A Mountain of Faith demo retrospective: How ZUN put the “fun” back in “Touhou”
Posted by: Owen S in Touhou, tags: First impressions, Mountain of Faith…wait. There isn’t any “fun” in “Touhou” to begin with. Which is soberingly true, but besides the point. I put my brand-new, 120GB Seagate 2.5″ external to good use today by bringing it over to the house of J, a close friend of mine, and passing him two seasons of Honey & Clover, Code Geass, and Touhou.
Guess which game I showed him first? No prizes for guessing.
now made over 9000% more fun with pictures like these, too
It’s pretty reassuring to know after so long that my half-assed attempt at translating ZUN’s pre-Reitaisai entry was probably correct. His original statement on his blog was somewhere along the lines of:
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and despite referencing several dictionaries, I couldn’t think of an appropriate translation, so I just noted it as indecipherable. The general meaning I got from it, though, was that he wanted to make the STG, or shooting game, fun again. Wait, you ask, isn’t Touhou fun to those who play it? No, not quite. Although a few of those over at #shrinemaiden would understandably disagree (whenever the topic drifts to Touhou over there it feels like I’m defending a thesis sometimes, they’re that hardcore), in my defence, when I first got my hands on the Touhou games I played them practically non-stop over a period of two months.
Something I noticed real quick was that the pressure heightened considerably as the series went on. EoSD wasn’t a problem to deal with as it was pretty much vanilla; no special systems to take note of, no elaborate scoring systems, just a no-frills move-point-shoot affair. Aside from its lack of a visible hitbox, midi-like soundtrack, and none too spectacular graphics when compared to its later counterparts, it did its job. It delivered.
PCB was a different kettle of fish. Aside from upping the ante graphics-wise to what would later be adopted as a standard (and again, what some consider as ZUN reaching a plateau) until MoF, it adopted the Cherry system, and thus began the nightmare. For the Cherry system wasn’t just your everyday double-edged sword; if it wasn’t bad enough that it cut both ways, it would occasionally wrest itself out of your hands and attempt to injure yourself. Not only was Cherry system was tied to your scoring bonuses, it also penalised you for bombing. The end result was that when I wasn’t trying to stay alive or play the game, I was casting furtive glances at my Cherry meter, wondering if I could risk a bomb and still achieve CherryMax at the end of the stage.
Should a game make its player subject to such ordeals? I tried to reason my way out of it, for after all, it wasn’t that hard a thing to live with. PCB had a shield system tied into the Cherry points (about 30 seconds of it every 50000), and it had more ups than downs. Letty Whiterock’s theme still remains one of my favourites, or at least was, until I discovered Voyage 1970 in IN later. It had Alice Margatroid, another of my favourite characters, as a boss in stage 3. It had a challenging final boss, with one of the most annoying resurrections ever. And it brought the Touhou community the Prismrivers theme, which, while not exactly my cup of tea, was arguably well-composed and excellent, as far as ZUN’s standards went.
My attention shifted to IN after that. IN took the basic graphics in PCB and stretched them out further; yet for all its dark and sullen glory the pressure mounted. Along with more newbie-friendly gameplay and an improved point-of-collection came the dreaded Human/Phantom bar, and Time Orbs. This became the game I spent most of my time on because of the unforgiving penalty that IN imposed on a death; dying meant losing a spellcard’s worth of Time Orbs, and the OCPD part of myself that demanded I clear every single stage fulfilling the Time Orb requirement, which in turn turned into an insane chase for clearing each stage to uttermost perfection.
It wasn’t as bad as it sounded in theory, but made for something else in practice. There’s a little bit of leeway that comes with the Time Orb collection, which allows for up to three or four deaths per stage before you miss the requirement completely. Even so, I found myself obsessively trying to clear each and every stage by meeting the mark, furiously alternating between Phantom and Human modes just to get a little bit more of those damned purple circles. Until I got around to not dying at every other spellcard, it became less of a shooting things game and more of a Gotta Catch ‘Em All game, to say nothing of how everything under the moon sun affected the score: keeping the bar at 80% or -80%; collecting Time Orbs; capturing the Last Word (which would only appear if you fulfilled the Time Orb requirement — see where this leads?); everything.
The next game, PoFV, took on a sadistic twist. As it had different dynamics and a gameplay more like Twinkle Star Sprites than any of its predecessors, ZUN probably took this as a cue to go wild danmakufying it. This had, for one, an AI that took repeated attempts to take down, even on Normal. The bullets were random and terrifying, a far cry from the preset patterns of yesteryear. To top it all off, the system was such that the longer you took to take down the computer, the harder things got as the summons gained in levels. This made PoFV pressurising in the sense that you had to chase the clock, a do-or-die situation that didn’t make for much enjoyment.
