New game, yay
Touhou dedicates a relatively small but surprisingly relevant lore towards precious(?) stones, between gold, arsenic, cherry stones and ESPECIALLLY Izanagi objects / power stones / dragon gems / occult balls. For this game in particular, the Story Stones(?) carrying powers from previous incidents is extremely reminiscent of TH 14.5's Occult Balls, which carried powers from the location they were from, and TH 18's ability cards, which were made from dragon gems : it's highly likely that the Story stones this time are some flavor of Izanagi Objects again. It also helps that the Story Stones(?) this time, which are used to deal with the Sanctuary barrier in Reimu's profile, fulfill a similar function to the Occult Balls, which could interact / breach the Hakurei Barrier. Coincidence is unlikely here.
When it comes to the story this time, we surprisingly have no serious detail about the incidents aside from it starting from the sanctuary. There's an incident, just not clarified what kind it is. But since it's about the Sanctuary, chances are that whoever caused the trouble this time exploited the big real estate raffle from TH 19. Possible chain of events may go like this :
-TH 18's Chimata resets ownership
-TH 19's various faction got their real estate, including ones that didn't necessarily made their mark in the main story
-TH 20's new real estate owners started doing some nonsense, incidents happens
We've been to the Sanctuary a bunch of times but have no real info besides it being consecrated land of some sorts, plus supposedly usable as a passageway towards the Lunar Capital (according to Seiran - Biten vs dialogue from TH19). It would be interesting if someone related to the Lunar Capital besides Seiran infiltrated during TH 19 and claimed someplace as their own for whatever purposes they have for this game (Maybe the Lunar Capital could be the capital in the game's title this time ? To be seen). Also curious to see if we're gonna use the ruins and abandoned places in Youkai Mountains as a stage this time.
There's potential but lots of uncertainties this time, so I'm looking forward to what's coming in a few weeks time.
On the game's side :
No more cards, but we it seems like we'll get to have a control over our buil (if there's any) with the magic rocks instead of cards this time. ZUN's way of balancing the games where you can get power boosts (TH 17 and onwards) is to make the trash mobs SIGNIFICANTLY more tanky. It's something that kinda kills the momentum for me, and I hope that he isn't gonna go that way for this game (there seems to be powered-up shots, so I hope he isn't gonna make enemies more tanky to compensate)
Curious pyramid-shaped "wonder stone" popping up in the middle of the stages ... to be shot down, UFO style ? Vertical blue meter at the bottom right of the first picture comes with a blue wonder stone, and likewise the vertical red meter comes with a red wonder stone. If ZUN's gonna have color codes and ressources matches, chances are that dealing with the blue power stones nabs ya point stuff, while the red one gets you bunch of power. No guarantee here, but just possibilities. Not sure what the horizontal meter does though, but it might interact with the magic rock system for this game. The wonder stone lacking a health bar but instead have a "zone" kinda makes me uncertain about its effects. Also levels ? The effects is obviously gonna scale based on how high it is.
Also I don't seem to see a PIV coutenr on the UI ? Recent releases's way of boosting PIV came with bullet erasing means, generally translating into a Pacman gameplay when it came to scoring run (not exactly my thing). I hope the lack of PIV boost is for real and instead we're gonna have to make use of the chaining system (from the numbers on the top left) to make combos that transltes into score (pure skill based scoring seems more interesting to me than trying to get the value bullet-deletion from the C button tbh)
And finally as an aside, when it comes to assets, we seems to have a bunch of new ones, graphic wise. Stage background first of all is a DIFFERENT green forest instead of the OLD one ZUN keeps dusting off every new game (for TH15, 16 and 18's stage 1, as well as still TH16's stage 2 and TH19's sanctuary stage) : pretty good look already, not to mention the various bullet types we fire. I hope ZUN went the TH19 way for the artistic direction of this game and grapped some people along the way to help for the spritework of the various enemy bosses this time.
