What I like about the Touhou games part 1

Over the past couple of years I've been working my way on-and-off through the Touhou scrolling shooter series of games, created by Junya Ota (more commonly known as ZUN). Recently I beat the 10th numbered iteration, Mountain of Faith, and started on the 11th, Subterranean Animism, and they got me thinking about why I enjoy these games so much. I figured I'd write a bit about it.

Phantasmagoria of Flower View is not included because it sucks I don't like it.

The Touhou games occupy a distinct sub-category of scrolling shooters that's mostly called either "bullet hell" or "danmaku" (lit. bullet curtain) depending on how weeaboo/actually japanese you are. The distinction is a bit fuzzy, but in general a bullet hell game will have a smaller player hitbox and higher bullet density than a game like Gradius or R-Type. I've enjoyed examples of both types, though Touhou is the only bullet-hell series I've played extensively. Cave's Donpachi is apparently credited with codifying the tropes of the subgenre, though the one time I tried one of them (I think Do-Don-Pachi Dai-Fukkatsu) it proved thoroughly too hard for me. The only other ones I can think of that I've played are one-offs: Treasure's fantastic Ikaruga, and a relatively little-known doujin shooter called Samidare.

One of the reasons I find scrolling shooters appealing is the simplicity of their mechanics. The controls and victory conditions are easy to understand: you move in whatever direction you press, and if you touch anything you die. I also enjoy plenty of games with rich, nuanced, subtle workings (the Sonic games come to mind; Starcraft is another, different example; Dota is an extreme case), but I feel there's a nice purity to uncluttered mechanics. As well as making a game easy to understand for a new player, it provides an obvious, direct measure of very basic skills like hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and concentration. Bullet-hell shooters basically exaggerate the principles of traditional scrolling shooters. Rather than your character's hitbox taking up their entire graphic, it will be a much smaller area in the centre of their sprite. Accordingly, the attacks that enemies fire at you can be much more densely packed before becoming impossible to dodge. On a basic level, this means that the action is more intense, and your precision and reactions are that much more taxed. I wouldn't necessarily say that the skill ceiling is always higher as a result (I'm not well-read enough to make blanket statements about the whole genre) but it feels that way, and even though I'm not actually that good at these games, it's gratifying.

This is an exaggerated comparison.

 Of course, individual series or titles add their own specific mechanics on top of this central core. Some will be relevant for the layman just trying to survive all the stages, while others may only relate to the scoring mechanics, and thus only the most hardcore will concern themselves with them. However I feel the best are those that are important at all levels of play. As a good example, Ikaruga's dark/light polarity switching mechanic is central to the entire game: it is practically impossible to survive even the first level without using it, but knowing how to exploit it allows for an extremely high skill ceiling.

This is epitomised by the last boss. If you just gun it down as quickly as possible, it's not too challenging. If you want a high score, however, you have to milk it for bullet absorption, waiting until the last second on the timer before killing it. Which means doing this...

...for 50 seconds.

The Touhou series's signature mechanics are rather modest in comparison. The blue point items dropped by enemies are almost always worth more the higher up the screen they are collected, maxing out at the "Point of Collection" about 1/5 of the way down. Moving above this also usually causes all items on-screen to gravitate instantly towards the player. Most games also feature a "Graze" mechanic, whereby the player is rewarded in some way for passing close to, but not touching, bullets. Combined, these offer incentives for risky, aggressive play. However, they are generally "scoring only" features, and do not hold any inherent relevance for the casual player, outside of possible extra lives at certain score intervals, or game-specific mechanics.

Where I feel the Touhou games excel is in their level design. Although in this case it might be more relevant to call it "pattern design". The actual levels have their own strengths, but it's when the bosses appear that I think the real design happens. As you might surmise from my most recent posts, I like it when design elements work in multiple ways: I like a character design, for example, to look good, but it should also immediately suggest things about the character's personality, their place in their world, their role in a story and, if they're in a game, how they play. The bullet patterns employed by Touhou's bosses touch on this idea, and I feel they're actually getting better with each game.

