|
Friday 7 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
I spent a few more hours with the game. It is utterly addictive in its way of gameplay, even if the levels are practically fixed. The enemies always comes from the same location and fires the same way, with the only different being when I kill them. This game relies primarily on the concept of a “bullet-hell” style. This is a style in shoot ‘em up games where the screen is filled with numerous bullets and the player must navigate through these bullets to safety. With the amount of bullets that are thrown at you, it would be nearly mind-numbing to try to memorize all the patterns even though it can be done.
The game can become frustrating at parts, especially with the sometimes ridiculous waves of projectiles that the bosses throw at you. These ways often require concentration to avoid, especially since other waves overlaps and pass through other projectiles, creating an intricate moving network that required me to constantly have my finger on the slow button. But with the harshness of the game, I found Touhou to be a very fun shoot ‘em up to play.
DESIGN:
The characters and bosses in the game are primary magical girls that seemed to be under ten years old, with the main canon fodders enemies being angels that fly across the screen. The game is a vertical shooter with a bit more than the left half of the screen being used for the flying and combat. The right side of the screen contains the statistics that include the score, lives, and the power-up value. The power-up value is different from other games, in that when you pick up the red cards that are dropped by enemies, the value increases for a small decimal number. Whenever it reaches a whole number, your character gets an increased firepower to use. Every time the character uses a bomb, the power-up value decreases. This makes strategy somewhat important as the power-up value combines increased firepower in relations to bomb-usage.
The backgrounds are absolutely beautiful, with three dimension clouds passing by on the first level. There is even land far below that is viewable. What makes the background even more interesting is that when boss fights occurs, a new background overlaps over the original background. One particular example was a wooden screen with Japanese characters carved out of the wood to create holes that you can see the previous background of clouds and landscape moving past.
The bosses each have their own health bar that decreases rapidly at first, but as it goes further down, it takes more shots to damage the boss. After the boss reaches the small black portion of the bar near the end, the female magical girl that the boss portrays changes her attack waves to a more difficult style. After the bar completely empties, the magical girl changes style again as the bar refills. This repeats for a few times before the boss finally dies, but it is a new style that I haven’t seen on other shoot ‘em ups besides the Tohou series.
|
