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.

There's something relaxing about booting up the game, and jumping into a run without a care in the world. No routing, no resource management, no spellcard practice, just good old-fashioned random dodgin' and shootin'.

That is, until Stage 7 and onwards, where the game slaps you in face and ridicules you for your SHEER naiveté, thinking you could play an entirely random STG without consequences. Some days, you'll barely stumble through Aya/Medicine and Komachi with 2-3 lives intact, and then you'll be greeted by Eiki and her literal TAS evasive abilities. And as she jumps in, out, and WITHIN reality to weave though WALLS of bullets, she'll make sure to send you patterns that would make Remilia blush. Oh, and did I mention that the first round is essentially unwinnable? God help you if you didn't bring an extra life.

Of course, on other days she and the rest of them will be nice and turn off the ultra-instinct after two minutes. Such is the nature of PoFV.

minna! chiruno no sansuu kyoushitsu hajimaru yo!
atai mitai na tensai mezashite, ganbatte itte ne!

kirakira daiamondo kagayaku hoshi no you ni
eikou shiboukou nantoka shite hairou
tensai shuusai toppu mezashite go go!

yuuka kazami is my wife

my favorite touhou game and all in all a really great bullet hell. to be honest, this game is also a great intro to the series, what with its big ass cast and friendlier gameplay. 9 has the best roster of characters, tied with 15 and 11. 19 is a great successor but i feel 9 is much more fleshed out, and its more appealing to me personally

the music is really, really good. all the remixes of old themes sound great and the new character themes are great too, with shiki eiki's being my favorite. gameplay is super fun, the playthrough starting out easy but quickly devolving into chaos. the ai literally cheats sometimes, but its ok. all the spellcards are fun to learn and i had a great time going through the game with every character

We were this close to perfection, but I guess the AI can never be fair.

I did 1CC it on lunatic around a year later to my first completion. Maybe Marisa is busted.

Fun fact: this is the only mainline Touhou game that I still didn't beat its extra mode. It's quite tedious to even unlock, honestly.

above all else i admire phantasmagoria of flower view for being a pretty nice light-hearted bit of fanservice to wrap up the first round of windows touhou games. it kind of only works on that level if you've played 6, 7 and 8 - and given my recent reviews, you know i have - so this sort of acts as a reflective greatest hits collection of some fan-favorite characters and themes like reisen, cirno, lyrica, mystia, etc. the remixes here are all pretty good too - i especially like how video game-y 'beloved tomboyish girl' is here, and the 'phantom ensemble' arrangement was a special surprise, as i really love that fight.

still, i found the phantasmagoria concept inherently kind of flawed when i first played touhou 3, but i'm sorry to say while there are generally some improvements that come with this being a later and more realized touhou game, it's still not great. the boss ai goes from braindead to genuinely unfair (hi eiki shiki) on a whim and the actual means with which to strategize are so vague that i genuinely had to look up strategy tips to make sure i wasn't playing the game wrong and that mashing charge shots wasn't optimal. i eventually beat the game with 5 of the characters but i genuinely wasn't interested enough in the unlocks this time around to push through 100% completion. not as much variety as 8, not as tight as 7, not as engaging and somehow worse balancing than 6. it's alright, i guess.

Well, I was going to wait until 10 to really start taking these seriously, since the plot get more interesting at that point, but Touhou 9, which I hadn't spent much time with previously, ended up capturing my interest quite a bit. As such, I'm going to start with the basics.

The Touhou project is well known as a series of shooters, but this one is a little different, being a followup to Touhou 3, Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream. It's a head-to-head competitive shooter, obviously inspired by Twinkle Star Sprites. Through your performance, you can unleash your own attacks on the other player to make things harder for them. Whoever runs out of life through taking damage first is the winner. Compared to TSS, this game has a lot more bullets and generally feels more like a Touhou, as it should. You get a selection of characters from previous games as well as a few new ones, and as always the soundtrack is phenomenal. Grinding through the proper fighting game spinoffs tends to be a repetitive pain but I enjoyed doing it here because it's much faster, less predictable, and the ending story was pretty much always something worth looking forward to from a character perspective.

Because the game has 14 tiny story campaigns, I hadn't expect it to cohere as much as it does, but even though you are kind of covering the same thing each time, it does kind of develop as you unlock more characters. The incident this time has the lowest stakes yet: There are a lot of flowers blooming, many out of season. Generally, whatever character you pick wanders around beating up anyone they find hoping to find out why. They fail until they notice that in addition to the flowers, there are a lot of extra ghosts around as well, leading them to a lazy Shinigami named Komachi. She's supposed to ferry the dead down the Sanzu river to recieve judgement, but the extra ghosts are too much for her, and she's just sort of not doing it. Her boss, the Yama named Eiki Shiki, yells at her and then decides to lecture your character on her own sins. The flowers and the gathering ghosts are revealed as something that happens every 60 years along a cycle of nature's rebirth, and there isn't really anything that your chosen character can do but leave it alone and try to live a less sinful life.

Incidentally, given that this game came out in 2005, even though the games don't really match their release year, the implication is that the last flower event would have been around World War 2. Even the supernatural characters like Eiki don't know what the event causing massive numbers of human deaths are, and it doesn't matter to the story, but I'm just saying that it's the War on Terror. I'm saying that George Bush caused the events of Touhou 9. That's what I'm saying.

After the "normal" story campaigns, you unlock the Extra mode, which is very tough but takes place after those other stories and lets you do campaigns for Komachi and Eiki. The Yama travels around checking in on everyone to find out if they're taking her lessons to heart. Universally, every single one of them has forgotten or failed to understand. Everyone agrees that nobody will remember any of this stuff in a year, let alone 60.

