Hopefully everyone reading this blog is at least familiar with the Touhou series. Working under that assumption, I won’t bother with a rundown of the basic gameplay. This, instead, will be a summary of the main mechanic and my first impressions of each game, starting with Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and going through to Ten Desires. Well, technically they’ll be second impressions since I’m writing this after my first playthrough of each, but it’s close enough.
I’d warn for spoilers as well, but I never paid enough attention to the plot to know what was going on myself. ᄀ（￣ー￣）ᒥ
Oh, one more thing. Each playthrough was Normal Mode, default lives, Reimu (Homing Amulet, or equivalent, usually), and played until I ran out of continues (or gave up in 10-12). Pictures often not related.
Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
What’s probably most remarkable about EoSD is how unremarkable it is. There are no frills, no gameplay gimmicks, and no fancy 2011 spritework. Just you, 3 bombs, and a helluva lotta danmaku.
Apparently the safe spot is only on Easy Mode.
You also don’t get a visible hitbox in this one, either. Either I had seen Reimu’s back long enough to know where her hitbox was anyway (…creepy) or there’s some sort of visual cue as to where it is. Either way, I didn’t do too bad for myself.
Progress: Made it to Stage 5. Then lost my final life to a trash fairy. ;__;
Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom
Here’s where Zun throws a spanner in the works: the first gameplay gimmick! In PCB, in addition to the Graze and Point counters, you also have a Cherry counter. It affects score or something. Considering how terrible I am at these games, it isn’t too surprising that I never really noticed the Cherry system. Looking it up, though, it was also tied to Supernatural Borders, which I was wondering how I was getting.
I have a visible hitbox!
By this point I’m starting to get a little bothered by not being allowed to use the point of collection until I’m at MAX power. All those little pickups, floating away . . .
I picked up a bit on the plot this time. Reimu is collecting Cherry Blossoms because . . . something, and a certain ghost (Yuyuko) was stealing Spring to revive a youkai cherry blossom with a soul sealed inside.
Progress: 1 cc’d to stage 5, lost to Youmu. Made it to Yuyuko and was promptly defeated. (Fucking lasers)
I broke the rule a little here and went back to practice mode for stage 6. I did worse than the actual run. FFFFffffuuuuu
I skipped 7.5, since 12.3 is the latest fighting side-game. Look there for my thoughts on that.
Touhou 8:
This time, you get to pair up with a youkai partner to shoot things. There’s also a human/youkai balance meter that does . . . something? Instead of the usual continues counter, continuing costs you time, and the game ends at 5 am. Moving to the next level also costs time. And you can pick up more time to use less time when it’s time to go forward in time (Marty! You’ve got to come back in time with me!).
I’d say this game is the one where I started to get a feel for the game beyond “dodge bullet; shoot boss.” I started to see the patterns of openings in walls and general bullet spam, and I got a hang of the very important skill of deathbombing. It probably helped that Team Reimu has what I think is one of the longest DB windows in the series (it’s like an entire second).
Adorable, but what a lame name.
Plot this time has something to do with the moon. Also Marisa engaging in “Troublesome Youkai Hunting.” Whether that’s the hunting of troublesome youkai or troublesome hunting of youkai, I can’t remember.
Progress: Cleared stage 5, but I had used 2 continues by that point and so was denied stage 6 as the clock hit 5am.
Touhou 9: Phantasmagoria of Flower View
Well, this was different. I probably shouldn’t have played this, since I lost a good bit of the muscle memory devoted to dodging regular danmaku and replaced it with muscle memory for dodging boring danmaku.
Phantasmagoria is a 2-player VS Touhou shooter. You shoot bullets, you get points, you build charge, you shoot even more bullets at your opponent, lather, rinse, repeat. Instead of lives you have a yin-yang counter at the top of the screen that decreases in some proportion every time you die, and when it’s empty you lost the match. It’s fun for a bit, but quickly becomes rather formulaic because the reduced screen size limits bullet patterns somewhat. Also rather frustrating to fight CPUs in PvP situations, as usual.
No idea what the plot was. At all.
Progress: Made it to stage 9 (did I mention there are 9 stages? yeah) and then lost due to CPU-controlled danmaku dodging being bullshit.
You can't tell by the screenshot, but Reimu is a CPU. And dodging all of that unfocused.