StB, despite being the black sheep of the family, took on the negative traits of its previous sibling nevertheless. While a lot of games basically comprise of the same actions repeated over and over again, StB made this literal in the worst sense conceivable. Playing in the shoes of tengu reporter Aya Shameimaru, the player, instead of shooting down a boss as per usual, took photographs instead. That’s right, photographs. Which wouldn’t have been half as bad if not for the insane relative proximity required for such a feat, the mind-boggling bullet patterns which resembled Mensa’s spatial-logic matrices at times, and the terribly unfriendly learning curve required to accomplish said feat.
Coming back to present-day MoF, as I ran the DirectX 9.0c April setup on J’s PC, it occurred to me that ZUN was distancing himself from the ghost of his previous games even in the game engine itself. MoF’s main menu was more responsive, with none of that slight yet annoying lag which, as a constant, I took for granted. The colours were brighter, warmer, and lent a certain air to the game right from the loading screen itself. And then there was the main character, the star of the show herself, and as I opened my mouth to begin to recite a history of Gensokyo, albeit truncated-
-I realised there wasn’t a need to, and quickly closed my mouth again. It struck me — ZUN severed all ties to his old characters by just going back to the basics, too; this would ensure new blood in his fanbase as there wasn’t the need for acquaintance with the characters prior to fully appreciate the game’s nuances. J, in his ever affable nature, said something jokingly about the character selection screen resembling Pokemon. Oh, just you wait, I thought. Having premeditated beforehand on the pros and cons of Touhou and how the “wow factor” would influence him, I was relying on the combination of graphics and J’s competitive nature (guys are too predictable anyway) to get him hooked.
And so began the first level of MoF. At this point it’d be good to note that I was running on 3, 4 hours of sleep at most, having slept at 6AM. It was 1 in the afternoon thereabouts, the temperature was stuffy, and I was tired. Despite all that, however, I managed to notice that MoF made for a good demo. There wasn’t any weird systems to point out, which was a bonus for me, for, sleep-deprivation aside, I also had a tendency to not be able to talk while playing, and MoF’s GUI spoke bounds in its simplicity. No Time Orbs here to explain anything. Hell, no Time Orbs, period. No scaling levels of difficulty on an insane level. In my worn out state I began to appreciate the little things that ZUN had put in place.
I died at Hina Kagiyama’s second spellcard, or somewhere along those lines. At this point the screen was beginning to blur ever so slightly, my concentration was waning a little, but that didn’t matter, for J was clamouring to have a turn. I decided to pull the carrot away ever so slightly and taunted him, knowing his nature would demand he prove me wrong. He continued in the manner I’d expected him to. I acquiesced, and handed over the controls, mentally noting that his keyboard made for poor gameplay due to the sticky directional keys.
It was the point of no return from then on. J’s reactions were precise enough for someone who had most likely never touched a shmup before, and it was nice to see how he adapted so quickly, shouts of “collect your points!” and “use your bombs!” from yours truly notwithstanding. He was hooked, and he kept on asking later on, regarding where I’d found out about Touhou. Not about to introduce a real life friend to 4chan just yet, I muttered something about an online forum, with a smile on my face.
Just as planned. Later while I ran through IN with him it made for tongue-tied gameplay, because I then noticed how unfriendly the whole system was, nevermind the easier Easy Mode compared to MoF. A considerable chore lay in the form of showing him how the Phantom/Human bar worked while trying to collect enough Time Orbs in stage 1, because my ingrained habit of not focusing too much stood in the way. Somewhere along Mystia’s Last Word J wrested the controls from my grip, and his fate was sealed.
I had made another Touhou fan — something that would have been considerably tougher had it not been for MoF sweetening the deal. You know what they say about how a watched kettle never boils? At the rate I’m anticipating the full version of MoF, it might as well be an eternity before that happens. Because when I fire up the demo I’m reminded of how everything’s fun all over again, and suddenly Comiket can’t come fast enough. If you thought Higurashi’s Mobius Strip was bad enough, ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you the endless spring of ‘07, and it’s all ZUN’s fault.
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June 9th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
You know, there’s a pretty simple solution to your problem: don’t care about points at all. That’s what I do. I’m happy if I can complete the game without dying. And I think StB was supposed to be more of a gift to the hardcore fans, so that explains the difficulty.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
It’s hard, Touhou turned on my OCD side and now it won’t go away. I get unreasonable amounts of satisfaction from seeing the Time Orb meter at the side turning bronze, and get agitated when I die even once. ): Yeah, I knew about StB, but ZUN’s still a sadist.
June 10th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
If you don’t care about points, then it would lose so much meaning. Shooting games were meant for heavy scoring. At least, that’s what I think.