Oh, wait.


Okay. XD Without wasting any more time on introductions (it's Darius here by the way - hai thar), let me relate my (only recently gleaned) experiences on everyone's favourite bullet hell game, Touhou!

Bullet hell or danmaku, if you don't know what that is, is pretty much the oddball in the family of shooter games. It's a subgenre characterised by Screens of Death, though not always blue ones. In other words, it's about how environments in a game are almost always filled densely with enemy projectiles. Large clusters of shots are constantly aimed at and around your small character sprite, leaving relatively little room to manuever.


Touhou is at heart a bullet hell game, and so it inherits every bit of patterned madness other games in the genre typically have. I don't think I need to go into gameplay here: it's a shooter, enough said. It does have some interesting gameplay mechanics, however (such as being able to avoid death upon collecting a sufficient number of points), but they aren't really the point here.

Okay. My feelings towards it, after playing it? It's a seriously abusive game, in the worst sense (and not in the sense of having bugs and issues with balance). It's macabre and grisly, and people are masochistic to play it!

Just because John Rambo/your spaceship/robot/Spartan is replaced by any one of a few prepubescent anime girls and the alien life forms/Persians/other robots/mindless Rambo-victims are now fairies and little bugs doesn't make it better! Just because there actually is some semblence of a story doesn't tone down the game's implicitly violent nature. The BGM is pretty awesome; it puts you well in the mood to play, but that shouldn't reconcile anything! At heart, it's an instrument of torture!

I brought this up with Junhao the other time, so I'll add on to the points I made. Firstly, you're placing yourself in an obviously disadvantageous situation, and by that, I mean, seriously. Bosses assail you with waves of multicoloured murder, from all directions at times. The whole screen can be filled with enemies, filling it further with shots... and each of those enemies/shots can kill you. At least the Arbiter in Halo leaps into crowd after crowd of rogue, insane Brutes knowing he has an energy shield, active camo, plasma grenades and an Energy Sword...

Second point: grazing. You can score more points by grazing enemy projectiles as they fly by you and nearly kill you - that is, the game rewards you for living on the edge and grazing death. Pain doesn't get more pleasurable, huh? XD


Consolations are perhaps that you do have a large number of powerful screen-clearing bombs, extra lives, a border between life and death you can apparently escape, as well as some pretty decent firepower. However, you still have to handle slipping through dangerously small and arbitrarily changing gaps in patterns of shots, hoping you kill the boss before she kills you. You still have to line up your fire with the boss and somehow sit still while enemies just try to take you out. And, you have to get past Screens of Death. And they are deathly.


Oh, me? Yes, I'm still playing the game, and moving on to the sequels, even. Still fighting my way through stages, dying, grazing shots... mostly dying. Why? Perhaps it's the eye candy... Ha ha...

Labels: Gaming, Touhou

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"I nearly win stage 1 of fairy class (easy modo)" - Some Guy