Touhou Open World game idea (Read 938 times)

[0of64]

The world of Touhou - Gensokyo - is large, and also there is a lot of lore behind it. So what if... there was an Open World Touhou game? What would it be like? I just think this would be a fun topic to talk about as Im really invested in the idea of exploring the wide reaches of Gensokyo. Honestly its a world I wish to explore. What comes close is prolly Puppet Dance Performance and a Minecraft map.

What're your guys' thoughts on the idea?

[spongelevator]

there's enough to gensokyo current-day that an open world would probably feel just right
we've got a lot of locations and gensokyo's pretty "full" now
so next move is to put it together (or already have it as a map to explore)

I don't know if it would be a survival type game where you play as a human trying to not get crit immediately by the first rumia in the tutorial or if you would be someone skilled with danmaku with fights
or perhaps just exploring as some sort of invincible being or an immortal or something
but some of the less-explored locations would probably be pretty interesting to see mentioned outside of like two lines of dialogue and maaaaybe a pmiss article
like going to muenzuka and seein all the weird stuff that fell in (also dead people lol)

maybe you could make the youkai mountain into a moriya gear solid 3 or something wwww

has all the greenery and landscape for stealth gameplay and the "survival" aspect (though suwack would not enjoy you feeding on a tree frog)
stage bosses could work as cobra unit with their abilities
well it aint exactly open world at that point but eh I always thought it was a funny idea lol
only "open world" game I have ever played is mgsv I'm pretty sure so I suppose I do not really know but running across the entire afghanistan/angola-zaire region was worth the 500 hours so I would gladly do it again in a gensokyo game

[0of64]

Hahahaha Moriya Gear Solid 3 XD

I don't have an idea for a plot but I have this idea where as you play the game you can unlock more playable character. You start with Reimu and Marisa bc of course you do and then you later unlock Sakuya, then Sanea, then Youmu and so on and so forth.

And I just came up with this now but what if we brought back those communication orbs from TH11 where you can call up Yukari probably to give you hints to push you in the right direction.

Also maybe restrict flying a bit so the player gets a chance to explore Gensokyo on the ground before zipping to places across the sky

Also yea, Gensokyo IS really full with "stuff" its fascinating

OH What if common enemies had AI? Like fairies. We could see see them do their usual activities like wondering around picking flowers or smthing or even have some hiding in bushes or behind trees and when you approach them they jump at you with a surprise attack like if it were a prank!

[spongelevator]

youmy and aya could actually work pretty well for a late game unlock because youmy is the fastest on the ground and aya is the fastest in the air
so they could allow for particularly quick movement across the map (well assuming there's no quick travel or teleportation or anything)

with that communication orb concept I thought of more moriya gear solid japes
you could make a radio system there for maximum effect
and potentially have fairies as playable characters because you've got ability to turn invisible/stop noise/radar which is actually another very good thing for stealth
it would need balancing of course because stealth camo is meant to be broken but stopping noise and radar would be very entertaining
pretty sure there was a fangame involving stealth fairies though I wasn't able to get it to work
I would not be surprised if it did just that honestly

perhaps there could be some sort of method to make certain areas less friendly to flying
like an ungodly amount of crow tengu if you try to fly near youkai mountain or fairies near the lake so you end up taking the ground route and exploring more
it would work with the setting without making it basically adventures of floating omnipotent camera


yeah enemy AI would definitely make the world feel more alive
the akyuu friendliness ratings (yeah yeah akyuu unreliable I know) could probably be used to separate characters into a handful of different types of AI
and you could make gensokyo's inhabitants suddenly a lot more interesting than floaty despawning stuck on a grid type pokemon
want to piss off yuuka and see what happens

[0of64]

Ooooooh Yea I like the idea of enemies in the sky and also speaking of MGS mechanics I've just thought of one rn. Now I'll be honest I never played any of the games though I have watched reviews of them by SomecallmeJohnny so what I've been thinking was that you could possibly "recruit" common enemies such as fairies and phantoms and have 3 of them at a time as like your companions to aid you in fights or heal you and they would like get stronger the more you use them.

Yea AI would make the world feel more alive and putting enemies were it would make snese like a butt load of Tengus at the Youkai mountain like you said.