Phantasmagoria is easily the most skippable main game, and to anyone looking to casually play a bit of Touhou I’d recommend doing so in order to keep your skills sharp.
9.5 is covered with 12.5 below.
Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith
And back to the usual Touhou fare. This time, you get a Faith meter and collect Faith pickups to fill the meter. I assume it’s tied to scoring somehow, but more importantly (for me, at least) it’s sort of like your bomb source. Instead of having to fret a bunch over when to use my 3 little bombs, I get to play a balancing game between bombs and Faith+power (1 bomb costs a few thousand Faith and 1.00 power). Considering how bad I am with consumable items in most games (WhyCantIHoldAllThesePotions.jpg), an effectively unlimited source of “OH SHI-” buttons is just perfect for me. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the PoC no longer requires MAX power.
Unfortunately, I’m still pretty terribad and MoF forces you to restart a level if you continue so I only got to level 4 this time. (You appear to have unlimited continues, though)
I think I read somewhere that Tokyo has a really serious crow problem. As in, there's one guy whose entire job is to come up with ways to keep the crow population down. Or maybe I just have a thing against crows now.
10.5 got rolled into 12.5 below, if you’re looking for that.
Touhou 11: Subterranean Animism
I swear this one had some huge jump in difficulty. Did not like.
You get paired up again, although this time it just flavors your shots and bombs and gives you a neat special ability. Hmm. I guess that’s more than just “just;” that’s probably more than Imperishable Night gave you. Anyway, I went with Suika because a) semi-homing shots and b) I liked her ability (release input to auto-collect items). The shot was a bit disappointing (I got maybe 30 degree arcs out of the homing shots), but the special ability (I thought) was really handy. Bunch of power cards in a clump of bullet spam? No problem. Want to claim that life fragment immediately? No problem.
There was also a little radio meter with a score card counter or somesuch, but I didn’t notice it much. Filling the meter to 1.00+ by grazing auto-collects items for you, but with Suika’s ability, that didn’t see much use.
So many bubbles . . . (Never did manage to no-miss this card)
Oh, yeah, made it to the stage 3 boss. Barely. After like half a dozen continues. Then I gave up.
Touhou 12: Undefined Fantastic Object
I think this is my favorite gameplay gimmick in the series. You try to pick up trios of UFOs, and upon getting three of a kind or three different kinds (there are red, blue, and green) you spawn a big UFO which sucks up power and score cards to build a meter. Once the meter fills, you get some sort of bonus (score for blue, bomb shard for green, life shard for red), and again if you manage to defeat it before it flies away. One mechanic that can be used whether the play is very defensive, very aggressive, or somewhere in between; I love the elegance of that. I tended to go for red UFOs to cover up my suckitude.
Infinite continues and level restart upon continuing is still in, and instead of power cards granting .05 power they now grant .01. (There are a helluva lot more of them, though) When the giant streams of bullets come out with easily hundreds of cards falling down the screen, it feels good to hear the constant SCHUNKSHCUNKSHUNKSCHUNKSHUCNK of graze and card pickups.
You do seem to visit the afterlife more than is probably healthy, Reimu.
I pressed on for several more continues than I should have, and managed to scrape through to the boss of Stage 5. Looking back at the spell card where I quit, I think I get how to beat it now…maybe I’ll break out practice mode.
Touhou 7.5/10.5/12.3: Immaterial and Missing Power / Scarlet Weather Rhapsody / Hisoutensoku
Oh boy, fightan gaems! 😄
I only played Hisoutensoku, since that was the latest game in this offshoot of the main series. Normally, I’m pretty crap at fighting games because I don’t care to memorize combos or input strings; lucky me I can get away from that (just a little) in Hisouten. Special inputs are simple (3 directions in a simple pattern plus one of two Bullet inputs) and some characters can get by more on bulletspam than on combostrings. For example, I manage a decent Patchouli with an aggressive zoning and drawing strategy. I can get through Lunatic arcade without a sweat (I suspect that’s really no big deal) and the handful of PvP games I played I didn’t do too bad for myself.
Except against Sakuya players. Goddamn I hate Sakuya players.
