xdaniel

Hey there~

📜 Hobby programmer, ROM hacker, retro computers & consoles, anime & manga fan, sometimes NSFW?

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gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Pre-registration has started for Touhou Gensou Eclipse, the horizontal, free-to-play smartphone STG announced years ago by danmaku veterans Cave and finally scheduled for release in Japan on November 22: fan artist u_u_zan is in charge of character designs and main illustrations, and they already have a ton of known community members and circles queued up to contribute art, music, etc.


For the unaware, Cave completely withdrew from arcade and console development a decade or so ago and, by some stroke of luck, found big success with Gothic wa Mahou Otome ("Gomaotsu"), an original danmaku smartphone STG they released in Japan in 2015, and that one game has not only carried their company but attracted several outside investors, leading to them amalgamating all sorts of odd side-hustles that have nothing at all to do with video games, which include or have included a platform for fortune-telling consultation via live stream, an idol events planning business and a Vietnamese subsidiary that they never seemed to know what to do with. (Remember the big scandal a few years ago the idol Maho Yamaguchi and how her management basically tried to blame her for getting assaulted in her own apartment? The owner of that management agency bought into Cave right around that time, and still owns a significant % of shares.)

All that said, Gomaotsu has clearly been on the decline for years and it's no longer in a position to insulate them from the failures of their other ventures, nor were they able to find success with any other games; as of recently, they acquired Deluxe Games, the company formed by former Capcom head Yoshiki Okamoto that designed and still runs the massive smartphone game Monster Strike, so they look to be doing super well on paper, but the reality is that Okamoto basically wanted a quick path to being publicly-traded and burrowed into Cave from the inside. On Cave's side, they needed to secure personnel for the production of this new game, and it really does seem like they've decided to put all their eggs in this one basket, so one has to wonder what will become of them if it doesn't hit.

Will it hit, though? I mean, I have no idea how or why Gomaotsu took off the way it did or why similar games didn't, nor do I know how any smartphone game without an eight-figure marketing budget can hope to succeed in 2023, but I also wonder if the massive glut of Touhou spinoffs being released all the time hasn't taken the shine off this one... I know "Cave x Touhou" would have gotten a lot of attention at a certain point in time, but now, in this particular format?

I wouldn't really concern myself with any of that crap if modern-day Cave was nothing but the corporate entity in possession of their old games, but despite some of the rumours that spread after they stopped making arcade games and the multiple staff departures that have happened since, there are still quite a few noteworthy and influential veteran developers at the company and, unlike some other companies/devs out there, I don't see them going independent or finding some other way of going back to making the sort of games they used to—part of me selfishly wants the company to finally die so that they might go somewhere else and work on new, traditional games in the vein of their classics, but my understanding is that some of them don't necessarily feel the burning need to make more games and are content to wait out the clock, so in that case, I'd like for the company to at least stick around until they're able to retire and someone else (not Embracer) can salvage their catalogue.

Iunno, maybe this Touhou game will usher in the STG renaissance people have been expecting for the last fifteen years. What else could, if not this game?


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

A few years back, they were talking about how their in-person score attack events for Gomaotsu were more successful than anticipated and how the audience playing the game was becoming increasingly hungry for more content that erred closer to traditional STG gameplay, and they sort of implied they were weighing up the viability of an arcade or arcade-style Gomaotsu project, and at that point I really did feel like all the chips were falling into place... but then the pandemic happened and all that talk went away, and the company's in a much different place than it was then, too.

That was their window and it slammed shut, basically, and I haven't had any really hope since then.

That’s a deeply, deeply sad story and worse than I could have imagined for one of the most (at one time, anyway) iconic and important game studios of all time. I’m just glad that cave-likes are a thing in the indie scene