Using certain attacks, you can also build special "points" of energy towards a super attack that will wipe a lot of health off the opponent. Each character has multiple attacks mapped to three different attack buttons that range in strength, depending on how long the button is held for, and a lot of these attacks have the effect of filling the screen like the bullets in a bullet hell might. In this one you’ll predominantly do that by attacking from a distance. Like any fighting game, your job in Kabuto is to reduce your opponent’s health to zero. Once a battle starts though, the clumsy approach to combat renders the good work that the story does to set the scene rather mute. There’s unfortunately a lot of assumed knowledge built into the script, so people who haven’t played many (or any) of the Touhou games might feel a little lost at first, particularly the way the characters interact with one another based on their history, but the overarching narrative is clear enough for anyone. The best feature in the game is a story mode that offers a story that, silly and simple as it is, is also charming and fun.
There’s also a real dearth of playable characters in the game, and while they all do fight differently to one another, it doesn’t take long for a sense of endless repetition to set in. I get that there’s one girl that uses ice, and another that tosses daggers around, but ultimately all you’re doing is shooting coloured, glowing projectiles at one another until someone falls over.
Kobuto doesn’t do them any favours with the basic character models and costumes, coupled with a distinct lack of personality as they fight. I’ve played enough of the Touhou games now that I have a sense of the major characters, even if I’m not familiar enough with them to be particularly enamoured to them. There’s one stage that is quite distinctive, because it’s got a silhouetted castle and sinister sky in the background, but for every other level I’m really struggling to remember anything about them. That in itself isn’t the end of the world, but the design of these characters and environments is also completely uninspired. Environments and character models are very, very basic, and not unlike a PlayStation 2 game that’s been HD remastered for the PS4. But then you’ll get into a battle with someone, and the pieces will fall apart, and quickly. In the story mode, and whenever the 2D character art pops up, it’s gorgeous, and every bit up to par with any visual novel or anime-inspired JRPG that you might have played. This is one horrifically ugly game, in-game, because building environments from that perspective is an incredibly resource-heavy way to do things. The team working on this game wanted to give players a behind the back, third-person perspective on the action, and that’s where its problems start. If you were to take something like Geometry Wars, replace the characters with cute anime girls, and then replace the enemies for a combative one-on-one action, you’d have that particular game in a nutshell.īut Burst Battle had loftier ambitions than that. Just like Kobuto, it was a top-down one-on-one fighting game, but in playing it you were instead given the impression of a bullet hell more than anything else.
It was a simple, but clean and elegant and used a perspective, gameplay engine, and aesthetic that could hide its budget and limited development resources. But Burst Battle is just not very good.īullet Ballet understood the limitations of its development team. It was, in fact, one of our favourite games of the year. Liberated of the constraints of commercial game development, that has led to some good times roguelike Touhou Genso Wanderer was a solid experience on all levels, and Touhou Kobuto’s immediate predecessor, Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet, absolutely delighted us. The entire Touhou IP and franchise comes from the dōjin soft corner of Japan’s games industry - effectively developers that work on games more as hobbies than as a commercial pursuit. That, of course, is part of its charm for the very small niche that would look at the screenshots and even think to give it a go. It’s a clumsy, clunky and amateurish production. Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle is not a very good game, unfortunately.
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