Perfect Cherry Blossom - A fantastical Journey for Blossoms

[Dracos]

Man, it has been a while and I really should review the multitude of games I've been playing.  Let's start with a good positive one.  Many of you are already familiar with this through our dedicated Touhou fanatic and preacher Halbarad, as well as Alex and Laggy, but Perfect Cherry Blossom is the 7th game in Zun's Touhou series, a set of renowned vertical shooters that refer to themselves as 'curtain fire' games.  Common vernacular for them actually calls them bullet hell (or Danmaku shooters), which is pretty descriptive as well.  They're known for being very difficult and placing tremendous amounts of gunfire on the screen.  Or rather, spellfire.  In general anyhow.

Perfect Cherry Blossom does not break any such trends here, but is a fantastic game and a good introduction to the bullet hell genre that I found tremendously satisfying.  Given that bullet hell might not be a familiar genre, it is a form of flight/shooter game in which the primary focus is evading complex patterns of projectiles.  These patterns often fill the entirety of the screen and make control of screen real estate quite important.  Each level involves a series of random enemy battles interspaced with boss fights which offer pattern after pattern of bullets to defeat.

Narratively, it returns us to the story of Gensokyo, a mystical land where demons, ghosts, and maids roam, living together in harmony.  Well, sort of harmony as they all kind of hate each other, but mostly not killing each other.  Following a harsh winter though, Gensokyo's residents waited impatiently for a spring that was remarkable for its lateness.  Finally, a trio of young girls (for all of the characters in touhou are young girls), bothered by the continued winter head out looking for hints of spring.  Reimu, a wacky priestess with little sense and lots of wild flare;  Marisa, a headstrong black mage that really doesn't pay much attention; Sayuka, a maid intending to clean things up swiftly.  Yeah, I give them generic lines, but they real thing to take away is that the story is told over a cast of wacky characters complete with odd dialogue (If the translation I have is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt it, they speak in a really odd form too).  The story follows one of their quests to hunt down the traces of spring, eventually seeking to stop the flowering of the demonic perfect cherry blossom by the ghost lady Yuyuko.

Similar to most vertical shooters, it is a very short game experience and can be finished in under an hour of gametime, offering an intense and short experience.  It is though extremely replyable offering valid experiences for a decently wide range of player skill levels and decent (if not fantastic) tools for learning to get better.  Given, I'd say that the baseline is a little high.  PCB is not good as juniors first vertical shooter and only decent as juniors first bullet hell game in terms of difficulty.  But if you can hit that baseline, it has a pretty good difficulty slope throughout the game and across the various difficulty levels it offers and a lot of flexibility options to appeal from that minimal bar to the extreme difficulty hound.  The game is mental exercise, almost constantly requiring looking for patterns in things and taking advantage of them as well as learning the rules of play.  Most of them are pretty self evident in the play, or at least I found them to be so.  Being the seventh in the series, it sported a pretty mature design heritage with, as far as I could tell through my playthroughs, a minimum of design idiocies maintained.  The game is easy to get into, easy to get out of out, and keeps very little in the way of the flow of the game.

The game is broken up into six levels, though the majority of the gameplay is maintained in the attack patterns and spell card patterns (Special more challenging attack patterns that are timed and give a bonus for beating them without dying or using a bomb).  Each of the characters have two modes, complete with different shooting styles and different bomb attacks.  They also have special abilities unique to each character.  All of them can adjust the flow of time by going into focus mode, which also enables more damaging attacks.  This comes at a cost of mobility though, so there's a good trade off to consider when using.  They all also have a series of bombs (Number and effectiveness vary by the character and style chosen) which can be used to get a breather and more importantly, can be used as a last ditch effort at the moment of death to survive.  Bombs refill every life, so in fact the sign of a skilled player is that they never die with a bomb in their inventory.  The game has three main types of collectables: Power ups that increase firing capabilities, Point blocks that give large point values and count up towards extra lives, and cherry points that are used to gain mystical shields for a short while.  To make collection easier and reward consistent good play, there is an auto collection boundary (about 85 percent up the screen) that if passed with full power causes all collectables to teleport to the player.  The game rewards brave play through a graze system: Going near an attack without letting it touch your hitbox (As in letting it pass by your skirt for example) gains graze points which add to your score.  Anyhow, the meat of it is that the actual gameplay has a good amount of depth to it for a vertical shooter.  There's a lot of choices that you regularly get to make beyond simply what area of the screen you are in and that's a pretty good thing.

The meat of the gameplay is though the learning and solving of changing patterns, looking for and examining patterns quickly to allow yourself to manuver through them successfully.  In that respect, it feels more like a puzzle game than the standard shooter.  The manner in which the game plays makes normal reflex based play seem ill suited for its style.  Instead it is more like cooperative pattern weaving, with the enemies shaping most the pattern, but you contributing vital components, cutting out enemies at different points which in turn changes the pattern of bullets coming at you.  In effect, I found it pretty darn interesting as a mental exercise alone.

The graphics, while simple in areas, are pleasant and pretty nice.  They're not the best sprite art that I've seen and some of the actual reactions seem a bit stiff, but they're bright and colorful and give a nice theming to it.  More importantly, the game manages to be pretty clear with what can kill you AND with foreshadowing graphically what is coming.  I was pleased overall with this.

