page do not do near enough explaining it. It felt like half the time when I moved units to "pincer" enemies, nothing happened or a unit I wasn't expecting attacked. I barely won, only by repeatedly trying until I got lucky and trying to spam the heal move with the otter spirit. The LGBT themes are also very light in this game. I assume they would become more prominent later in the story.
