[Review made: April 29, 2003]"What???!?!? Why'd you skip to the newest title of Touhou?!?!??!?!??!" I hear you asking. Well, with Touhou 7 coming out this year and rumors coming around that Touhou 6 is a reboot, I decided to just skip ahead. I've already played the other games for myself, I'm just too lazy to actually review them. All I have to say is that for this one, the story is fucking crazy. So, first off: this story is kind of like Castlevania. No, really it is. Reimu hakurei but in a different outfit and with darker hair who also isn't 16 bit this time around would resemble Simon Belmont. Remilia Scarlet, the final boss if you don't count Flandre, would resemble Dracula. The other bosses (Rumia, Churno, Meiling, Sakuya, Patchuolli, and the mid-stage bosses) would resemble, well, the bosses of course! It is so hard to get an English version of this game, mostly due to it being THIS new. I still couldn't manage to find one, but luckily my only friend who likes Touhou Project knows Japanese and even got his own copy of the game when he went to Comiket in Japan for it! (Talk abt overkill...) Anyway, he (hopefully) accurately translated the cutscenes for me so I could review this game. (LOL) The game starts off with you beating two really cool characters: Rumia, the man-eating Youkai, and Churno, the dumb ice fairy. They don't exactly have much to do with the lore, but the reason you are out is because of the red mist spreading across town. You need to figure out how to solve this problem. Eventually, you run into a mansion who is being guarded by a red haired martial artist known as Meiling, the Chinese Girl. (Whoa! That's like Ranma! I wonder what'll happen if I splash boiling water onto her.... hmmm..) Once you defeat her, you pass through the gates of the mansion and the rest of the fights take place indoors, You eventually run into some red haired... person(?) named Koakuma. no need to explain her lore, because there is none! She is literally a mid-stage boss with no dialogue. After you beat her within 20 seconds, you meet Patchuolli, the magic librarian. Fun fact: If you play as Marisa in this game, you steal some books! She tells you to back off, but in natural Reimu/Marisa fashion, you don't and defeat her. She mentions that next you will have to fight someone who can warp time and space itself. Then, you run into Sakuya, on stage five. She is a red-eyed maid who can stop time. She gets mad at you because you are interrupting her cleaning. In natural maid fashion, she basically turns into Dio from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and starts throwing knives at you in stopped time. If you beat her, you get to stage 6 where you find Remilia Scarlet, the vampire who owns the mansion. She explains that she needs this mist so she can go outside in the day and do some bad things (whatever, drama queen) You and her have a nice conversation ending with "It's going to be a fun night It's going to be a long night. " Eventually you beat her and the scarlet mist stops. She has a very difficult boss fight, so I recommend collecting graze points on stage 3 before you fight Meiling so you can get more 1-UPs in case Remilia hits you more than expected. If you beat it on normal difficulty or above without using a continue, you can unlock the extra stage, where you get to see Reimu call Remilia's little sister "special ed" and proceed to duke it out in the hardest most difficult touhou fight ever. It's a really fun game overall and I hope you can try it out for yourself someday. Good luck out there, adventurer!
Touhou 2: Story of Eastern Wonderland
[Review made: IDK when, probably a month or two before the EoSD review though]When I first saw that there was a game released only in Japan about a shrine maiden riding a a senile turtle through rural Northern Japan with two yin-yang balls by her head while shooting down enemy ghosts tanks with the same yin-yang balls, I didn't think that was the real deal. Turns out it is. Touhou 2: SoEW is the most stressful, yet most fun SHMUP (shoot 'em up) I have ever played. You play as a girl named Reimu Hakurei, who is a shrine maiden who rides a senile pet turtle named Genjii. She has two Yin-Yang orbs to shoot with (can vary based on the shot type you choose for her). The first boss is relatively easy, but I do sometimes wish that its first attack didn't just immediately release with no warning. Other than that, easy boss. The second boss is where I start to lose my shit a little. She gives you barely any fucking room to work with to dodge her attacks. It's just a "good luck, btw... try to dodge her movements" she essentially backs you into a corner of the screen with her attacks, but when you get to dodging her bullets in that corner, that's when it gets REALLY tedious. This is why I wish Reimu moved a little slower when you wanted her to. So at that point, you have to just hope you dont accidentally move a little too far to the right when she fires projectiles and also that you're not obstructing her path. If you get hit by her, expect not to unlock the extra stage that run. There's no chance you won't be continuing at least once on this run. At the third stage, you fight a giant platform. Yes, you heard me right. A FUCKING PLATFORM. It's another one of those fights that are pretty difficult at first but once you've played it 2-3 times, you have it memorised. Once you beat it, you run into Mima, the one who's been causing all this trouble. You'd think this is the final stage, but of course not! It's touhou! Instead of fighting Mima, she sends out a third-rate Magician named Marisa, whose model is ripped from a hentai game that was also on the PC-98. I'm not kidding, ZUN traced over a hentai nurse's modle for this game. Have fun sleeping at night. Guess what, HER FIGHT MAKES ME WANT TO THROW MY COMPUTER OUT OF THE FUCKING WINDOW. So, get this. She has these 4 orbs that are similar to yours, just magic instead of yin-yang, right? Seems pretty simple so far. Just seems like a character design choice. She starts using them as weapons. You may be thinking, "Well, yeah no shit. They're supposed to fire projectiles. " I don't mean a weapon as in ranged combat. I mean a melee weapon. She starts expanding their radious rapidly and you can almost never tell where they'll go unless you memorise her attacks. If they hit you, that's a life off. And if you expect to memorise them easily, good luck. You'll need it. Once you've beat Marisa, you've probably used a continue by now. She mocks you, calling you weak for using a continue and so does Genjii. By then, Reimu's kinda pissed bc they just called her weak and said she shouldn't go any further because of it. Once she finally meets up with Mima at stage 5, this is when it's ON. I hate Mima's fight too. I don't want to spoil most of it, because it is the final fight in the entire game (other than the extra stage you unlock by beating it with no continues), but let's just say this: WHAT THE FUCK MIMA!!!! As much as I found the game difficult, I genuinely think that it's good and that you should play it. It does require an emulator for PC-98, I recommend using Neko Project. I forgot where I found the ROMs for it, so good luck (haha).
