Touhou Kaeizuka: Phantasmagoria of Flower View

released on Aug 14, 2005

This game is a split-screen vertical danmaku shooting game where two characters engage in the normal Touhou-esque gameplay, while unleashing attacks and character-specific spell cards onto the other player, similar to that of Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream. When a player gets hit enough times to lose all their hit points, they are defeated. The game features a Story Mode, which pits the player against a series of nine opponents that get progressively harder, and a versus mode, which is a single match against either an AI opponent or a human opponent(or, two AI opponents). With the netplay patch, multiplayer is also possible through LAN or over the Internet.


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It really feels like they were on something when making this game.

the invisible war of the franchise

I really really like 1v1 shmups.

recently i took one of those online personality quizzes (this one was about what emotions you create art from) which i usually enjoy because it's a way to feel seen and heard and connect with complete strangers even if the quiz wasn't really well-thought at all. but this one was and the result i got both shocked me and at the same time it didn't. that's because at some level i always knew about my discontent, it's not one of those things i'm gonna be talking about a lot and it's not even fully related to my gender experience, it's just something that i knew and that i don't think other people knew. that's what shocked me, that this was even a possible result at all. these things don't really have to do with the state my life is in, i'm pretty happy right now! but i also have no idea where this discontent comes from. seems to just be some inner thing that probably doesn't have a good explanation. maybe i just dislike reality as a concept.

i think ZUN does too. of course this comes just from my observations, i have never read an interview with the man and i could be completely off-mark. i hope i am because this is a bit of a cursed existence i wouldn't wish on anyone else. but ZUN very clearly created a world within our world. if i didn't hate analogies i'd say gensokyo is simply a fictional manifestation of his mind, a barrier against the outside world.

god i hate that i'm psychoanalyzing him this sucks, but i think there's merit in what he created, a fantasy world that still exists in ours. while he doesn't get too heavy into the themes he wants to portray in each game, as they mostly have a dream-like feeling or are retellings of other stories or is mostly just making these characters come to life, i'd be lying if I didn't think Phantasmagoria of Flower View wasn't his first step into trying to talk about human condition in a more focused way. in this game, which is a versus game funnily enough, there's no threat, there is no culprit, there's just someone at the end who likes to lecture others so they try to be better people. no, the whole "incident" in this game is something happening outside Gensokyo, in our world, as a very clear mass death event just happened and spirits are flooding their home world. the characters keep driving home the point that this is something that happens every 60 years, which would make 60 years into the past from this game the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. what i think ZUN was trying to say here is that no matter how divorced we are from reality, we still live in it, and that affects our fictional worlds too. we or our fictional population liking it or not. in this case, it didn't make much of a difference for the people of Gensokyo, but i'm pretty sure it did for their creator. some people think this was in response to a shock from the 2004 tsunami, but honestly i wouldn't dare to try to comprehend what was going through ZUN's mind at the time. i just think that i feel a kindred spirit in him and that seeing a fantasy world get affected by the events of our reality to be incredibly sobering and unique, even with all the meta narrative going around us i don't think i've ever seen anything done this delicately.

One of the Touhou games of all time