Tohou Shooter Series

[Kaioshin Sama]

Well I tried playing the first five games in a PC-98 and nearly had an aneurism trying to get the games to stop hanging every 10 seconds (Hanging for even a split second in a shooter usually means instant death but this bitch hung for a good 5 seconds at a time). After about a couple of hours fiddling around with the oh so cooperative and compatible Anex68 emulator and some rather uncooperative shareware images + 3 nervous breakdowns later I've finally given up. Checking up on the Anex86 website itself I found out that it isn't even fully compatible with Windows XP, so I just spent the last two hours trying to run an incompatible program to run incompatible games. How's your night been folks.

Anyway on with the windows games now since PC-98 is a bitch and I didn't quite care for what bits and pieces of the first five games I tried. I just heard about this series today and its a long running series with 9.5 (is that right) games in it that involve some insane shooter action and what I'm told is an intricate plot (for a shooter game). Anyone care to add anything, I'm going to try and kill this headache (Thanks a lot PC-98 and Anex86) and just felt like starting the topic on this series.

[Varion]

Er, yeah, why'd you bother with the earlier ones >_> Just go play the Imperishable Night demo - plays fine on any PC and is easily the best in the series imo.

Still, really surprised this topic hasn't been made already, but it looks like it hasn't, so here goes. The touhou series is completely made by one guy, ZUN, who does literally everything - music, art, programming and all, and he still sells his games at Comiket (and after that into the doujin section of some japanese stores and the likes of paletweb on the net).

Enjoy the series quite a bit despite not being all that good at them (can do most of easy without dying, but can't seem to do normal all that easily, and lunatic? lol). Still, great way to pass time even if you don't get addicted and end up spending all your free time trying to work out the spell card patterns.

For anyone who wants to see what it plays like, there's a movie of the extra stage (which you won't even touch until you're very, very good, so don't worry) here, or if I could just yoink Dracil's sig for a minute:

You're supposed to dodge all of those >.>

[Zeifear]

Originally Posted by Valdra

For anyone who wants to see what it plays like, there's a movie of the extra stage (which you won't even touch until you're very, very good, so don't worry) here, or if I could just yoink Dracil's sig for a minute:

You're supposed to dodge all of those >.>

That doesn't look like fun! It looks like someone broke a few of their fingers playing!

[Varion]

Originally Posted by Zeifear

That doesn't look like fun! It looks like someone broke a few of their fingers playing!

It's a masochistic kind of fun that not everyone has in them Comes mostly from the satisfaction afterwards than during for me, you get so worked up in concentrating on dodging everything that all that pent up energy has to go somewhere - normally a huge burst of joy afterwards. Either that or relief. Still, it's there. Plus, some people like a challenge and most games these days don't seem to deliver on that. Touhou certainly does x.x

Actually in all fairness some of them don't look that hard. The last one does though

[Zeifear]

Originally Posted by Valdra

It's a masochistic kind of fun that not everyone has in them Comes mostly from the satisfaction afterwards than during for me, you get so worked up in concentrating on dodging everything that all that pent up energy has to go somewhere - normally a huge burst of joy afterwards. Either that or relief. Still, it's there. Plus, some people like a challenge and most games these days don't seem to deliver on that. Touhou certainly does x.x

Actually in all fairness some of them don't look that hard. The last one does though

Is this free then? I'd like to try it out. I use to love these kinds of games back on SNES. =D

[Varion]

Originally Posted by Zeifear

Is this free then? I'd like to try it out. I use to love these kinds of games back on SNES. =D

The demo is, yeah. Put it in my first post but I'll post it again:

http://mirror2.fuzzy2.com/zun/eiya_tr003.lzh

File extension might look weird but Winrar will open it Includes all the difficulties, characters, 3 of the game's stages and midi music only. Full version's $24 (inc shipping) and comes with all the stages (which is uh, 6 or 7, I forget) and both WAV and midi music. Apparently ZUN doesn't believe in mp3s >_> Still, the demo's got plenty to play about with.