Oh definitely playable fairies! Ya gotta play as the strongest character for ez kills

OH Imagine codec conversations with the like of Reimu and Yukari just bickering with eachother XD

Hmmmm, I think what you balance things out is at the beginning we would have like say Reimu and Marisa and other characters who can fly that you get at the start of the game slow in the sky but fast but super fast on the ground to allow room for a fast travel system so that when you get someone like Aya, you can just ignore fast travel all together. Also I think switching between characters would be easy as pressing down on the R stick and rotating between a few characters you can set for quick access

OH OH What about in the beginning of the game you would find Nitori's shop of some sort where you can buy like vehicles and such for that early game exploration when you are pretty slow and don't have youmu yet

[spongelevator]

in most of the MGS games about big boss you can fulton enemies back to base (or put them in campbell's truck if you wanna get weird) to build up an army and deploy as them
fairy army
that is all

what you described is actually like
exactly how SMT does it 
you recruit enemies with negotiation and have three of them to fight alongside you to attack/heal/buff/whatever
new skills when leveling up and such
by the end of this game you would be lv99 with a party of kasen/okina/yukarin to fight the dragon god lol

codec conversations would be very entertaining
I don't know how they would be incorporated considering mgsv just kinda
tossed them out
and that's the only open world metal gear but it would be nice to see
getting burst transmission calls from "lunaticeyes" warning you not to step in tewi pitfalls lol

maybe give each character individual traits
like tf2 classes except now pyro is futo
could spice up movement and combat though it'll end up making at least one character objectively inferior (sacrifice is worth it though)
though if it would be fairy army or recruitment type maybe it'd be better to allow stat allocation and have level ups with innate traits
better not have a superboss that requires 50 hours of grinding everyone to 99 in all stats and perfect skill sets

there could be both a kappa shop for technology and a card shop for powerups and such
like an expansion of UM's card system except now it's got all sorts of weird stuff
+4 jump height cards

also there could be specific circumstances that allow you to visit other worlds 
not as a main focus but as a "there's this, too"
a snippet of lunar capital or backdoor world perhaps maybe heaven or hell
if there was extra bosses or something I could see them being in alternate locations considering gensokyo is kinda the "home turf"

[0of64]

OH YES BRING THE CARDS OVER FROM UM that would add SO much customization.

Also I was thinking more like um, familiars from Symphony of the Night where they're like small companions that follow you around and attack automatically and deals that extra chip damage or even one shot small fries so you don't have to or pick up dropped items for you, heal you when you're at a certain health or for late game companions can constantly heal you like regen spells in some RPGs. They could even bring in special effects for you like more air time or buffs and such.

I would love to see alternate locations I think they would add more to explore and more content and the like.

Oh and I do like the idea of characters having different classes like like TF2, it would make them more unique and adds that layer of custimization

[Aeon]

you guys got some proper rad ideas, recruiting fairies and stuff especially that would be sick and you can build your own lil team of generics and chumps up to maybe fight named dudes and big youkai
i also have ((still)) not played mgs5 but the movement and options in that game: seem awesome. make em a bit grander-scale and you got cool flight tricks for traversing bigzone of gensokyo

alright homies i am about to blow your minds
i long sought a touhou open world game. looked everywhere, japanese, western, chinese fangames, and there was nobody who had even attempted a larger-scale recreation of gensokyo
it's really big, and really abstract. we aren't just making hogwarts here, it's an entire valley of uncertain size where every structure and field can facilitate massive danmaku battles and minutes of flight

oof64 in your original post you mentioned a minecraft map coming close and buddy, it does not come close. id say that is the product itself
i believe the last version of the gensokyo map that i played was in 1.12 so i'm pretty sure there have been some updates but: holy shit. i cannot possibly overstate how detailed and well-put-together every single corner of the place is
you slap a mending elytra on, disable mob griefing, enable some basic water and lighting shaders, equip a decent texture pack like mizuno's, and its an incomparable experience. even got secrets
it was a big server that a ton of people were building together so if you poke around well enough you can find all kinds of stuff, coolest being books. some of em are lil touhou stories, some are messages to other players, some are entirely random nonsense, i even found a few with coordinates to secret builds
you can go in myouren temple empty handed, take two hours to explore the place, and leave with a hotbar of just cool items. everything is made as massively grand as possible to the point that i don't even wanna post screenshots because the fouckin awe in walking into the sdm basement or reaching the foot of youkai mountain is irreplaceable

i explored a lot but there was still so much i didnt get to, and a bunch i couldn't get to because i broke my copy by updating to 1.13. i am in hell classes for only two more days but will grab and post links after that if anybody wants em
you guys are talking about proper open world games with story and abilities and stuff though, and the isolatory journey through a gensokyo with nobody in it in minecraft doesn't have that unless you wanna play the dangerous game of piling on mods

oh you know what there is that one game, the outsider who loved gensokyo? morally i am opposed to it but i cant say the guy didn't put work into it. some 50+ hour rpg that i'm pretty sure lets you go anywhere, albeit in my good friend rpgmaker vx ace's gridlocked topdown movement