The patterns are well designed on a basic "gameplay" level. ZUN is pretty good at balancing their difficulty, while making them distinctive and varied such that a player will need specific skills to beat specific attacks. It's not all just twitch reaction or rote memorisation: you need pattern recognition, concentration, patience, endurance, and even planning to get through a whole game's worth of Spell Cards (the series's name for character's special attacks).

They're also pretty just for prettiness's sake. Fitting for a series where all the characters are cute girls.

A boss will generally have overarching themes to their attacks, which helps give each one a distinct identity outside of just their design and personality as written in the dialogue. The enemies aren't nondescript monsters or spaceships, they're characters. Sakuya in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil uses waves of knives in tandem with time-stopping, a likely reference to Dio Brando from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Sanae in Mountain of Faith uses bullets densely arranged in pentagram formations that then gradually unfold and invert in various ways.

However, I feel ZUN is at his most ingenious when he communicates a specific idea through his patterns, especially if it relates directly to the character using them. A very simple, early example is Cirno's "Perfect Freeze" spell card in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. She sprays bullets rapidly across the screen, freezes them in mid air, then allows them to thaw so they slowly disperse in random directions. Cirno is an ice fairy, so this is thematically fitting for her.

Nitori, the stage 4 boss of Mountain of Faith, is a kappa, thus many of her patterns suggest jets or streams of flowing water in some way.

Even though it was Mountain of Faith that prompted me to write this post, I actually think the following game, Subterranean Animism, has the best bullet pattern design in the series. There are two characters that perfectly sum up what I'm talking about.

In stage 4, a red and black cat appears multiple times as a sub-boss. It assualts you with highly aggressive, screen-filling patterns.

It hounds you again in stage 5, attacking even more ferociously.

 Even though it's just a cat, you get some idea of its personality, just from how it fights you. Then, at the end of stage 5, it appears again, assumes a human form, and finally talks to you... and this cat, Orin, turns out to actually have a very friendly, outgoing, almost cowgirl attitude.

It seems her aggression was more akin to boisterous playfulness. When I first saw this, I thought, "Oh... that makes complete sense too." My perceptions weren't refuted, merely recontextualised. And in this new context, the rest of her attacks, no less vicious than before, make sense in a different way.

The last boss, however, is a work of genius. Reiuji Utsuho is a hell raven who consumed a Yatagarasu, a sun crow, and has thus attained the power of nuclear fusion. She is determined to use this to turn the surface of the earth into an extension of hell. However, even if you skip through her dialogue, her very first attack instantly tells you exactly what she's like, and suggests how the rest of the battle is going to go.

It's simple and not particularly difficult, but also violent and very fast. She's a creature of no great sophistication, but with massive power. She is simple, but brutal - and so are all of her attacks.

Many of her subsequent spell cards involve massive blazing fireballs as projectiles. Their sheer size, orders of magnitude larger than the bullets you're used to seeing, hints at Utusho's bloated, overloaded power.

Spot the miko.

They're so huge that they often mercilessly restrict your available space. It induces a feeling of constriction and oppression in the player... and this is exactly what the character you're controlling would be feeling, fighting in a swelteringly hot environment, with walls of flame in every direction. Just through level design, ZUN manipultes the player's emotions to connect them to their avatar. That's clever.

And her final card is the cleverest of all. Utsuho spawns bullets all over the screen. She then creates an artificial sun in the centre, which begins to gravitate all the bullets towards itself... along with your character!

And it only gets worse, as sunlight starts streaming outwards, and the pull of gravity intensifies... all while the sun gains mass and expands, restricting your movement even further.