Anyway, most basic of explanations:
Arrow keys - Movement
Z - Shoot. Hold it to keep shooting. Also goes through text.
X - 'Bomb' - grants you temporary invincibility and does a strong attack. Best not to use them too much though as if you use a bomb during an enemy 'spell card' (their health'll be in one of the red bars and the patterns will be more complicated) you won't get any bonus for completing it.
Shift - Slows down movement and makes your firing more concentrated on a smaller area.

The blue boxes add to your score (the higher up the screen you collect them the better), and red ones make your shots stronger. Moving up to the top section of the screen and pressing shift collects everything on the screen.

Finally, staying above 80% usage of either normal or shift attacks (it shows you in the bottom left of the screen) lets you collect time orbs when you hit enemies/just miss bullets. Get the right amount by the time you've finished a boss and you get to try their 'last spell', which is way harder than anything else they've got, you can't lose a life on, and gives you a nice bonus if you do it.

There, that should do for now

[Zeifear]

Thanks! I haven't played this type of game in a long time.

[Dragnfly@Gamefaqs]

There's demos I think, somewhere. Otherwise it's a $20 or so purchase, I think.

And don't be too frightened off by the difficulty. It's all about baby steps. Remember. Baby steps

The actual Shmups for the windows series are Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night. Shoot the Bullet is very unique, Phantasmagoria of Flower View is a vs. battle game like Twinkle Star Sprites and Immaterial and Missing Power is an official game but it's not made by him. It's made by Twilight Frontier (of Eternal Fighter Zero and Higurashi Daybreak fame) and is their first of three touhou-based doujingames (along with the megaman spoof MEgamari and the Mario spoof Super Marisa Land)

The fanbase is really anxious because Zun took a break this year, and the next game he released will likely be Touhou 10 (or Touhou X if you want it to look cool) and saying expectations are high is quite an understatement.

Other fangames of note include a 3D fighter akin to Psychic Force which just had it's full version out this last comiket, Touhou Soccer which.... needs to be seen to be believed... actually, the list goes on and on. If you count small titles like hanafuda and such, there's roughly twice as many fan-made games as there are official ones.

Here's the wiki and the non-H imageboard. Personally I wish Zun would get another artist to draw the character portraits for his games, but I'm likely neglecting his will to do it all solo.
http://www.pooshlmer.com/

EDIT: Sorry. Was destracted and took a while to write this. It was meant to go a few posts up.

EDIT: Ok, ok. So in the one or two months since I last looked at the imageboard the fanservice level spiked. Oh, well. We're all over 13 here and there's no actual hentai. Shjould be fine.

[Kaioshin Sama]

It looks harder than it actually is for most shooters, not that they are easy or anything but difficult. What you have to realize for most shooters is that despite the fact that you have a sprite, the hit box for your sprite is actually much smaller than the sprite itself usually located in a box shape in the center. Therefore shots can graze the outside of your sprite and not kill you, but if your hit in the center its instant death. You've also got to focus on dodging the bullets, don't pay attention to anything else but the bullets immediately surrounding your character, don't look at the sprite or the screen, just focus on dodging while maybe scoring a few hits here and there on the boss.

To bad I can't play any of them right now as my computer is dying on me.

[Potatochobit]

all the newer shooters have a technique to repel enemy attacks, so although it looks like there is no way to avoid attacks, its possible to make your own path through the bullets when needed.

only touhou game ive played is immaterial power though. and that was a fighting game.

[IchiKyo]

It's looks Harder O_o
But I ready to test it
Thanks for the Demo

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by Potatochobit

all the newer shooters have a technique to repel enemy attacks, so although it looks like there is no way to avoid attacks, its possible to make your own path through the bullets when needed.

only touhou game ive played is immaterial power though. and that was a fighting game.