[spongelevator]

only in mgsv can you be dropped off in a yoshi-egg colored helicopter playing never gonna give you up and then proceed to sprint 2500 meters without stopping alongside your one-eyed ginger wolf dog buddy wearing full battle armor to an oilfield (don't forget to punch an endangered okapi on the way and steal it) where your bright pink camo disguises you from the enemy as you dolphin dive to the middle of the base and unleash your mechanical arm's 45 meter lightning strike, taking out 10 guys at once who will promptly be captured via wormhole (1984 technology) and named "bastard agama" or "steel eel", then smoking an e-cigarette for 72 hours straight and extracting yourself via shipping crate


ok that does not make sense if you haven't done it yet
but it reminded me that the rest of the SA stuff could be used in a game
mgsv's buddy mechanic basically allows you to change the way you play the game depending on who you bring
you've got the stealth horse, radar dog, sniper, and cool robot man
SA aint exactly the same but I could see the concept being usable in a similar way where you're a human being assisted by a youkai that has specific abilities to aid you
back to that fairies thing perhaps you could unlock them throughout the game starting with luna, then later star and finally sunny and just bring them along as a buddy
something would have to be done to balance it though considering soundproofing is only useful if you're already good and invisibility is always broken but eh I do not care it is funnier that way
well that assumes it would be a stealth type game I suppose but eh unless you count smt games as open world or watching mario odyssey on the youtube it's all I got

also perhaps there could be a pokedex-like thing (or compendium if we are going to summon chen) that you can fill out by exploring
pokedex and akyuu's encyclopedia are equally not correct so it works out quite well
don't even need a bunch of collectibles if the youkai ARE the collectibles lol

I wonder what the combat would be like
there's some 2hus fangames with 3d flying+danmaku
but good lord
maybe we're in a no spell card rules world and everyone goes back to absolute murder that would be easier lol


I do not know what mind crafts are still but I looked up gensokyo minecraft map
and man they really made the whole gensokyo in mindcraft
even the pc98stuffs and sanzu river/higan
honestly just the fact that it exists makes it worth going through even without a lv80 suika in the starting area that will kill you instantly or being able to equip sanny with a comp

[rys]

only in mgsv can you be dropped off in a yoshi-egg colored helicopter playing never gonna give you up and then proceed to sprint 2500 meters without stopping alongside your one-eyed ginger wolf dog buddy wearing full battle armor to an oilfield (don't forget to punch an endangered okapi on the way and steal it) where your bright pink camo disguises you from the enemy as you dolphin dive to the middle of the base and unleash your mechanical arm's 45 meter lightning strike, taking out 10 guys at once who will promptly be captured via wormhole (1984 technology) and named "bastard agama" or "steel eel", then smoking an e-cigarette for 72 hours straight and extracting yourself via shipping crate

you forgot the part where you menacingly play the outhouse tape on speaker the entire time

I wonder what the combat would be like

Might not be the most exciting choice, but there's the Danmaku board/card game that you could make an adaption of; would even tie in with the exploration parts of the game, since you could get cards associated with a character by befriending or beating them. Even at 1 card per character and some generics, that's a lot of options.

[spongelevator]

Dec 17, 2021 8:15:15 GMT rys said:

you forgot the part where you menacingly play the outhouse tape on speaker the entire time

I aint familiar with how card games usually work though the idea of getting new cards after defeating characters reminds me of super paper mario lol
it would definitely add more to the combat though like a more major form of UM's cards

though I just realized it's probably possible to just position the camera directly above and make danmaku 2d (though that's not particularly interesting it works I guess)
and have the non-danmaku parts be something else like magic battles or whatnot
or maybe instead of a full on bullet hell it would just be an acceptable amount of bullets

[0of64]

Ooooooh yea I like these. Having to scoure the lands to collect spellcards for characters would add challenge and a satisfying reward aswell as keeping the player to keep playing and exploring for stronger moves to mow down chumps with.