Your enemy's power is so great that not only does it violate the physics of the world, but it even directly affects the way that you, the player, interact with it. This isn't suggested by some corny dialogue (the Touhou games do, admittedly, have plenty of corny dialogue), you aren't just told "Her power is too great! She's sucking in everything!" You are made to feel it in a visceral way. One might be reminded of the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, and that is also a fucking amazing game. Of course, games have interfered with a player's controls before, but Touhou's language is so refined, so limited, and so well established that it's a shock to have this happen, for the first time in eleven games. And it's perfectly placed: a fantastic climax to an intense final battle.

Comparing Utsuho to earlier final bosses, she just seems clearly more sophisticated from a design perspective. Remilia's okay. Yuyuko's patterns are absolutely gorgeous, extremely fun to play against, and she's actually one of my favourite bosses in the series for how well she brings together so many secondary elements like pacing and music. Kaguya's spell cards are ingeniously patterned around elements from the story of Kaguya-hime, on which she is based, and takes the game's Last Spell gimmick to a satisfying conclusion. Kanako uses a bunch of very clever and enjoyable patterns. But I don't think any of them approach the level of sophistication of Utsuho's attacks. None of them are so refined and thematically tight: none of them so completely describe the character's personality.

In a way, bullet pattern design like this is the most pure and perfect form of level design. Aesthetically, they're almost like abstract geometric patterns, which is the most basic kind of visual design possible. Functionally, however, they're able to be as complex and nuanced as a designer's imagination can fathom, as the rules of the game itself are so simple that there's almost no way to create something unintuitive or convoluted within it.

There's more to Touhou's clever game design, but I want to save those thoughts for another post.

(By the way, all the GIFs are from my own play on Normal mode.There are two more difficulty levels above this, Hard and Lunatic. And Touhou games are apparently not even considered hard by the shooting game community at large. On that note, if somehow a person who is actually familiar with games like Donpachi and Mushihimesama reads this post, and it turns out that those games do all this stuff but better, I apologise: I just haven't played them.)

Also I offer no apology for the tons of massive GIFs.

Mountain of Faith took me a very long time to beat, so I drew a picture to commemorate the fact. It's just fanart of the dodgy character designs and has nothing to do with what I've gone on about in this writing, but I tried to make it look nice, at least. I made it a bit of an exercise in colour and composition, though I still have lots to work on. Many sincerest thanks to Joe Sparrow (again) for giving me advice and generally being a bro.

More soon (actually never). Also I got sick of the X-Large image preview size being just slightly too wide for the default layout so I actually started dicking around with my blog design finally. I'll probably get rid of that cluttered sidebar at some point, as well as actually maybe concocting a background. It'll be a treat!

I just finished watching Kaiba. It was sad and difficult and confusing, but I very much liked it. It's too complicated to do any justice with a brief crappy post like this, so all I'll say is that it definitely fits the bill of "anime you should watch if you like interesting things". Or if you like animation, or are just burnt out on stupid pandering crap.

It was nice to watch in the midst of Panty & Stocking, since it's pretty much the perfect antithesis. P&S is loud, abrasive, schlocky raw entertainment and it knows it, with angular characters even going to the extremes of inverted-curves design. Kaiba is subtle, low-key, DEEP as fuck, with characters that look all soft and pudgy.

I realise now that I didn't take any screenshots and I can't be bothered to get any right now to post. Fuck it, it's from 2008 anyway, you can find plenty about if you look. I'll probably rewatch it at some point and take millions of screenshots, though.

I suddenly realise that Neiro's waggly hair probably looks really strange up there. I can't even tell anymore. I knew I shouldn't ahve tried to to an animated doodle starting at midnight when I've got work tomorrow. La dee da.

I am beset upon to watch Venture Brothers instead of this animu bullshit. I shall get on that when I am not stupidly busy.

Miscellany

I've been a bit bored lately. Did some work on a pitch for the lovely fellows at Treat and we won it so as of next week or so I will be a busy bee on some christmas ads. Other than that I have been doing alot of not much.

A nice timewaster I have found, which follows on from my former (and still to a small extent current) timekiller of doing Mario Paint Composer covers, is Notessimo, which is sort of like a more advanced, Flash based version. It has loads more instruments, lets you set volume and panning for individual notes, and has layers. I've been working on-and-off on a cover of "The Extreme", the final boss theme from Final Fantasy VIII. I don't remember that one being a particularly good game, but it's an incredibly awesome piece of music, and the equivalents from VI and VII have already been done (they're even on the Featured page!), so I thought, "Why not?" This is where I'm at right now.


Link in case the flash embed fails.


My attention span is rather short so while I will hopefully finish this (I'm fairly pleased with how it's going so I'd definitely like to), I don't know if I'll do many more in future. It's so much more complicated and time-consuming than Mario Paint! That said, I did also start Sandopolis Zone Act 2 from Sonic 3 & Knuckles concurrently (I alternated between the two before I got into a good groove with The Extreme), so here's the current progress on that, which I'm also rather pleased with.


Link.

I also went the London MCM Expo on Sunday. When I was invited by my lovely, almost saintly friend Emily I was thinking "Jesus has it really already been a year?" Then she told me it's every six months. Thank goodness! Anyway, as promised I went dressed as Tetsuo, but I tragically COMPLETELY FORGOT TO TAKE ANY PHOTOS, so you will have to take my word for it (and Emily's and Joe's if they comment on here, since they both bore witness). I decided not to do the whole "red cape white vest" thing we see him do in the movie, because: A. It's goofy; B. It's been done alot. So I kind of amalgamated a couple of different looks from various parts of the manga (he changes appearance about 5 times), and wore a utility vest over nothing, which he wears in volume 6, but also kept the robotic arm that he has earlier on. You'll know roughly what I mean if you've watched the movie, but in the manga it's more organic, so I achieved it by painting it all over my right arm, and customising one of those skeleton gloves to look mechanical. It worked surprisingly well, even if the paint got somewhat rubbed off on the way in (because it was FREEZING COLD so I had to wear a jumper over it *sadface*). For the full look, I should also have gone barefoot and bleached my hair, but I learned too late that bleaching one's hair does not happen in an afternoon.

I know it's lame to do a whole paragraph talking about stuff like that with no visual guide but that's how I roll.

I also got to play Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and the Wii version of Goldeneye. Of the first, I thought it was adorable and definitely fun with two people, though hopefully it continues to offer new things so the original novelty factor doesn't wear off (also I think it's kinda dark how you kill enemies by just... unravelling them, and I find this rather appropriate). Of the second, I thought it was a bit gimmicky and didn't seem to have much real substance (also I've never been all too keen on the idea of having to waggle to do a basic thing like roll). Of the third, I remained totally unsure of the point. Goldeneye was fun on the N64 because if you had an N64 you weren't playing the probably superior FPS's on the PC, and also because it was the first game of the sort where you could really expect to have four people playing it together in the same room. Repeating it now just seems redundant (also, inverted y-axis master race was here, all you non-inverted peasants should go back to trading hats or something).

I kind of wish I'd brought more than just a tenner, because then maybe I would have bought some of the neat things I saw there. It's all well and good going home and doing a £50 manga binge on Amazon, but you can't get stuff like doujinshi on Amazon. I saw an Aria one (don't know if it was hentai or not, lolzzz), I should've bought it and maybe checked out more from that stall. I also tried to get Emily to buy a K-On futanari doujinshi for a friend of hers who had requested porn. IT WOULD'VE BEEN WORTH £14. I also saw a stall run by Yamino, the artist of Sister Claire, one of the only webcomics out of all the ones I read that I would not feel embarassed for other people to see. I actually feel really terrible for saying hi and then not buying anything. I'M SORRY YAMINO. If you're at the next one I promise I'll give you some money (if you update more, he says, well aware of the inherent hypocrisy).

The whole "at least one creative thing per blog post" thing seems to have merely caused me to post even less rather than draw more. However, I plan to stick by it, and I'm not counting those Notesimmo works above, so here are two drawings I did today.

