Going through (almost) every Touhou game in release order #1 - Highly Responsive to Prayers

[Cosmic]

As the title suggests, I've decided to do a little thing on here every so often where I talk about every official Touhou game I can be bothered to say anything about in order of release, starting, of course, with Embodiment of Scarlet De- I mean Highly Responsive to Prayers! Man this game is weird idk how I feel about it

I have no idea what the general fandom consensus on this game is, so I have no idea if this will be met with a "yeah obviously" or a "how dare you", but this game is... strange, and I don't know if I like it or not. I think I do? I probably do. Anyway, on the one hand, when it's at its best, it can be surprisingly fun and enjoyable to play, and even this early on there were still a handful of bangers in the soundtrack (Magic Mirror my beloved), but on the other, there are lots of moments in this game where you're stuck batting the yin-yang orb around for what feels like forever trying to hit that one single tile you have left, or on the later boss fights, stuck between choosing to attack and inevitably lose a life or continue dodging bullets and never get a chance to attack.

Speaking of which, though, I do think the boss fights are the best parts of this game. While the actual stages can range from inoffensive at best to mildly inconvenient and annoying at worst, I had by far the most fun against the bosses. Their fight themes are all great, and although the fact it's occasionally possible to get stuck faced with an onslaught of bullets it's literally impossible to dodge, the fact the game allows you to retry them as many times as you like does help in making them not too frustrating. They're also where the yin-yang orb gameplay is at its best for me, having to balance attacking and dodging (something that only really gets annoying against Sariel and Konngara and is quite a fun game of risk and reward up until that point) against a target that's big enough to be able to aim for with decent consistency, and without any obstructions to get in your way. Admittedly, I can't actually beat Sariel or Konngara, so the fact I don't like those fights could very well just be a skill issue on my end, but oh well.

The rest of the game is... less good, admittedly. There's nothing really all that fun about trying to hit the tiles in the normal stages, nor are there any real decisions to be made, you just kind of keep going until you eventually win. The normal stages are all really easy, too, with the only difference between the early and later ones being that the later ones are all mildly more annoying, without really providing anything more in terms of an actual challenge. Thankfully, though, "mildly annoying" is the worst they ever get, and they're not bad enough to hugely detract from the overall experience. Overall, it's definitely an odd game, and one that definitely shows its age more than even the later PC-98 games that came after it, but at the very least worth going back to, if not for a look at where the series started then just for the honestly quite fun boss fights. Fuck Kikuri's first attack phase, though. The rest of her fight is quite fun, but that first phase can go die for all I care. At least I get to listen to Magic Mirror during it, though.

[Nekofire]

This game really is interesting but everything is so confusing about it especially the story, I feel like ZUN and the team just wanted to make a video game without paying extra attention to the story… the characters really looks cool but sadly, we never saw them again (expect Reimu and Mima)

Btw Highly Responsive to Prayers had a lot of references/inspirations from other games and one of the most notable is Kiki Kaikai, I’m not gonna make a long list about the references to it because there is a lot of references to that game series