Touhou - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

So over the break I have been playing A LOT of games. I also got back into the Touhou series :D Although I have been a fan of Touhou for about 2 years, I haven't played the games in a long time. Now, most of you probably haven't even heard of Touhou so let me explain what it is.

Touhou, or Project Shrine Maiden, is a Japanese doujin series of bullet-hell shooters (Bullet-hell shooter = 2D Shoot 'em up. Sorta like Gradius). The entire series is developed by the one-man developer Team Shangai Alice, whose sole member, ZUN, is responsible for all of the games' music, graphics, and programming. There are currently 13 main games, with the first 5 being developed for the Japanese PC-98 series of computers. The gameplay of the Touhou series focuses on shooting down numerous enemies while dodging seemingly impossible bullet patterns (I'm gonna show you a video of what the game is like at the end of the post). Each game after the 6th usually includes some kind of new scoring system. All of the games also encourage "grazing", which is when a bullet barely misses your characters hitbox. Whenever you graze a bullet, you gain extra points.

You gotta dodge stuff like this :D

That looks impossible right? Well don't worry, your hitbox is very small, so patterns like this aren't as difficult as they seem (although they are still VERY difficult).

Today, I'm going to talk about the 6th game in the series: Touhou - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. This is the first Touhou game that was developed for Windows PCs. It's also my favourite in the entire series, mainly because of the cast ^^

What I like about this game is how it greatly improved over the previous ones, and how there are no complicated gameplay mechanics. This allows me to focus on dodging bullets instead of trying to remember every little gameplay mechanic.

The game features 2 playable characters, each with 2 different "shot" types. Reimu Hakurei focuses on wide area attacks while Marisa Kirisame focuses on more powerful focused attacks. They also feature different "bomb" types, known as Spellcards (Bombs are what you use to clear an entire screen. Think of a panic button).

I decided to choose Reimu because I always used Marisa when I first started. I also choose her second shot type, Persuasion Needle, because it does tons of damage. I went through the first stage without any problems, although I almost made a few careless mistakes >.< Second stage was okay although I panicked at the boss and wasted a bomb (Curse you Cirno) >.>

The third stage is where I started messing up. I was doing fine until the boss. The problem with this boss is that she has 2 different attacks where she simply fires bullets into random directions. This requires me to do some ninja-dodges because I can't rely on patterns.

The fourth stage wasn't any better. It wasn't random bullets that killed me, but ones that change direction >.<
You have no idea how hard it is to dodge a stream of bullets that CURVE INTO YOUR CURRENT POSITION.

Fifth stage was worse. Now instead of the bullets curving, the boss teleports, freezes time, and changes the direction of the bullets WHILE TIME IS FROZEN. So if I position myself to dodge a stream of bullets, I'll get frozen and the bullets are now coming straight at me.  But I was able to figure out the patters eventually and managed to beat the stage while dieing only once.

The last stage is pretty fun and frustrating at the same time. But instead of ranting about it, here's a video of me doing it.

I forgot to mention that there are 4 difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic. This was done on normal. This run was pretty bad to be honest >.<

Well that's all for today. I'll talk more about Touhou some other time. Later ^^