Cosmic
Onshi
IMPERISHABLE NIGHT IS SO PEAK AAAAAAA-
Ok, calming down for a moment, I really like this game. I'm not sure if I'd call it my favorite game in the series, but it's by far my favorite of the early Windows games. Apparently, ZUN's plan was to end the series here, and given that this feels like a culmination of everything Windows Touhou has been up until this point, it's easy to see why he would choose this as an ending point. The game features 8 playable characters, split up into 4 teams of 2, and follows whichever team the player selects on a mission to find out what's going on with that strange fake moon in the sky; the playable teams are Reimu/Yukari, Marisa/Alice, Sakuya/Remilia, and Youmu/Yuyuko.
But, how does it play? Well, that's kind of a hard question to answer, as this game features various bizarre gimmicks which it never makes any attempt to explain, but which only impact your score and nothing else, and as a result, can largely be ignored. I didn't actually understand how these gimmicks worked until I did some research for this post and was fully able to enjoy the game without them, and I can't imagine my newfound knowledge having any impact on future playthroughs, so I'm just going to speed through them. Time orbs! These are a thing you collect by doing Things™, and if you get enough, time doesn't advance as much once you clear a stage (the less time has advanced by the end of the game, the more you score). There's also a human/youkai gauge in the bottom left, which is influenced by a thing I'll go over later, and if it's below -80% or above 80%, collecting time orbs becomes easier. Additionally, if you collect enough time orbs by the end of a stage, the boss will activate their Last Word, an extra-powerful spellcard which you get one chance to dodge, and can't use bombs during. If you get hit, you don't lose any lives, and the Last Word simply ends and you move onto the next stage. These are kind of cool, admittedly.
Beyond that, there is one new feature to this game which actually does impact the way you'll play it, and that's the team system. As mentioned earlier, you're technically playing as a team of two characters, and this manifests as your human character (Reimu/Marisa/Sakuya/Youmu) being used while you're unfocused, and switching out to the youkai character (Yukari/Alice/Remilia/Yuyuko) once you start holding the focus button. In the moment, this doesn't feel that different from how focused/unfocused shot types usually work, but depending on which character you're using, the gauge at the bottom left from earlier will move more towards either the human or youkai side, and the attention to detail with how each shot type corresponds to the character's personality is particularly nice. Reimu's homing shot fits her nicely as a no-nonsense youkai exterminator, while Yukari mostly just sits back and has Ran do all the work for her, and Marisa's (relatively) wide angle, lagging secondary shots and fast movement encourages the player to move as fast as possible and blow up everything in sight, a playstyle which suits her nicely and contrasts Alice's much more controlled, forward-facing laser shot. Additionally, Youmu's admittedly poor area coverage is balanced by her having potentially the most damaging shot type in the game, allowing her to easily cut through everything in front of her, while Yuyuko's beautiful yet dangerous all the same wide spread shot covers almost the entire screen, delivering an indiscriminate death to all of her enemies. I can't quite work out what Sakuya or Remilia's shot types have to do with their characters, though, those two are kind of the exception here. Your bombs will also be different depending on which character you're currently using, although with the exception of Youmu's straight slash being very effective during boss fights but largely not worth using anywhere else, this doesn't impact how you play the game too much.
This game is also by far the hardest of the early Windows games, making it the first of many I'll be forced to admit that I've never been able to 1cc on normal, but it's also notable for being particularly creative with its bullet patterns at times. For one, there are now these strange glowy things I can't seem to find a name for anywhere which disappear when you switch to the youkai character but shoot bullets and can be destroyed by the human character, adding an extra layer of depth to many bosses' spellcards, as you need to decide between going straight for the boss but having to survive a much harder attack, or targeting the glowy things and lengthening the amount of time you spend on the spellcard but making it easier to survive. The balance between which of these options is better or worse varies between spellcards, too, ensuring that you consistently need to weigh up the options each time. Additionally, individual bosses also get quite creative here, in particular Mystia, who can darken the screen and make you unable to see far-away bullets, and Reisen, who does something very strange which I'm not quite sure how to describe but which is nonetheless really cool and makes her one of my favorite bosses to fight in the series. Other bosses in the game also vary the types of attacks they use greatly, ensuring a sense of variety between fights, and this type of creativity isn't 100% unique to Imperishable Night, but I felt it was worth calling attention to nonetheless.
Additionally, this game's character writing is also excellent. Reimu being very tired but begrudgingly having to put up with Yukari's Yukari-ing anyway, Remilia being basically a child who's just here because she felt like it and Sakuya having to spend the whole game babysitting her while still sincerely caring about her, and Yuyuko just being consistently very very strange, much to Youmu's confusion, are all great dynamics, but my favorite pair by far here is Marisa and Alice. I love their dynamic of Marisa wanting to just go full unga bunga mode and blow up everything in front of her and Alice trying to be the responsible one and actually proceed with some amount of logic, while at the end of the day, they're still both friends who care about each other a lot, it's great. They're also the only pair in the game where both characters are on roughly equal standing with each other, which also gives their interactions a unique feel when compared to the rest of the game's cast, the others being teams of master/servant, master/servant, and whatever Reimu and Yukari's relationship is. That's not to say any of the other pairs aren't great too, though, I love all of them. The interactions with either Reimu or Marisa in stage 4 are also great, although I kind of wish there had been alternate Sakuya or Youmu fights during that stage for the other two teams, even if I understand why that wasn't done. Speaking of which, that whole fight is really great, it reminds me a lot of the Reimu/Marisa fight in LLS, only way cooler because of the banger chase sequence that happens halfway through.
The new characters are a bit more of a mixed bag for me, though. I quite like Keine and especially Kaguya, and Tewi is just a mid-stage boss with no actual dialogue here, but I like her later PoFV characterization, but beyond that, I don't have any characters here I'm all that fond of. Wriggle is just annoying, Mystia is barely a character, and Reisen here is just the same "stage 5 boss who's a dedicated servant to the stage 6 boss" trope we got in the last two games, without anything to really distinguish her from Sakuya or Youmu. I'm not super familiar with her characterization in other media, so maybe she's more interesting elsewhere, but she seems to be a very popular character, and I can't for the life of me understand why. The black coat thingy she has here does look really cool, though, I wish ZUN would let her wear it again. Eirin is also kind of just a whatever character for me, although I do really like the moment at the beginning of Final A where she explains exactly how she's successfully trapped the main characters, that was cool. Overall, this game's cast doesn't do nearly as much for me as PCB's, and while they are "better" than EoSD's in the sense that they actually have some amount of personality in their dialogue, EoSD still has a lot of characters like Cirno, Meiling or Remilia who would go on to be much more well-written than their first appearances, and who are more likeable to me than anyone introduced in Imperishable Night (ignoring Kaguya). Actually, while re-reading this, I'm noticing that I somehow managed to forget that Mokou, one of my favorite characters in the series, was introduced in this game, so I'm just going to add this little bit at the end to say that Mokou is great and I love her, 10/10 character.
Lastly, I want to talk about the soundtrack. As you can generally expect from this series, the soundtrack is fantastic, and while there isn't any one song that jumps out at me as exceptionally outstanding like Border of Life did in Perfect Cherry Blossom, there's still a lot here to love, and the entire soundtrack has this really distinct vibe to it which I can't quite describe, but which sounds unlike anything else in the entire series. For specific examples, Illusionary Night immediately does a great job of establishing this game's whole feel and tone right out of the gate, and Deaf to All but the Song is this game's resident "goes far too hard for how early in the game it plays", and while I don't have a lot to say about Plain Asia, it's another one I really like. Maiden's Capriccio and Love-Colored Master Spark are also both great at selling that feeling of a battle between old rivals, and Cinderella Cage fits the feeling of finally having reached the source of the incident perfectly. Lunatic Eyes ~ Invisible Full Moon, on the other hand, isn't one I'd ever go out of my way to listen to, and to be honest I'm not a huge fan of it by itself, but I will admit that it works really well as a battle theme for Reisen, having a waving, uncertain quality to it, as if you can't quite understand what it is you're even fighting. Also... Voyage 1969. I really love Voyage 1969. I'm not sure how to describe why exactly, I just like it a lot.
Overall, Imperishable Night is a great game, one of my favorites in the series, and while it does have things I don't really like all that much, like the bizarre time orb system or the 50/50 new characters, it definitely delivers on being a fun, engaging bullet hell with varied boss patterns, a banger soundtrack, and a wide variety of great returning characters, which is really what I, and I'd imagine most of you, are fans of this series in the first place for. This game, to me, more than possibly anything else in the series, embodies what Touhou is, and that's why I love it so much.
Ok, calming down for a moment, I really like this game. I'm not sure if I'd call it my favorite game in the series, but it's by far my favorite of the early Windows games. Apparently, ZUN's plan was to end the series here, and given that this feels like a culmination of everything Windows Touhou has been up until this point, it's easy to see why he would choose this as an ending point. The game features 8 playable characters, split up into 4 teams of 2, and follows whichever team the player selects on a mission to find out what's going on with that strange fake moon in the sky; the playable teams are Reimu/Yukari, Marisa/Alice, Sakuya/Remilia, and Youmu/Yuyuko.
But, how does it play? Well, that's kind of a hard question to answer, as this game features various bizarre gimmicks which it never makes any attempt to explain, but which only impact your score and nothing else, and as a result, can largely be ignored. I didn't actually understand how these gimmicks worked until I did some research for this post and was fully able to enjoy the game without them, and I can't imagine my newfound knowledge having any impact on future playthroughs, so I'm just going to speed through them. Time orbs! These are a thing you collect by doing Things™, and if you get enough, time doesn't advance as much once you clear a stage (the less time has advanced by the end of the game, the more you score). There's also a human/youkai gauge in the bottom left, which is influenced by a thing I'll go over later, and if it's below -80% or above 80%, collecting time orbs becomes easier. Additionally, if you collect enough time orbs by the end of a stage, the boss will activate their Last Word, an extra-powerful spellcard which you get one chance to dodge, and can't use bombs during. If you get hit, you don't lose any lives, and the Last Word simply ends and you move onto the next stage. These are kind of cool, admittedly.
Beyond that, there is one new feature to this game which actually does impact the way you'll play it, and that's the team system. As mentioned earlier, you're technically playing as a team of two characters, and this manifests as your human character (Reimu/Marisa/Sakuya/Youmu) being used while you're unfocused, and switching out to the youkai character (Yukari/Alice/Remilia/Yuyuko) once you start holding the focus button. In the moment, this doesn't feel that different from how focused/unfocused shot types usually work, but depending on which character you're using, the gauge at the bottom left from earlier will move more towards either the human or youkai side, and the attention to detail with how each shot type corresponds to the character's personality is particularly nice. Reimu's homing shot fits her nicely as a no-nonsense youkai exterminator, while Yukari mostly just sits back and has Ran do all the work for her, and Marisa's (relatively) wide angle, lagging secondary shots and fast movement encourages the player to move as fast as possible and blow up everything in sight, a playstyle which suits her nicely and contrasts Alice's much more controlled, forward-facing laser shot. Additionally, Youmu's admittedly poor area coverage is balanced by her having potentially the most damaging shot type in the game, allowing her to easily cut through everything in front of her, while Yuyuko's beautiful yet dangerous all the same wide spread shot covers almost the entire screen, delivering an indiscriminate death to all of her enemies. I can't quite work out what Sakuya or Remilia's shot types have to do with their characters, though, those two are kind of the exception here. Your bombs will also be different depending on which character you're currently using, although with the exception of Youmu's straight slash being very effective during boss fights but largely not worth using anywhere else, this doesn't impact how you play the game too much.
This game is also by far the hardest of the early Windows games, making it the first of many I'll be forced to admit that I've never been able to 1cc on normal, but it's also notable for being particularly creative with its bullet patterns at times. For one, there are now these strange glowy things I can't seem to find a name for anywhere which disappear when you switch to the youkai character but shoot bullets and can be destroyed by the human character, adding an extra layer of depth to many bosses' spellcards, as you need to decide between going straight for the boss but having to survive a much harder attack, or targeting the glowy things and lengthening the amount of time you spend on the spellcard but making it easier to survive. The balance between which of these options is better or worse varies between spellcards, too, ensuring that you consistently need to weigh up the options each time. Additionally, individual bosses also get quite creative here, in particular Mystia, who can darken the screen and make you unable to see far-away bullets, and Reisen, who does something very strange which I'm not quite sure how to describe but which is nonetheless really cool and makes her one of my favorite bosses to fight in the series. Other bosses in the game also vary the types of attacks they use greatly, ensuring a sense of variety between fights, and this type of creativity isn't 100% unique to Imperishable Night, but I felt it was worth calling attention to nonetheless.