If you don't get it, be thankful, it is literally the lamest and most forced meme ever. I currently have "doubles" and "check em" filtered and will keep things that way for the forseeable future and I still can't seem to completely avoid it.

Yes, more of that same creature from Alien Nine. Though it's more than just a dumb practice doodle this time (this is a lie, I literally thought this up on the toilet). Those drills take fucking ages to draw, I've no idea how Hitoshi Tomizawa ever did a weekly manga with those things everywhere. Must've had lots of assistants (or just worked literally all day every day, as I hear most manga artists do). It's also really hard to keep a good composition going with those things involved. I am pleased with how appealing Kumi looks, though.

Oh yeah, I'm still watching Panty and Stocking. It is by far the most difficult to place thing I've watched it ages. On the one hand I feel it's actually got uglier since the first episode, and the awesome animation and visual moments haven't really been coming consistently or at all (I even got into a massive argument with some people on /a/ about it, as I'm prone to do, which also led to a nervous little moment when someone recognised me through a filename and linked this blog on there, and I was worried this little corner of the internet where I can talk shit with impunity would be compromised). On the other hand, the humour and characters are sporadically improving and there's been some actual genuinely funny moments. Overall, as my friend Joe said, it's interesting, and that's one of the best things you can say about most anime these days. I'm not going to end up rating it as highly as a masterpiece like, say, FLCL (oh, I can hear the trolls already), or even just a really overall great series like Gurren Lagann, but I'll definitely remember it more than I will Mitsudomoe or whatever other flavour-of-the-month nonsense I've watched lately.

P.S. I'm in the Stocking camp. I know everybody's in the Stocking camp. I don't care.

This moment from episode 4 is probably the hardest I've laughed at an anime in literally years.

Oh yeah, I also watched Forrest Gump recently, which is a good film, as well as the first few episodes of Seinfeld, which is also, as it turns out, quite good.

Hiroyuki Imaishi wackiness from Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi ep 12

Imaishi (better known these days for directing Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and to a much lesser extent Dead Leaves) did direction, animation direction, and storyboard for ep 3, and animation direction, storyboard, and layout (or "creative design" depending on your source) for ep 12 (the one I'm posting images from) of this series. I'm betting that all the more exaggerated and cute bits of these two episodes were drawn directly by him, since they're just so distinctive. These episodes are standouts from this series anyway (I just got done watching it, I enjoyed it overall, save for the horrible ending, but these are the only two episodes I really find memorable by themselves), but while watching it I thought this first scene stood out even from the rest of the episode.

And I'm just assuming Imaishi did all the drawings. Maybe I'm wrong, but this strikes me as a very energetic and creative person just smashing out the most expressive poses and expressions they can, and that's the kind of figure Imaishi sounds like from all I've heard of him (and the mark he leaves on his works in general). He's most infamous for frenetic movement and crazy poses (he was also responsible for the wild gunfights in FLCL episode 5), and that's certainly present in these episodes. In particular there are some very fast, chaotic cycles which I actually find quite hard to read (though horrible PAL conversions can't help: I actually rented this series on DVD rather than downloading it, which I do sometimes so I can complain about how shitty anime DVDs are here).

These don't even have any in-betweens, those are the whole sequences! (assuming I didn't miss any frames; given the number of blended frames on the DVD I had to skip past I may have missed some) In fact, that first sequence of frames up there doesn't have any actual in-betweens either, the characters just switch straight between the poses (maybe with some supporting secondary action like a cloud of dust from the closing book). In that case though, I feel it worked, the poses are so strong and so appealing they don't even need in-betweens. Try it yourself! Open them all in different tabs and just switch between them.

All this no-inbetween business reminds me of something John K once said about how, whenever he actually animates these days rather than doing layout or suchlike, he doesn't have the patience to draw lots of gradual in-betweens, he just wants to do funny drawings. That's exactly the vibe I get from this scene.

