Thoughts on Playing Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires

Some of you may have noticed the sudden, abrupt absence last month. No posts, no updates, no Twitter, no Gmail, no concrete contact to the blogosphere in whatever way. If one should ask, it’s not because I have lost interest in the current season and its shows. It’s not because I have decided to go into another hiatus to deal with unfinished business, either.

It’s only because of one thing, and one thing only: Getting my body ready for Touhou‘s thirteenth installment, Touhou Shinreibyou.

Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires (or simply Ten Desires) is the latest game in the Touhou Project series of games by ZUN. It was finally released at ComiKet 80 after delays due to work on other projects^[1] and the recent Touhoku Tsunami and Earthquake Incident^[2], which cancelled Reitaisai 8. The game boasts lowered difficulty, new Practice Modes, a diverse variety of musical tracks, an ingame manual, and innovative danmaku patterns never seen on any of the previous games. Given these features, Ten Desires now serves as the gateway game for the current era of Touhou games^[3], similar to how Imperishable Night is seen as the gateway game for the previous era.

The title screen, sans the Extra Mode (because I’m too lazy to actually clear the game in full).

Story

Ten Desires tells the story of the abrupt emergence of divine spirits in Gensokyo and how its residents deal with the incident. Reimu and Marisa set out to find the cause in order to end the incident, going along with their usual reasons^[4]. Sanae seems to have a different agenda with the spirits, seeing them as an opportunity to gather faith for her shrine. Youmu, on the other hand, wants to exterminate the spirits that aren’t in her jurisdiction, because she doesn’t want Hakugyokuro to be overpopulated with such spirits.

Gameplay Features

The game has a few new features, while some elements from the previous games, such as Last Spell/Deathbombing^[5] and the Bomb/Life Piece System^[6], make a definite comeback. One of the new, notable features of the game is Trance Mode, wherein you gather divine spirits^[7] in order to fill your Trance Gauge. The mode kicks into the game in two ways: One is when you get hit by an enemy projectile and failing to Deathbomb. The game then shifts from Normal Mode to Trance Mode, granting higher bonuses from items, more damage, and invincibility for a certain period of time, depending on how much Trance you have on your Trance Gauge, which is located on the lower left part of your screen. After the time limit expires, Trance is cancelled and the player finally loses a life. The other, more useful way of having Trance Mode work is the manual activation of Trance. By pressing the C button, a player can manually activate Trance, provided that the player has a full Trance Gauge. This is very useful for escaping from sticky situations.

However, Trance Mode is not without disadvantages. While Bombs can clear all the bullets on the screen and grant temporary invincibility, Trance only grants invincibility. Once Trance is cancelled, and your hitbox lands on an enemy projectile, consider yourself dead. Another disadvantage is that Trance immediately cancels the bonus from a Spellcard, as opposed to Bombs, which only cancel Spellcard bonuses if they are activated during the card’s duration. This means no matter when you activate Trance, the Spellcard is considered failed once the card is activated during Trance Mode.

Other recurring features are the Points of Collection (the upper part of the screen where items automatically home into the player), and the no-change property of Power and Bonus Items^[8]. However, the Life Bonus from Bonus Items has been removed in favor of the current Bomb/Life Piece System.

Just being on the business end of a blade, nothing special.

Playable Characters

There are four playable characters: Hakurei Reimu, Kirisame Marisa, Konpaku Youmu, and Kochiya Sanae. This character lineup marks the first time a Touhou game has four playable characters on the Windows platform^[9], and the second time in the entirety of the series (the first one being Mystic Square from the PC-98 era). In exchange for two additional characters, the character modes^[10] are removed to further simplify game mechanics; instead they are integrated as alternate attacks that can be activated through Focused Mode. Reimu, Marisa and Sanae retain the usual format for their respective Focus Modes, while Youmu utilizes a unique Focus Mode by means of a chargeable slash a la Phantasmagoria of Flower View that can eliminate a number of opponents on her front. Bombs have little to no change, again save for Youmu, who changes her Imperishable Night Bomb Spellcard to her current one, which is a flurry of random slashes executed in almost the same way Aya executes her Spellcard, Wind God “Illusionary Dominance”^[11], in Mountain of Faith. But again, the only bullets and enemies eliminated are the ones in front of Youmu’s sprite on the time of the card’s execution. Evidently, it’s Youmu’s oddities that bring diversity between the playable characters.

Boss Characters

A good mix of boss characters litter the game. Ten Desires features new boss characters, while three characters, Saigyouji Yuyuko, Tatara Kogasa, and Nue Houjuu return from the past Touhou games to fill in their roles as stage boss and midboss, respectively. The new characters hail from the human faction, spurred to gather by the resurrection of the game’s final boss, the saint priestess Toyosatomimi no Miko. The character group also incurs the ire of an existing character faction: The youkai faction from Undefined Fantastic Object. My personal favorite for this game^[12]? The undead Chinese guard Miyako Yoshika, and it doesn’t help that her consitution and abilities already match those of past characters, specifically Hong Meiling^[13] and Yuyuko^[14].