Eiki is really the star here. She gets the most dialogue and has quickly become one of my favorite characters. The fanbase, being terrible, often depicts her as a little angry gremlin, but that's just completely at odds with the game. She IS a preachy cop don't get me wrong, but she's also the judge of sins. Part of a cosmic order. These aren't human laws she's following, and she doesn't make them. When she fights someone, its to improve their karma. Even for the characters who exist outside of her jurisdiction, as it were, she thinks it would be "cruel" not to lecture them, and she has a point!

The problem, certainly as a westerner, is that it's impossible to get a handle on her rules. Her judgements from character to character seem to contradict themselves. At one point she goes full boomer and says that rich people are more moral than poor people. She tells Reimu to exterminate more youkai but also that she should feel bad while doing it or else it's a sin. In the end, I had to play her own, final campaign to reach peace with it. Nobody listens to her in the end! They start off trying, and then immediately lose interest. A lecture, no matter how much authority is behind it, cannot change the nature of a person, as our memories and feelings fade so quickly. The rules that govern gods would never be the same as human laws. Buddha never said that reaching nirvana was easy. That's the whole point. It's pretty much what I hear The Good Place is about but a decade before and it's a shooter with a joke in the manual labelling one of the characters "idiot"

This is the Touhou game I spent the most time with. It's fine enough single-player, but a vs. shooter like this is it's at its best when you're playing with a friend.

Each of the playable characters has their own distinct attacks and playstyle, sending over various obstacles to their opponent. I like how instead of a single bomb type, there are progressively more powerful spells you can use as you kill more enemies. Komachi in particular is so much fun to play as with the sheer amount of bullets in her spells. As usual, ZUN's soundtrack is great. Wind God Girl is one of my favorite tracks in the series. 2-player mode is a lot of fun and can be played locally or online via peer-to-peer connection.

The only issue is that controls get uncomfortable after awhile. There are control options, but you have to decide between no autofire or no unfocused movement when firing, neither of which are ideal.

eu não acredito que o único jogo em que eu posso jogar com a Mystia, as irmãs Prismriver e a Yuuka Kazami (na sua caracterização da era windows) é esse danmaku competitivo esquisito. eu queria gostar um pouco mais dele por ser um encerramento da primeira fase dos jogos windows (já que o próximo mainline muda umas coisas, aparentemente), mas em termos de gameplay, phantasmagoria of flower view não me atrai tanto. a AI das inimigas começa incrivelmente burra e abruptamente se torna injusta, e o fator aleatório que vem da competitividade acaba tornando esse touhou meio fraquinho pra mim por não ser muito um jogo de aprender padrões de bala. eu gosto de alguns dos arranjamentos musicais novos, pelo menos.

eu não acredito que essa é a ultima vez que a Yuuka fala na série.

Avr... Sí bien es algo criticable el repentino cambio en la jugabilidad considerando el camino que la franquicia ya estaba construyendo desde el 2002, sin duda alguna PoFV es el juego más infravalorado de la misma.

La jugabilidad aunque la pantalla esté dividida pues conserva las mismas mecánicas, pero alteradas dependiendo del personaje que uses. A diferencia de los juegos anteriores, aquí se nota más la influencia de los ataques de los personajes, pues el daño provocado hacia los enemigos es proporcional a los ataques afectuados por el videojugador ejecutando mejor la mecánica principal de los disparos en un sentido vertical a diferencia del juego anterior que tenía errores que fácilmente podía romper el sistema de combate del mismo. También, la mecánica de potenciar tus habilidades está mejor repartida y es más consistente, en juegos anteriores la mejora dependía bastante de la suerte, sin mencionar que realmente solo la primera que eligas será la única que prevalecerá en la aventura, cosa qué se mejora bastante aquí, al tener un modo de juego más dinámico considerando la jugabilidad que implementa. No obstante, la dificultad es uno de sus aspectos más deplorables. Pues la mayoría de combates están programados para que las oponentes pierdan sus puntos de salud de forma rápida si el juego ve que juegas mal, algo muy contraproducente considerando la batalla final que es la única que cuya naturaleza es realmente difícil controlando por completo el entorno del juego. Es sorpresivo, pero no progresivo. Es uno de los juegos de la franquicia más fáciles junto a Undefined Fantastic Object (Aunque este último es más por problemas en sus mecánicas así como sus bugs que pueden usarse a favor del videojugador). Visualmente y musicalmente el juego sigue bien. Su aspecto visual es el primero en la franquicia que cuyo entorno se basa enteramente en la cultura de un país, en este caso, Japón. Está muy bien diseñado, sin tener bajones de frame rate incluso teniendo la pantalla sobresaturada, siendo el último en la franquicia de tener ese detalle. El diseño de los personajes está decente, al igual que en lo anterior es el último juego donde cuyo diseño de personajes, tienen la mínima coherencia en su anatomía. En el Ost, es de los mejores. La instrumentación es preciosa, influenciada por los juegos retro junto a una combinación particular de guitarra flamenca de forma excepcional, notándose bastante en temas cómo Wind Girl God (De los mejores temas de la franquicia).

En fin de cuentas, no es un mal juego, es de los mejores de hecho, pero siento que tiene varios errores... Pero aún así, mejora bastantes del juego anterior que realmente ya se sentía bastante sobreexplotada la jugabilidad Arkanoid sin implementar nada nuevo de buena forma. Siento que merece más reconocimiento, puesto que es algo odiado solo por su cambio en la jugabilidad (Qué encima ni es tan grande para ser considerado un spin off, Bruh). En fin...