The Touhou games don't really have anything like that, unless you count bombs, of which you get around three per life. I consider them extra lives that you sometimes forget to use. Most of the time it's about squeezing through gaps with your small hit zone (as mentioned by Kaioshin earlier) or memorizing tricks to dodging certain patterns, or more likely both. Luckily your hit zone is shown clearly while holding shift, so you don't have to completely guess. Unluckily, the bullets also have smaller hit zones than their sprite, so...

Anyway, I'm horrible at these games, but they're still pretty fun in small doses. Plus I like the characters. Sadly, number 7.5, Immaterial and Missing Power, is my favorite game in the series (and I'm not completely horrible at it; kind of funny dueling friends while trading keyboards in laps...) but since it's a spinoff is unlikely to get a sequel. Oh well.

And everyone should play Touhou Soccer, for a bit anyway. I mean, Master Spark on a soccer ball.

Edit: Plus the music is cool. Reminds me of old video game music, manipulating my emotions easily. Although they often seem to have complete different feelings than what Zun intended, based on the translations of his music room notes.

[celcius]

I think Potatochobit is talking about grazing in Immaterial and Missing Power. In that game, grazing is done by dashing, dash jump, air dash, or high jump and projectile type attacks will be nullified. In the real Touhou games, grazing is the act of getting close to bullets to get extra points.

I also like Immaterial and Missing Power more, since I'm more of an FG person. And with it having such a wonderful netplay patch, you can challenge players from across the globe (well, there's a direct proportion between distance and lag). It's a shame that tasofro won't be continuing with TH07.5, I would have loved to see Flandre and Reisen in the game.

The music is absolutely fantastic, and with the amount of doujin arranges that are released every Comiket, you're bound not to hear the same song twice until the next wave of CDs.

[Dragnfly@Gamefaqs]

Having Flandre and Mokou in there would be a dream because they're two of my favourites. I could also see them using Keine (complete with transformation and change in moveset) and Reisen would also be cool.

There was a rumour going around that if you did certain things you'd fight Lily, akin to how you fight the ref in Samurai Shodown. That would've been awesome if it were true.

But one would need to wonder. Would Flandre be faster than Remillia? If so, that's pretty sick.

[Clarste]

Originally Posted by Dragnfly@Gamefaqs

Having Flandre and Mokou in there would be a dream because they're two of my favourites. I could also see them using Keine (complete with transformation and change in moveset) and Reisen would also be cool.

There was a rumour going around that if you did certain things you'd fight Lily, akin to how you fight the ref in Samurai Shodown. That would've been awesome if it were true.

But one would need to wonder. Would Flandre be faster than Remillia? If so, that's pretty sick.

Well, according to their profiles, Remilia specializes in melee (and control of fate, which manifests in no form in any of the games that I know of), whereas Flandre specializes in the complete obliteration of anything and everything. One of those lends itself to speed more than the other perhaps?

[Akirasuto.]

I recommend people try out the spell card practice from IN to get a feel of Touhou series. ^^

[Kaioshin Sama]

Back From Beyond the grave on a loaner computer. Three Words Ai Cho Aniki.

[Varion]

Originally Posted by Kaioshin_Sama

Back From Beyond the grave on a loaner computer. Three Words Ai Cho Aniki.

Homoerotic shooters do not belong in a Touhou topic

Also, Phantasmagoria of Flower View is haaard. There's no method to it at all, just random stuff flying all over the place. Your tactics do nothing!

[Dragnfly@Gamefaqs]

It's when your tactics do stuff (properly choosing when to allow birds or when to assault) that you're starting to get good at the game.

If you had the version that came out on comiket day before Zun patched it up, it was crazy easy. Went about 4 frames per second. Of course a match took a while.

[Hoshi_Kawa]

I think their full versions, thats what the intro paragraph says, but i never beat of them to confirm that x_X For some weird reason i find, Lunatic dificulty easier than easy difficulty

just some screenies i took on Lunatic difficulty: