Cosmic
Onshi
Last time, we talked about the first Touhou game on Windows, so now, it's time to talk about the first good Touhou game on Windows!
In a way, Perfect Cherry Blossom is like what would happen if you fixed everything that was wrong with Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, and then added a handful of new quality of life changes in while you were at it. For example, for the first time in the series, when you hold shift to focus, you can now see your exact hurtbox, which is a huge help in some of the more tightly-packed spellcards later in the game, and there's also an indicator at the bottom of the screen labelled "ENEMY" during boss fights that shows you the boss' horizontal position. Everyone always talks about the visible hurtbox as a great addition that makes the games that don't have it much harder to go back to in hindsight, but I honestly find the enemy indicator to be more helpful in most situations; both are very much welcome additions, though. Additionally, if you gather enough cherry items and defeat enough enemies, you'll activate a "Supernatural Border", a temporary shield which clears out all on-screen bullets once you get hit, or if you try to use a bomb. This does kind of just make the game a bit easier, and as the player there aren't many interesting ways to interact with it as a mechanic, but it did help me 1cc this game as Sakuya, so I'm still thankful that it's here. A way to turn it off admittedly might have been nice, though.
Remember how I said EoSD had like 3 good songs? Yeah, no, ZUN is back to composing peak again, this game's soundtrack is way better. Right off the bat, Deep Mountain and Crystallized Silver are two instantly memorable songs, both from just the first stage, and the soundtrack is consistently great after that point too. Diao Ye Zong excellently captures Chen's playful nature, with a subtle hint that there might be more to her as well, and Doll Judgement takes a while to get going, but once it does, it becomes a contender for one of my favorite songs in the game (at least if we ignore one particular song which I'll go over later). Mystic Oriental Dream is another great one that gives the Netherworld a truly otherworldly feeling, as well as this sense of a "peaceful, yet dangerous" place that fits the area perfectly, and Necrofantasia feels to me like the perfect kind of theme for someone as hard to reach as Yukari, even if I've never actually gotten far enough to fight her myself. It's also just generally a banger, although that applies to most of the game's soundtrack.
Ok, so now feels like a good time to mention that if you've never played Perfect Cherry Blossom, you should go back and do that right now, and make sure to fully finish the main game. It doesn't matter if it's a 1cc or not, just go do that right now. I get that there's an inherent assumption in these posts that I'm going to spoil things, and the possibility that anyone reading this has never played PCB is unlikely to say the least, not to mention that the game's nearly 20 years old by now, but even still, I think what I'm about to go over is something worth including this warning for anyway, as it won't hit nearly as hard if you're aware of it in advance, and the feeling you get from it when it happens for the first time is unlike anything else in the series. Ok, have you done that? Promise? Good.
Yuyuko's final spell might actually be one of my favorite moments in the entire series. You manage to defeat her, just like you would any other boss, and by all means, the game should end now. But then, it just... doesn't. You wait there for a few seconds, not really knowing what's going on, and then some kind of bizarre quote fades in on the screen, and then that godforsaken piano starts up, and suddenly Yuyuko is back now??? Shit shit fuck fuck what do I do why is she here aaaaAAAAAA- ok, assuming you know what I'm referring to, you don't need me to explain any more, but the feeling you get from seeing her suddenly come back for one last-ditch effort to stop you in your tracks is unlike anything else this series has to offer, and Border of Life is the PERFECT song to accompany it with. If anything here had been at all misplaced, this moment wouldn't hit nearly as hard, but the moment of anticipation and not quite knowing what's going on at the start, followed by an ominous piano theme suddenly starting up, and then Yuyuko herself appearing is all timed to perfection, and I think Border of Life is the main reason this works so well. After the starting piano, it quickly changes into something that sounds panicked, yet all the same triumphant, as if to express this feeling of not quite knowing what's going on, or how or why it's happening, but that all the same, you're almost there, and that whatever this is, if you can overcome it, you've won. It's not a song that I ever go out of my way to listen to, but all the same, I can acknowledge it as one of the best in the series for the way it manages to perfectly turn the moment where it plays into something truly special.
Now, for the story. Now, I can't actually beat Ran, and this is one of those games where the extra stage adds a lot of extra context to the story that wasn't there before (as opposed to EoSD's which was largely entirely irrelevant to the wider story), so I've largely had to just piece together what happened in this game by absorbing information about it through the internet, so to be honest, I'm not 100% sure what actually happened in this game, but I'll try my best to summarize it. On a basic level, it's fairly straightforward - someone has been absorbing Gensokyo's Spring, leading to an extended Winter, so either Reimu, Marisa, or Sakuya, in her first appearance as a playable character, has to find out who did this and put a stop to their plans. Eventually, it turns out to have been Yuyuko Saigyouji, the head of the Hakugyokurou Shrine in the Netherworld, who wanted to make the Saigyou Ayakashi cherry tree bloom. Shortly after discovering this, the heroine defeats her, and returns Spring to Gensokyo. But, how was Yuyuko able to interfere with Gensokyo so easily from the Netherworld, and why was she so obsessed with the Saigyou Ayakashi?
This is where it gets a bit strange, although that could just be me having not finished the extra or phantasm stages (this game has two extra stages, by the way). As far as I can tell, Yuyuko is the spirit of a woman who committed suicide underneath the Saigyou Ayakashi, and once it fully blooms, it'll start to draw more humans toward itself and make them kill themselves too. It's never explained why exactly Yuyuko wants to make it bloom, but the implication seems to be that she's unaware of what it does, or the fact that she killed herself underneath it, and is just drawn to it by her subconscious. Anyway, for some reason, Yukari then shows up and decides to mess with the border between Gensokyo and the Netherworld, allowing Yuyuko to collect Gensokyo's Spring, and then once the incident ends, she forgets to make it go back to normal, prompting the heroine to go and fight her to make her restore it. Why Yukari wanted to go along with Yuyuko's plan in the first place I have no idea, but oh well. Basically, this game's story is confusing, and trying to make myself understand it by looking it up online was a mistake. I have heard that apparently even if you play the extra and phantasm stages, a lot of this information is really poorly communicated anyway, which honestly wouldn't surprise me, but I have no room to say for sure if this is the case or not.
Anyway, lastly, the characters! These are also much better than EoSD's cast, although they're not perfect. Their personalities, for the most part, are actually conveyed in their dialogue again, which leads to them feeling like actual characters as opposed to EoSD's faceless obstacles that were carried by their much better portrayals in later games, and the difference is obvious immediately. Alice is back from Mystic Square, although aside from the blonde hair and her use of dolls, she's basically a different character here. As opposed to Mystic Square Alice, who I can only describe as an annoying child, PCB Alice is actually sincerely polite and helpful to the main cast, and yet for some reason gets ignored anyway, leaving her completely baffled in the process, an interaction which plays out in several different ways but is consistently at least somewhat amusing each time. Chen and Youmu are also great new additions, Chen being a hyperactive zoop zoop cat child with no real idea of what's going on (just like me fr), and Youmu being somewhat similar to Sakuya in that they're both serious, diligent characters who you fight on stage 5 and who are both dedicated to serving the stage 6 boss they work for, but Youmu still having enough of a personality of her own to make her feel distinct - I particularly enjoyed the moment in stage 6 where she practically begged the main character not to go on, as she had gone from wanting to drive them out to just being afraid for their safety now that the possibility of them actually reaching Yuyuko and being killed as a result had become all the more likely to her. Yukari I also quite like in her future portrayals, although I can't say how much of what I like about her is present here due to my previously mentioned inability to reach her.
The rest of the characters are a bit of a mixed bag. Letty is boring, but gets away with it due to being a stage 1 boss and having a banger theme, and the Prismriver sisters never really did anything for me either, although the fact that their designs mirror the main 3 characters is a nice detail. Yuyuko herself, on the other hand, is a character I still haven't quite made my mind up on yet. She doesn't grab my attention quite as much as Chen/Alice/Youmu/Yukari, and for the most part I'm not particularly fussed either way about her, but she's still at times a likeable character, and she still manages to show enough personality here that I'd still put her well above the EoSD cast.
Overall, PCB is another great game in the series, and for me represents the point where ZUN really started to find his footing with the Windows games. It's not my favorite Windows game by any means, or even my favorite of its time, but it's still a really fun, enjoyable experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed going back to it for this post.
In a way, Perfect Cherry Blossom is like what would happen if you fixed everything that was wrong with Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, and then added a handful of new quality of life changes in while you were at it. For example, for the first time in the series, when you hold shift to focus, you can now see your exact hurtbox, which is a huge help in some of the more tightly-packed spellcards later in the game, and there's also an indicator at the bottom of the screen labelled "ENEMY" during boss fights that shows you the boss' horizontal position. Everyone always talks about the visible hurtbox as a great addition that makes the games that don't have it much harder to go back to in hindsight, but I honestly find the enemy indicator to be more helpful in most situations; both are very much welcome additions, though. Additionally, if you gather enough cherry items and defeat enough enemies, you'll activate a "Supernatural Border", a temporary shield which clears out all on-screen bullets once you get hit, or if you try to use a bomb. This does kind of just make the game a bit easier, and as the player there aren't many interesting ways to interact with it as a mechanic, but it did help me 1cc this game as Sakuya, so I'm still thankful that it's here. A way to turn it off admittedly might have been nice, though.
Remember how I said EoSD had like 3 good songs? Yeah, no, ZUN is back to composing peak again, this game's soundtrack is way better. Right off the bat, Deep Mountain and Crystallized Silver are two instantly memorable songs, both from just the first stage, and the soundtrack is consistently great after that point too. Diao Ye Zong excellently captures Chen's playful nature, with a subtle hint that there might be more to her as well, and Doll Judgement takes a while to get going, but once it does, it becomes a contender for one of my favorite songs in the game (at least if we ignore one particular song which I'll go over later). Mystic Oriental Dream is another great one that gives the Netherworld a truly otherworldly feeling, as well as this sense of a "peaceful, yet dangerous" place that fits the area perfectly, and Necrofantasia feels to me like the perfect kind of theme for someone as hard to reach as Yukari, even if I've never actually gotten far enough to fight her myself. It's also just generally a banger, although that applies to most of the game's soundtrack.
Ok, so now feels like a good time to mention that if you've never played Perfect Cherry Blossom, you should go back and do that right now, and make sure to fully finish the main game. It doesn't matter if it's a 1cc or not, just go do that right now. I get that there's an inherent assumption in these posts that I'm going to spoil things, and the possibility that anyone reading this has never played PCB is unlikely to say the least, not to mention that the game's nearly 20 years old by now, but even still, I think what I'm about to go over is something worth including this warning for anyway, as it won't hit nearly as hard if you're aware of it in advance, and the feeling you get from it when it happens for the first time is unlike anything else in the series. Ok, have you done that? Promise? Good.
Yuyuko's final spell might actually be one of my favorite moments in the entire series. You manage to defeat her, just like you would any other boss, and by all means, the game should end now. But then, it just... doesn't. You wait there for a few seconds, not really knowing what's going on, and then some kind of bizarre quote fades in on the screen, and then that godforsaken piano starts up, and suddenly Yuyuko is back now??? Shit shit fuck fuck what do I do why is she here aaaaAAAAAA- ok, assuming you know what I'm referring to, you don't need me to explain any more, but the feeling you get from seeing her suddenly come back for one last-ditch effort to stop you in your tracks is unlike anything else this series has to offer, and Border of Life is the PERFECT song to accompany it with. If anything here had been at all misplaced, this moment wouldn't hit nearly as hard, but the moment of anticipation and not quite knowing what's going on at the start, followed by an ominous piano theme suddenly starting up, and then Yuyuko herself appearing is all timed to perfection, and I think Border of Life is the main reason this works so well. After the starting piano, it quickly changes into something that sounds panicked, yet all the same triumphant, as if to express this feeling of not quite knowing what's going on, or how or why it's happening, but that all the same, you're almost there, and that whatever this is, if you can overcome it, you've won. It's not a song that I ever go out of my way to listen to, but all the same, I can acknowledge it as one of the best in the series for the way it manages to perfectly turn the moment where it plays into something truly special.