Touhou 9.5/12.5: Shoot the Bullet / Double Spoiler
I really liked Double Spoiler (I don’t actually have StB). It’s like Zun took the really exciting parts of the main games (spell cards) and turned that into a game unto itself, then decided to spice things up by asking you to take pictures of his pretty, pretty bullet patterns. The quick death, quick retry gameplay style emphasizes an aggressive flair that I can’t manage in any of the other games, and at the same time the bits of survival while your camera recharges help teach dodging and placement skills that are useful in the main games as well. Making a suicidal charge towards a boss with full knowledge that you’ll just snap a picture and clear away all the nearby bullets is so delightfully wrong in terms of usual Touhou play that it’s like a deliciously forbidden fruit.
Then again, lasers. Fucking. Lasers.
Touhou 12.8: Great Fairy Wars
Gee, Zun, did 12 get enough sidegame love yet? No? Alright, that’s cool. ‘Cause I really liked Fairy Wars. I mean, I’m still bad at it, but like Double Spoiler it had that allure of encouraging a gameplay style that would be suicidal in any of the main games.
Playing Cirno who’s out for revenge on a trio of other fairies for wrecking her house or something (it continues a story in a manga, and the artist for that did the dialog spritework for GFW), your goal is to shoot your way to revenge! Because YORE THE STORENGST! You’ve got something better than that silly shrine maiden with the pits could ever hope for, though: you can freeze bullets in their tracks! By carefully choosing where and when to deploy your Freeze barrier you can create chain freezes that charge extra lives and bombs — or even get you through otherwise impossible bullet patterns.
GFW is also where I finally picked up on how to stream properly, since the game encourages it by awarding faster freeze recharge for grazing. Very useful, shame it took me this long to finally get it.
AWWWWWWW YEEEEAAAAHHHHH
And we all had fun watching me fail repeatedly at the Extra stage on Wednesday, right? Right?
Touhou 13: Ten Desires
The latest, though I don’t much care to call it the greatest. Certainly not the worst, though (Phantasmagoria, I’m lookin’ at you).
The gameplay mechanic this time around is supposed to be the spirit meter, which you fill and then use to enter an uber/invincible mode (if you’re good) or get a few more seconds of shooting in when you derp on a bullet (if you’re bad, like me). However, I didn’t feel it as much as I did a couple other tweaks to more basic gameplay. Continue-where-you-died is back, as is limited continues, and the difference between focused and unfocused shooting is amplified as well: unfocused movement gives you a spread attack (+homing, for Reimu) while focused gives you a much more directed and linear attack. Like the bomb/power tradeoffs of 10 and 11, I liked the tactical sense of this choice.
Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?
Buoyed by my own confidence, I ignored Han’s sage advice and got cocky. Managed to use up a continue before the first boss, and the proceeded to not even make it to the end of stage 4. I went back for another round though, this time with Marisa, and managed to 1cc all the way to halfway through the last boss. Awww Yeeeaah. (Only continued once that run; I actually saw an ending!)
Closing Thoughts
Earning that ending card in Ten Desires (even if it wasn’t a 1cc) felt like a really good way to end my whirlwind tour of Gensokyo. You’ve got me hooked, Zun; the question is which game shall I actually shoot for that first Normal Mode 1cc? MoF has a bomb system I like, UFO has a mechanic I like, and I’m already pretty close to doing it on TD. Suggestions appreciated, otherwise I’ll probably end up rolling a die or something to choose.
A lot of the difficulty in these games is psychological, I’ve realized. Once you get over that initial “OMGWTFDANMAKU” moment you start to notice that a lot of the bullets are actually quite slow and dodgeable (I was able to sightread easily 90% of what the games threw at me). Over time I got steadily more comfortable with expanding my vision beyond my character sprite, predicting bullet patterns, and making those incredible mad dashes through fields of glowing death. Almost zen, after a while.
Of course, what would a review of a series be without a ranking?
Great Fairy Wars (Freezing is so much fun)
Undefined Fantastic Object (Love the UFO mechanic)
Double Spoiler [+StB, presumably] (Distilled Touhou, with a twist!)
Ten Desires (My opinion is perhaps colored a bit by my success)
Hisoutensoku [et al.] (Props for making a fighting game I can do reasonably well at)
Mountain of Faith (Infinite continues and a tactical, instead of logistic, bomb system make me happy)
Imperishable Night (The time mechanic was clear in gameplay, unlike . . .)
