TouHou Makuka Sai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival Part II
It’s billed as a homage to Touhou 7, but this game stands out for more than its ability to simply recreate a classic, delivering an excellent STG that stands on its own.
Its mechanics are founded on a slightly modified version of Touhou 7’s border system, in which periods of immunity granted through pickups and bullet grazing can have their duration extended by continuing to graze bullets or grabbing pickups. This mechanic is also how the game distributes extra bomb and life pieces, with longer borders providing increased rewards.
– Real player with 35.8 hrs in game
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–-{ Graphics }—
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Bad
- The graphics on this game are not AAA title level, and really it shouldn’t be expected. However, what really made this game standout is that … it’s absolutely beautiful. The stage backgrounds, the character sprites, the enemy sprites, animated spell card sprites and even the Danmaku and patterns itself are some of the prettiest I’ve seen among Touhou fan games, and actually, I’d even go as far as saying it beats even ZUN’s own mainline games in this aspect. I don’t know how the team managed to churn out such an aesthetically pleasing danmaku game, but they sure as hell did it. I’d also like to specially mention some of the things I thought were extremely outstanding in terms of graphics: Stage 4 in general, Alice’s patterns in general and Yuyuko’s patterns in general (also, her dancing spins while she throws out danmaku were nothing short of awesome!)
– Real player with 22.2 hrs in game
Touhou Fan-made Virtual Autography
The earlygame / free demo didn’t really have me sold on this game, but later on it gets REALLY good. It takes a moment, but it seriously grows on you. Would highly recommend, probably my favorite shmup overall currently.
– Real player with 394.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Faith Indie Games.
Yes, the gimmick is stupidly unbalanced.
Yes, it would be nice to have a scoring system.
But I still like this game. It has good patterns, and good soundtrack. The two things most important to a Touhou game. It also has some slight details which I appreciate, most notably limited progression on the boss music during dialogue in stage 4 and 5, as well as
! the midboss segment of the stage 5 theme having different instruments depending on the character you’re fighting.
Oh, and if you’re playing the demo, the diagonal movement thing is fixed in the full version, in case you were worried about that.
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Touhou Multi Scroll Shooting
this game is sexy. i like it.
the game is really fun and cute, and i like the multi scroll aspect. the music is good. its a bit silly how the stage enemies just fall onto the floor when you defeat them, but its ok.
(key given by skydash)
– Real player with 2.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Faith Indie Games.
Touhou Multi Scroll Shooting’s main gimmick is its plethora of perspectives. During levels, you’ll dynamically switch between a horizontal view, birds-eye view, a Space Harrier-esque view from the back of your character and free-roaming areas that are also viewed from the side. It’s as strange as it sounds, difficult to get used to but strangely appealing at the same time.
While the bullet patterns didn’t blow me away, the game is alright for the extremely low price point. Be warned that Normal Mode is already really brutal when compared to what usually counts as “normal” in Touhou games.
– Real player with 1.2 hrs in game
東方逆妙乱 ~ Ephemeral Unnatural Balance
Positives:
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Very cute art (shaded pastel style)
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Decent enough music
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Interesting system
that being said, I feel like the balancing is kind of wack. The Discord system is great when you’re in a difficulty you have completely mastered, but if you dare to reach a bit above your comfort zone, it’s an absolute beatdown. Especially late in the game, you have almost no opportunity to activate Discord since it’ll just immediately kill you, wiping out any progress you had on the meter (if this were changed, I’d like it a lot more). I also didn’t feel the need for an overdramatic resurrection butterfly ripoff.
– Real player with 17.8 hrs in game
From what I’ve played so far I have pretty much nothing but praise for this game. Honestly it’s better than most of the main Touhou games. It avoids every typical fangame gripe I can think of: stage design is good, systems are good, visual clarity is good. Most importantly it’s determined to be a Touhou fan GAME rather than a Touhou FAN game, and most of its fanservice is based around things recognizable and enjoyable from the games themselves instead of Alice xx Marisa UwU or whatever.
Many of the patterns and spellcards are remixed versions of ZUN’s ones, but the developers seem to have a good feel for how to keep the fun parts without the annoying ones. Nothing is flashy to the point of being nonfunctional and so far I haven’t encountered anything that felt like total bullshit. Lasers and attacks coming from weird directions all have warnings on them so you’re not caught blind. The stages feel like a big melting pot of the styles and identities of different games in the series plus some original stuff and it just works well.