As I said it doesn't always work for me in what I'm assuming to be Imaishi's animation. Sometimes the characters end up looking primitive and over-rushed and often his compositions are cluttered and difficult to read, (don't have any screenshots). But he makes girls look really cute!

 I'm reminded of these pieces of Gurren Lagann artwork that were apparently drawn by the man himself.

Especially the faces. The big eyes.

Converts directly into forehead space when the eyes are closed or narrowed.

As I said, Gurren Lagann is probably what he's best known for these days, but it's actually very restrained compared to this stuff.  Perhaps because he didn't get to do so much animation, layout, or storyboarding for it: apparently he did key animation for eps 1, 8 , 15, 26, and 27, but even those episodes aren't as wild as this. Maybe he refined himself a bit since 2002, or felt such a wacky approach wasn't fitting for the series (the director's cut DVD version of episode 6, directed by Shin Itagaki, animation direction by Yuka Shibata, was more like this, and it was purely comedic rather than adventure centric). GL did still have problems of clutter in the designs and occasionally the overall compositions, though it was generally less flat than this, but not as crazy. Not that I'm complaining, since I love the fuck out of GL, I'm just making observations for the sake of it.

How much influence does a series director even have? Compared to, say, an "episode director"?

Did he do these drawings too? (from later in the same episode)

There's also this great bit of Sasshi (the boy, the girl's called Arumi) doing a crazy whipping motion. It reads very nicely in context compared to the sequences above. Did Imaishi or somebody else draw it? (I'd include more frames but it's largely on ones, so these are the only frames I could get that weren't blended)

Imaishi's two episodes are also the rudest.

 

The plot of episode 3 centres around Arumi's panties getting stolen by a goblin while she's in the bushes taking a leak (she pisses herself as a result), and subsequent attempts to get them back by having a giant robot battle. She ends up smashing Sasshi in the face with her bare crotch once or twice. Damn! I wish I'd taken screenshots now.

Um, not really sure what I meant to say next. I'm trying to figure out how to efficiently clean mould off a high bathroom ceiling! Not fun.

Oh, I finally rewatched Neon Genesis Evangelion (including End of Evangelion) recently. It's fun! Well, eps 1-14 are fun, I'd forgotten that the tone shifts and the budget slips from ep 16 onwards.

 Unit 01 trollface.

And EoE just doesn't make fucking sense. Mostly concerning the motivations of certain characters. Actually, it's like, "But Not Really: The Movie".

Misato slipped Shinji the tongue so he'll finally pull himself together to go pilot Unit 01!
But Not Really, because once he sees it's covered in Bakelite he's just going to sit there feeling sorry for himself again.
No worries, Asuka's managed to find herself and is going to beat the Mass Production Evas alone.
But Not Really, because she'll just get raped.
However, Shinji's really going to pull himself together now, and go save her!
But Not Really because he'll see Unit 02's mutilated corpse and completely flip his shit.
But Rei's going to defy Gendo and go save him instead!
But Not Really, because she's actually just going to activate Instrumentality anyway.
Oh wait, Kaworu's going to come back and help Shinji out because he's a bro!
But Not Really, because his comforting is actually just another part of totally breaking Shinji's mind so he'll let Instrumentality happen.
Oh no, hang on, Shinji is actually going to reject Instrumentality and resolve to continue to live his life, conflict and all.

BUT NOT REALLY.

(amazingly, this still manages to be better than Abenobashi's ending)

I do still like Eva, though. Anyway, I did this in preparation for finally catching up with the Rebuild movies. They're up to two out of four now. Hopefully they'll be interesting. From the sounds of it (though I've been avoiding spoilers) Anno may be setting up for some unholy, mind-bending troll by the end of it.

Maybe I should lay off the depressing/frustrating/rage-inducing endings for a bit before I watch them, though. I recently fell in love with a little-known manga and OVA called Alien Nine. I shan't review (at least not now), but my experience of it can basically be summed up thus.

Anyway, it's late. Signing off.