 | "Touhou" by Konstantin
(2005-10-11) |
These past few months I've gotten horribly addicted to the Touhou series of curtain fire shooters from
Team Shanghai Alice. Curtain shooters are a genre that never really took off here in the US to the best of my knowledge, but seems to have gotten quite popular in Japan. Its trademarks are the insane amounts of bullets thrown at you and the intricacy (and beauty) of the bullet patterns. Gameplay becomes less about memorization and reflexes (though both are vital) and more about figuring out how to weave through the brief openings or finding the eye of the incoming bullet storm.
The games in the Tohou series also have the distinguishing feature of making all the players, enemies, and bosses into cute girls. Each boss encounter usually starts and ends with a conversation between the characters present, and while the plots aren't exactly deep, the conversations are quite amusing and serve to flesh out the characters a bit. Considering that there are now 9 games in the series (4 in its PC incarnation), the cast is enormous, and bosses have a tendency to become playable characters in following games. Since the series is very popular in otaku circles, some of the characters have rather sizeable fandoms, and I'll happily admit to being a huge fanboy of Marisa, the cheeky black witch.
The soundtrack, which ranks up there with the works of Kajiura Yuki in its sheer prettiness, variety of influences, and propensity to get stuck in your head, deserves special mention. I can't think of any other games where I would struggle to survive a particular boss not so much for the sake of progressing further through the game, but to hear more of the boss's theme. It's no surprise that a small cottage industry has sprung up producing dozens of remix CDs for the music, ranging in genre from metal to lounge. What is surprising is that all of the original music, along with most of the coding and the art has been made by a single person, Zun. He is living proof that even with all the game industry behemoths out there nowadays, a tiny developer can still put together an excellent (and from what I hear highly successful) doujin franchise.
The 4 games in the Windows incarnation of the series are Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (the easiest of the Windows games), Perfect Cherry Blossom (my favorite of the bunch, and has a translation patch out for it), Imperishable Night (which is insanely hard), and Phantasmagoria of Flower View (which came out 2 days after I left Japan, so I've yet to get my hands on a copy T_T). The links above are to the official demos of the games, so you can grab those with a clear conscience.
There's a growing English-speaking fan community for the series, which has produced a very thorough Wiki site for all things Tohou. So if you want more detailed information or instructions on how to play and what all the various powerups do, I recommend checking it out.
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