Now, for the story. Now, I can't actually beat Ran, and this is one of those games where the extra stage adds a lot of extra context to the story that wasn't there before (as opposed to EoSD's which was largely entirely irrelevant to the wider story), so I've largely had to just piece together what happened in this game by absorbing information about it through the internet, so to be honest, I'm not 100% sure what actually happened in this game, but I'll try my best to summarize it. On a basic level, it's fairly straightforward - someone has been absorbing Gensokyo's Spring, leading to an extended Winter, so either Reimu, Marisa, or Sakuya, in her first appearance as a playable character, has to find out who did this and put a stop to their plans. Eventually, it turns out to have been Yuyuko Saigyouji, the head of the Hakugyokurou Shrine in the Netherworld, who wanted to make the Saigyou Ayakashi cherry tree bloom. Shortly after discovering this, the heroine defeats her, and returns Spring to Gensokyo. But, how was Yuyuko able to interfere with Gensokyo so easily from the Netherworld, and why was she so obsessed with the Saigyou Ayakashi?
This is where it gets a bit strange, although that could just be me having not finished the extra or phantasm stages (this game has two extra stages, by the way). As far as I can tell, Yuyuko is the spirit of a woman who committed suicide underneath the Saigyou Ayakashi, and once it fully blooms, it'll start to draw more humans toward itself and make them kill themselves too. It's never explained why exactly Yuyuko wants to make it bloom, but the implication seems to be that she's unaware of what it does, or the fact that she killed herself underneath it, and is just drawn to it by her subconscious. Anyway, for some reason, Yukari then shows up and decides to mess with the border between Gensokyo and the Netherworld, allowing Yuyuko to collect Gensokyo's Spring, and then once the incident ends, she forgets to make it go back to normal, prompting the heroine to go and fight her to make her restore it. Why Yukari wanted to go along with Yuyuko's plan in the first place I have no idea, but oh well. Basically, this game's story is confusing, and trying to make myself understand it by looking it up online was a mistake. I have heard that apparently even if you play the extra and phantasm stages, a lot of this information is really poorly communicated anyway, which honestly wouldn't surprise me, but I have no room to say for sure if this is the case or not.
Anyway, lastly, the characters! These are also much better than EoSD's cast, although they're not perfect. Their personalities, for the most part, are actually conveyed in their dialogue again, which leads to them feeling like actual characters as opposed to EoSD's faceless obstacles that were carried by their much better portrayals in later games, and the difference is obvious immediately. Alice is back from Mystic Square, although aside from the blonde hair and her use of dolls, she's basically a different character here. As opposed to Mystic Square Alice, who I can only describe as an annoying child, PCB Alice is actually sincerely polite and helpful to the main cast, and yet for some reason gets ignored anyway, leaving her completely baffled in the process, an interaction which plays out in several different ways but is consistently at least somewhat amusing each time. Chen and Youmu are also great new additions, Chen being a hyperactive zoop zoop cat child with no real idea of what's going on (just like me fr), and Youmu being somewhat similar to Sakuya in that they're both serious, diligent characters who you fight on stage 5 and who are both dedicated to serving the stage 6 boss they work for, but Youmu still having enough of a personality of her own to make her feel distinct - I particularly enjoyed the moment in stage 6 where she practically begged the main character not to go on, as she had gone from wanting to drive them out to just being afraid for their safety now that the possibility of them actually reaching Yuyuko and being killed as a result had become all the more likely to her. Yukari I also quite like in her future portrayals, although I can't say how much of what I like about her is present here due to my previously mentioned inability to reach her.
The rest of the characters are a bit of a mixed bag. Letty is boring, but gets away with it due to being a stage 1 boss and having a banger theme, and the Prismriver sisters never really did anything for me either, although the fact that their designs mirror the main 3 characters is a nice detail. Yuyuko herself, on the other hand, is a character I still haven't quite made my mind up on yet. She doesn't grab my attention quite as much as Chen/Alice/Youmu/Yukari, and for the most part I'm not particularly fussed either way about her, but she's still at times a likeable character, and she still manages to show enough personality here that I'd still put her well above the EoSD cast.
Overall, PCB is another great game in the series, and for me represents the point where ZUN really started to find his footing with the Windows games. It's not my favorite Windows game by any means, or even my favorite of its time, but it's still a really fun, enjoyable experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed going back to it for this post.