Perfect Cherry Blossom (. . .whose mechanic I didn’t understand until I looked it up)
Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (It had to go somewhere, and it just didn’t excite me at all)
Subterranean Animism (That absurd jump in difficulty really soured me on it)
Phantasmagoria of Flower View (Can you tell I didn’t like this one? Because I didn’t)
Oh, and a closing question: Is it considered poor form to increase the available lives setting when the option is available?
You know, I’m kind of surprised you haven’t 1cc’d a game on normal yet, because you’re actually not that bad. You suck at resource management (not dying with bombs in stock), but you’ve got a good basic sense of how to dodge stuff. I’m not much better than you at that, and I 1cc’ed Imperishable Night on Hard, so I think you just need to be more liberal with the bombs.
If you’re looking for your first Normal 1cc, most people suggest PCB or IN, since the former’s got borders and the latter’s got a stupidly large deathbomb window (and spellcard practice). I also found MoF pretty easy on Normal – I made it to the last card in the game on my third playthrough. And yeah, I guess it would be frowned upon to change any of the default settings (I leave it on default lives, and I leave slowdown off if it’s available. I also picked up Daniel’s habit of never using continues, even if I haven’t unlocked all of the stages).
The most important thing in Touhou is to know your limits. It’s really tempting to just try and dodge everything, but you’ve got to know when you need to bomb. I’d say use practice a lot-not just to be able to capture more cards, but to know which cards you’re gonna automatically write off as a bomb. You also want to learn the stages, which is something a lot people forget to do. Often, Stage 4 is a stream-heavy stage, and can be virtually impossible if you don’t know what to expect and don’t do them properly, but it becomes second nature after seeing it a few times. And stage 6 often begins/ends with a death fairy, so know if you’re going to bomb on them (no shame in doing that).
The last thing I wanted to mention is that you might look into getting the vpatch for each game, which apparently messes with vertical sync and can reduce input lag. I’m not good enough to tell if it’s actually helping, but some people swear by it.
Jack · February 3, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Bomb use is definitely something I need to work on. It’s a just a mental hurdle I have with it being a limited resource, which I mentioned I’m really bad with in any game. I think taking your advice on practice mode will help — if I don’t have that pressure of resource conservation I’ll be more likely to experiment and figure out where I really should just bomb out.
I haven’t noticed any sort of input lag or issues with vsync, so I think I’ll pass on the vpatch for now.
Jack · February 3, 2012 at 2:24 pm
@Chris
Bomb use is definitely something I need to work on. It’s a just a mental hurdle I have with it being a limited resource, which I mentioned I’m really bad with in any game. I think taking your advice on practice mode will help — if I don’t have that pressure of resource conservation I’ll be more likely to experiment and figure out where I really should just bomb out.
I haven’t noticed any sort of input lag or issues with vsync, so I think I’ll pass on the vpatch for now.
Chaeha · February 4, 2012 at 10:21 am
I found a typo! You said “10.5 got rolled into 12.5 below.”
And you don’t really need faith to bomb in 10. It’s just a penalty, like how your cherry points and time points go down when you use bomb in 7 and 8.
10′s pretty easy. I didn’t really have much difficulties trying to 1cc 10. What I did was watching the top scorer’s replay and trying to copy his moves unless it requires some crazy maneuver that are usually in one of those scoring videos. It can kinda help, since in 10, score is how you extend your life. Since the graze doesn’t matter in 10, the scoring comes to maintaining your faith high, and the video shows you exactly where you wanna use bombs, and that made it so much easier for me.
Finally, Wriggle is a very nice name, thank you very much. Don’t say bad things about Wriggle!
Chaeha · February 4, 2012 at 10:38 am
You made me play touhou, but after seeing that I only get 40fps for some reason, I stopped. It used to run on 60. I don’t know what happened to my computer.
Matthew Strand · February 7, 2012 at 7:00 am
I quite enjoy Subterranean Animism myself, but suffer the reluctance to bomb that you do, and hence haven’t made it past stage 3. A note on the posted Tongue-Cut Sparrow spellcard: if you only shoot Parsee instead of her clone (hard to do with homing shots), then you don’t get auto-raped by bubbles. Makes life way easier.