Additionally, this game's character writing is also excellent. Reimu being very tired but begrudgingly having to put up with Yukari's Yukari-ing anyway, Remilia being basically a child who's just here because she felt like it and Sakuya having to spend the whole game babysitting her while still sincerely caring about her, and Yuyuko just being consistently very very strange, much to Youmu's confusion, are all great dynamics, but my favorite pair by far here is Marisa and Alice. I love their dynamic of Marisa wanting to just go full unga bunga mode and blow up everything in front of her and Alice trying to be the responsible one and actually proceed with some amount of logic, while at the end of the day, they're still both friends who care about each other a lot, it's great. They're also the only pair in the game where both characters are on roughly equal standing with each other, which also gives their interactions a unique feel when compared to the rest of the game's cast, the others being teams of master/servant, master/servant, and whatever Reimu and Yukari's relationship is. That's not to say any of the other pairs aren't great too, though, I love all of them. The interactions with either Reimu or Marisa in stage 4 are also great, although I kind of wish there had been alternate Sakuya or Youmu fights during that stage for the other two teams, even if I understand why that wasn't done. Speaking of which, that whole fight is really great, it reminds me a lot of the Reimu/Marisa fight in LLS, only way cooler because of the banger chase sequence that happens halfway through.
The new characters are a bit more of a mixed bag for me, though. I quite like Keine and especially Kaguya, and Tewi is just a mid-stage boss with no actual dialogue here, but I like her later PoFV characterization, but beyond that, I don't have any characters here I'm all that fond of. Wriggle is just annoying, Mystia is barely a character, and Reisen here is just the same "stage 5 boss who's a dedicated servant to the stage 6 boss" trope we got in the last two games, without anything to really distinguish her from Sakuya or Youmu. I'm not super familiar with her characterization in other media, so maybe she's more interesting elsewhere, but she seems to be a very popular character, and I can't for the life of me understand why. The black coat thingy she has here does look really cool, though, I wish ZUN would let her wear it again. Eirin is also kind of just a whatever character for me, although I do really like the moment at the beginning of Final A where she explains exactly how she's successfully trapped the main characters, that was cool. Overall, this game's cast doesn't do nearly as much for me as PCB's, and while they are "better" than EoSD's in the sense that they actually have some amount of personality in their dialogue, EoSD still has a lot of characters like Cirno, Meiling or Remilia who would go on to be much more well-written than their first appearances, and who are more likeable to me than anyone introduced in Imperishable Night (ignoring Kaguya). Actually, while re-reading this, I'm noticing that I somehow managed to forget that Mokou, one of my favorite characters in the series, was introduced in this game, so I'm just going to add this little bit at the end to say that Mokou is great and I love her, 10/10 character.
Lastly, I want to talk about the soundtrack. As you can generally expect from this series, the soundtrack is fantastic, and while there isn't any one song that jumps out at me as exceptionally outstanding like Border of Life did in Perfect Cherry Blossom, there's still a lot here to love, and the entire soundtrack has this really distinct vibe to it which I can't quite describe, but which sounds unlike anything else in the entire series. For specific examples, Illusionary Night immediately does a great job of establishing this game's whole feel and tone right out of the gate, and Deaf to All but the Song is this game's resident "goes far too hard for how early in the game it plays", and while I don't have a lot to say about Plain Asia, it's another one I really like. Maiden's Capriccio and Love-Colored Master Spark are also both great at selling that feeling of a battle between old rivals, and Cinderella Cage fits the feeling of finally having reached the source of the incident perfectly. Lunatic Eyes ~ Invisible Full Moon, on the other hand, isn't one I'd ever go out of my way to listen to, and to be honest I'm not a huge fan of it by itself, but I will admit that it works really well as a battle theme for Reisen, having a waving, uncertain quality to it, as if you can't quite understand what it is you're even fighting. Also... Voyage 1969. I really love Voyage 1969. I'm not sure how to describe why exactly, I just like it a lot.
Overall, Imperishable Night is a great game, one of my favorites in the series, and while it does have things I don't really like all that much, like the bizarre time orb system or the 50/50 new characters, it definitely delivers on being a fun, engaging bullet hell with varied boss patterns, a banger soundtrack, and a wide variety of great returning characters, which is really what I, and I'd imagine most of you, are fans of this series in the first place for. This game, to me, more than possibly anything else in the series, embodies what Touhou is, and that's why I love it so much.