The sound is fantastic.  Truly.  I listen to it hobbyishly now.  It's really quite awesome.  Goes right up there with gradius' stuff for my favorite flight shooter stuff, and frankly, it actually beats it.  This is get the soundtrack level stuff and it works well in the game.

Anyhow, wrapping it up.  I thought it was a very good game and frankly the only thing I wanted in it (Single spellcard practice) was added in Touhou 8: Imperishible Night anyway!  Coolness.

Dracos

[Jason_Miao]

Each level involves a series of random enemy battles interspaced with boss fights which offer pattern after pattern of bullets to defeat.

I'm not sure the interspaced boss fights is necessarily a distictive element of danmaku.  It's a common feature, but it's common in non-danmaku shooters as well.  Hell, 1942 had boss and miniboss fights.

Narratively, it returns us to the story of Gensokyo, a mystical land where demons, ghosts, and maids roam, living together in harmony.  Well, sort of harmony as they all kind of hate each other, but mostly not killing each other.

I haven't heard the "hate" bit.  Not sure where the ZUN conception ends and the fannon begins, but most explanations I've heard is that plenty of the characters are throwing mostly lethal projectiles at each other for fun.

Reimu, a wacky priestess with little sense and lots of wild flare; Marisa, a headstrong black mage that really doesn't pay much attention; Sayuka, a maid intending to clean things up swiftly.

That's an interesting characterization.  I've heard ZUN quoted as saying that Reimu's supposed to be lazy, Marisa as wacky, and Sakuya...well, maids are supposed to be "legendary creatures, heard of but not seen".

I wonder if the differences in description are the result of dialogue translations, or other factors.

They all also have a series of bombs (Number and effectiveness vary by the character and style chosen) which can be used to get a breather and more importantly, can be used as a last ditch effort at the moment of death to survive.  

They also collect all items.  In some screens where the enemies are particularly numerous, bombing may be the only way to collect all the point cards.

The sound is fantastic.  Truly.  I listen to it hobbyishly now.  It's really quite awesome.  Goes right up there with gradius' stuff for my favorite flight shooter stuff, and frankly, it actually beats it.  This is get the soundtrack level stuff and it works well in the game.

I've read somewhere (can't remember where, but it's probably on the Touhou wiki if it's anywhere) that ZUN considers himself a musician who writes computer games rather than the opposite.  

I thought it was a very good game and frankly the only thing I wanted in it (Single spellcard practice) was added in Touhou 8: Imperishible Night anyway!

Which is damn helpful.  Although IN is noticeably easier than PCB (In PCB, you play easy mode to get a feel for the game.  In IN, you play easy mode to see all the levels without using a continue) - wish it had been implemented for some of the earlier ones.



Post some of your better replays. :)

[Dracos]

I dunno.  Given there some 80 lines  of text total, all done through translation, if I have a bad grasp on their characterization, I'm okay with admitting that.

It seemed to vary though and while hate might be a strong term, they'll casually discuss killing each other before some battles and shooting each other down before a lot of them.  Either way, it is a quirky relationship in Gensokyo.

Good point about the bombs.  I noticed that but it didn't seem to be needed to tell about the gameplay.

Dracos

[Halbarad]

In fairness, a lot of the characterization comes from seeing a LOT of the characters; each individual game only shows a snippet for each. Reimu is indeed a lazy drunk, Marisa doesn't give a damn about anyone (not that she's selfish, per se, just that she doesn't really think before she does things), and  Sakuya's extremely devoted to her vampire mistress.

A lot of the information on the characters does come from fanon, although in the case of Tohou the line between fanon and canon is extremely blurred - ZUN himself sometimes takes fan interpretations and gives them legs, and I'm only aware of one particular character where ZUN and the fans really split on the way a character is viewed (Koakuma, specifically).

In terms of the characters in Tohou 'hating' each other, Miao's more or less right. In pretty much every Windows game so far, the final boss (or bosses) wind up going to Reimu's shrine to hang out and have a drink in one of Reimu's endings, all notably without attempting to kill anyone. Danmaku is (supposedly) not itself lethal; it's actually a system cooked up by I think one of the earlier Hakurei shrine maidens (although I've heard it attributed to Reimu herself) to keep people from killing each other outright when they fight at all - if you've got someone who enjoys stopping time  and throwing knives against someone who can invoke death in any mortal, it's not going to be a pretty ending no matter WHICH way it goes - except that we can settle things through danmaku instead. To boot, in PCB and IN the final boss asks you for a favor afterwards, which would tend to indicate "no hard feelings" to me at least.

As far as difficulty goes, the games have been trending towards being easier for quite some time. Mystic Square (the last PC-98 game, TH5) is just insanely difficult - easily the hardest of the danmaku games. EoSD is easier, PCB easier still, and as mentioned you can pretty much nap through IN Easy.

And as far as replays go, as the resident coder and Tohou nut I put together a replay archive site over on the DL, although Drac has yet to upload anything I believe. *eyes* Feel free to check it out and/or use it, address is http://www.rpgdl.com/Touhou/

[Dracos]

Haven't... just not used to doing so and things without a habit rarely get done with games.  It's neat though and a superneat feature of the game.

Dracos
who watches maybe 6 of the replays included with the game copies he was sent.