Enemies

Ten Desires also presents interesting ways to present the usual cannon fodder. ZUN didn’t shy on using every space on the screen in order to catch players off guard. From wisps spiralling toward the center of the screen to youkai fairies popping left and right to pepper you with bullets, the game relentlessly forces players to move a lot, especially on very unusual places. And with the abundance of divine spirits released by stronger enemies, the temptation to jump from the frying pan into the fire is greatly intensified. Another thing to mention is the behavior of bosses. Bosses in the game constantly release divine spirits to tempt players into coming close to them in order to get a bigger score bonus, which in turn exposes them to an array of dangerously spawning bullets.  All in all, it gives enough flair amidst the mellowed difficulty, giving even seasoned Touhou players a variety of ways to play the game.

Music

The game’s tracks were given variety because of the game’s very nature. Each stage and boss theme were given two iterations, one for Normal Mode and one for Trance Mode. The Trance Mode version of the themes are made by recording the themes in a lower sampling rate (22050 Hz), which gives them a different undertone. Interestingly, a new version of a theme can be produced by merging the Normal and Trance versions, with the exception of Toyosatomimi no Miko’s theme, which does not change regardless of whatever mode is in effect.

Don’t be fooled. This spellcard is deceptive to the point of being thought as easy!

Spellcard Quality

I really need to point out the drastic change in projectile behavior for this game. In an attempt to create innovative bullet patterns, ZUN introduces projectiles and Spellcards that behave differently from the past games. A good example of this would be one of Seiga Kaku’s Spellcards, Evil Sign “Guhun Yegui”^[15]. The Spellcard deploys a certain number of lightning orbs that constantly home into your location, while Seiga fires outward rays of bullets that slowly revolve either left or right, depending on where you’re moving. While Seiga’s part doesn’t really surprise much, the behavior of the orbs is something new^[16], because it never leaves the screen, and will constantly track and home into your location after a set number of seconds. This forces any player to keep watch of the orbs while mostly disregarding the revolving rays of bullets, a mistake that could cost a life or bonus in keeping tabs with.

Practice Modes

Finally, the Practice Modes make a comeback in Ten Desires, along with some changes. As some of you may have already known, the only Touhou game that comes with a variety of Practice Modes is, you guessed right, Imperishable Night. Ten Desires comes with the all the Practice Modes from Imperishable Night, from Stage Practice to the highly anticipated Spell Practice. But this time, Spell Practice not only records how many times you’ve tried and cleared a certain Spellcard in practice, but also the number of times you’ve tried and cleared the Spellcard in Story or Extra Mode. This is because they are needed to unlock the Overdrive Spellcards. Overdrive Spellcards are the strongest Spellcards of all the boss characters in the game that can only be unlocked when certain conditions are met, such as clearing a Spellcard on Story or Extra Mode or clearing a Spellcard on all difficulties. Unfortunately, ZUN did not create or include any Overdrive Spellcard for any of the playable characters, a disappointment for those who want to think of the game as the spitting image of Imperishable Night.

For an appropriate parting note, you can say that I enjoyed playing Ten Desires way too much. I actually decided for myself that I wouldn’t write a Ten Desires post as long as I’m not able to clear on pure Unfocused Mode glory, which I nearly did. I did have to consider focusing while not moving to use Reimu’s Focus Mode attack pattern, since it dishes out twice the damage at twice the speed compared to her Unfocused Mode attack pattern. But aside from that, yes, I highly recommend Ten Desires to anyone who wants to play Touhou games but aren’t sure where to start^[17].

Further Reading and Reference

Footnotes

1. Specifically, Fairy Wars and Double Spoiler [↩]
2. The Wikipedia arcticle can be found here. [↩]
3. In case you don’t know, Touhou games are divided into “eras”, which is basically the engine or platform used to make the games. The first era pertains to the games created on the PC-98 platform. The second era pertains to the games created for the first game engine for Windows, from Windows 98 up to Windows XP. The third and current era finally pertains to the games created on the third engine for Windows, from Windows Vista up to the current and future versions of Windows. TH01/Highly Responsive to Prayers up to TH05/Mystic Square are included in the first era.  TH05/Embodiment of Scarlet Devil up to TH09.5/Shoot the Bullet are included in the second era. And finally, TH10/Mountain of Faith up to TH13/Ten Desires are included in the third and current era. [↩]
4. Reimu feeling the need to be involved with the incident and Marisa being simply interested [↩]
5. using a split-second Bomb to prevent yourself from dying from an enemy projectile [↩]
6. you collect a number of Bomb or Life piece to acquire an extra Bomb or Life [↩]
7. Defeated enemies drop this along with Bonus and Power items. [↩]
8. Imperishable Night changes Power Items into Bonus Items once you hit Full Power Mode, while other incarnations use the default no-change property from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil [↩]
9. it is said that Imperishable Night is a special case, since in canon the game deploys a team of characters instead of having them play individually, while Phantasmagoria of Flower View and Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream are excluded due to their nature as multiplayer games [↩]
10. playable characters usually have modes that differ in the projectiles they fire, as well as the Bombs they use [↩]
11. A sample of the Spellcard can be viewed here. This is Hard mode, by the way. [↩]
12. Aside from Reimu, of course. [↩]
13. Yoshika and Meiling are both guards [↩]
14. both are depicted are always hungry and able to eat anything, especially Night Sparrows [↩]
15. A sample of the Spellcard on Normal mode can be viewed here. [↩]
16. At least for me. [↩]
17. And don’t worry about chronological order too much. Touhou games aren’t really defined by that. [↩]