I also like the pokedex idea so of you wanna like grind out an enemy that drops an item need you can look back at encyclopedia to learn about them or just learn more about them in general.

Also I like the youkai assistance thing. I was thinking sort of like Imperishable Night when you brought that up.

I think the combat should be a mix of melee and danmaku. The melee part is self explanatory but I think to make danmaku work we could add like a lock on thing like from Zelda where you can lock on to an enemy to focus on them.

Also I was thinking that Power can be used for when you have enough Power you can upgrade your shots/melee attacks

Oh yea, The MC map looks fucking AWESOME, I might explore it one day bc its honestly impressive

[spongelevator]

now that I think of it there could maybe be something like the manta system from digital devil saga
you basically buy an undeveloped set of skills and consume enemies to eventually unlock the skills for your character
it would have to be changed in some way but I always found that made the game much more interesting because you have far more control over what your character's like
maybe it would be pointless though if a ton of characters are playable because then there's variety in numbers
spellcards probably would be more useful in that situation to get minor upgrades or combos and stuff

I entirely forgot about imperishable night 
in IN it's more two characters than one character plus an assist so that reminds me more of cooperative multiplayer
that would be very nice for such a large game though I don't think I ever hear of open world games being multiplayer for some reason (though I've only even heard of maybe 10-20 open world games total)
usually there's online modes and versus modes but no multiplayer main game or campaign or whatever they call it
probably there's an obvious answer to why that I'm missing but it sounds like it would be cool

if melee+danmaku then perhaps the danmaku could be spell cards
and it can work as melee+magic/projectiles under normal circumstances and danmaku only in certain enemy phases so you aren't having to micrododge a wall of red every time you move past a populated area
lock on would work well for using projectiles and magic instead of having to aim like it's a schut game

also for a "story" type thing it could possibly be minor incidents like in the mangas 
usually the mangas also have some character or idea relevant throughout the whole thing but eh I do not care minor incidents was the good stuff
like "(moron) did (thing) and now (character) must deal with it" or whatever other types of "achieve objective" 
the manga is like 99% same handful of main characters going around interacting with minor characters though so minor incidents could be more entertaining by having them be local and concerning a specific playable character
not like making the character only usable in certain areas but more having certain scuffles relevant to certain areas to introduce each playable character and location
and there could be little things to do and get a small reward outside of the major stuff
basically stealing ideas again from the handful of medias I actually know about but it sound nice

[rys]

Most multiplayer games are built for pick up and play; it's a pain to get people together and stick around for long games; it can work, but it's usually better for something short or that wouldn't expect everyone to be around.

For story, the fighting games usually had the right idea. Have an incident that gives everyone an excuse to go around and meet/fight everyone else. A single big story would probably focus on a party of a few characters and skim over the rest, so having a series of small, connected substories can share the spotlight with a few characters each.

[spongelevator]

I can see why a full multiplayer game wouldn't work and maybe not be desirable (even on a smaller scale stuff like the newest mario party is now online even though it was always a multiplayer local thing) but I meant more like in pikmin 3 deluxe where you can play the story mode with two people
it's split screen and local only but you can have two players controlling different captains and revert it to single player whenever you want
it's the only game I've seen that does this though (original pikmin 3 didn't have it and other games like mario galaxy only let p2 be a cursor)
now that I mention local multiplayer though I remembered most stuff is online these days so I guess that answers it
also balancing issues if that matters pikmin 3 went from "easiest game in the series" to "easier than the easiest game in the series" 
a pvp online mode would suit game better due to the maybe large cast

yeah adding a general story to the small local incidents and whatnot would improve that idea
so now it's not just "whack the fairy over the head with a stick" and then "find a large mushroom to create a potion" right after with no relation whatsoever
fighting games usually have like 15-20 playables as a result of the somewhat loose main story and connected routes from different points of views (17.5 made it so many of the routes were different and all had to be seen to get a hold of the incident which is ehhhh)
manga handles it by being all slice of lifey (excluding SSiB) so I suppose it would depend if the game tried to be more of a casual "look through this world" or a more active type of game where you're always paying attention and frequently in combat
it's good to see many potentially otherwise unrelated characters interacting and the kinda "anyone can be fought in any order besides the final/pre-final boss" works well though I feel a loose story with minor events could achieve something similar with less playable characters
either having a massive cast with variety or having a bunch of little stories seems kinda asspainish
though I will say both are hypothetically entertaining at least lol
I do not know which one I would prefer