Touhou Project 10: Mountain Of Faith

I've made a note of this already, but I've been very, very busy with school and whatnot. Things are finally starting to wind down, so expect to hear more from me shortly. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, well, that's up to you, isn't it?

Despite my long-standing intention to do so, I haven't yet gotten to posting about the doujin soft franchise I most admire, Team Shanghai Alice's Touhou series. Team Shanghai Alice is misleading: the Touhou games are entirely produced by one man, a fellow who goes by the pseudonym ZUN, and have been since their '96 debut on the Japanese PC-98. With a few minor exceptions, the Touhou games are traditional 2d shooters: replace the spaceships with little bullet-flinging girls and you're starting to get an idea of ZUN's bizarre, obsessively detailed dream world. These aren't just competent, merely enjoyable games this man makes: they are superlative examples of their genre, meeting and often surpassing professional work. I can't imagine how he does it: a friend and I like to theorize that a maid cafe in some electronics-district dungeon must keep a permanent booth open for ZUN, where he sits at a laptop, codes, and is waited on. How else, right?

Anyway, Zun's been quiet for the last couple of years. The last "proper" Touhou shooter, Imperishable Night (Touhou 8), was released back in 2004. Since then, Touhou has only seen the back-to-back releases of the offbeat Phantasmagoria of Flower View (Touhou 9) and  Shoot the Bullet (Touhou 9.5). The former is modeled after the sleeper classic Twinkle Star Sprites and the latter too unusual to be modeled after anything: it's a game where you take pictures of bullets. Ten is a special number, and ZUN was, of course, working on something. Thankfully for us, the demo of Mountain of Faith has just started to circulate.

ZUN said something, if I recall correctly, about going back to basics for Touhou 10: if this looks like basics to you, then yes, welcome home. I kid, I kid! This is actually a much more streamlined interface than the previous Touhou shooters. See that sidebar? See how direct it is? How to-the-point? That sidebar used to be pretty packed. Don't get too worried by that screen, though: while curtain fire like this (relatively quite tame-- it becomes much more frightening and beautiful as the game goes on) is one of the signature elements of Touhou, it also features a very manageable difficulty curve. Easy really is a pushover, and Lunatic really is for the completely insane. Like most 2d shooters, this is a game of noticing and understanding patterns: if you give the game some time and some close attention, you'll start to understand how the bullet patterns work and how to weave through them. Start on the bottom and work your way up. See how far you can get.
 

If I might digress, a proper difficulty curve is a very sadly overlooked element in many niche-genre videogames. Knowing that their audience is the core, previously indoctrinated player, genres like 2d shooters and fighting games (and possibly Beatmania IIDX in music games, though this has been changing a little too slowly) simply drop the new player into a situation that only an advanced player could be expected to handle and tell them to swim. As such, most potential new players simply drown and walk away from the game. It takes a kind of person to play and master Touhou on Lunatic, and ZUN intelligently acknowledges that his audience is not entirely composed of that person. Accessibility, people.