– Real player with 12.4 hrs in game
Touhou Multi Scroll Shooting 2
This game is sexy. I like it.
Cool mechanic, interesting, boss fights, nice stuff. Only negative is the wonky balancing and the hit or miss stage design.
– Real player with 1.7 hrs in game
Follow Our Curator, Hands-Off Gaming!
Touhou Multi Scroll Shooting 2 (or MSS 2 as we’re gonna refer to it from now on) is another new Touhou Derivative work, this time a sequel to 2019’s MSS 1 which you can actually grab for free on Steam. This time there’s multiple characters, 7 Stages, and overall it’s a huge improvement on the original. Some of the bullet patterns really had me sweating my ass off trying to dodge them, but using Sakuya’s time slow ability actually felt super engaging and fun.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
東方幕華祭 TouHou Makuka Sai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival
As a Touhou game, the quality here is high. It has what you would expect from a Touhou game and a little more; beyond the standard 6 stages and Extra stage, there are also Spell Card Challenges with many new difficult spell cards for each of the bosses in the game. The character options provide a second way to adjust difficulty, which I find helpful: Patchouli can be very easy bordering on overpowered (but is also slightly complicated to control), Sanae is fairly easy, and Marisa and Reimu are the most balanced. Whether intentional or not, I think it can help breaking into the higher difficulties as you can start out playing as Patchouli, then Sanae, etc.
– Real player with 62.8 hrs in game
Now, don’t let the hours played confuse you.
I’ve been playing this game before it ever released on steam, but with that in mind let me start explaining how good this game is.
Touhou Fantastic Danmaku Festival, is a fangame remake of Touhou 6: Embodiement of Scarlet Devil, with a few changes here and there made by the chinese developer StarX
Unlike Touhou 6, there’s some differance, some of which I won’t spoil.
There are four characters to play as, the four being Reimu, Marisa, Sanae, and Patchouli.
– Real player with 10.4 hrs in game
Azure Reflections
I adore this game, just to get that out of the way (this review also I might seem a little scattered, first steam review after all). It’s a very well made game with very clear amounts of love and passion. The three main characters, 3 different shot types each, and the several types of accessories allow for lots of gameplay variance, and let you customize the experience to something much more enjoyable to you as well. The bosses and their patterns are also very fun to fight against and learn the patterns of, thanks to the game’s mechanics. Danmaku Rush is very fun to learn and use to it’s fullest capacity, allowing you to even one shot certain Spell Cards if you know when to use it.
– Real player with 50.7 hrs in game
pros:
-Elaborate game mechanics
-Great 3D and 2D art
-Fantastic soundtrack
-Very replayable and has rewards to encourage you to keep trying
-Performance is excellent on my PC (GTX 1080, 4k 60fps)
-Multiple difficulty levels to suit any player
-3 playable characters with unique dialogue interactions with each boss
-Voice acting is Japanese only but it’s pretty good
cons:
-The background of the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th stages are the same, so it becomes a bit boring seeing the same blue void
-Bats are annoying
– Real player with 23.5 hrs in game
Touhou Blooming Chaos 2
This is a fun little action game. It has nice graphics, the controls seem pretty good, and there’s a lot of achievements in the game to keep completionists busy for a good while.
Basically the game is an arena battler where in each room you enter you have to fight and eliminate all enemies before you can leave the room and choose where to go next. The floors in each maze are procedurally generated so the layout of the rooms in the maze is different every time. Somewhere in each floor there’s a portal that will take you to the next floor. After you kill enemies they may drop a coin with a monster or boss picture on it occasionally or they may drop things to help you like potions, powerup items that you can collect and use when you need a boost in combat, or equipment in the form of dresses. Your character can wear up to 6 dresses at once and these give you stat boosts. Each dress has a built in special effect or stat boost depending on the type of dress it is but it also has a number of random stat boosts depending on how rare the dress is. There’s 5 levels of rarity of the dresses I think so the least rare dress would boost one random stat a small amount and the most rare dress would boost 5 random stats up to potentially higher amounts, in addition to the base effect of the dress which is also stronger at higher rarity levels. A good part of the game is spent collecting and crafting dresses to try to build up your character and collections of specific monster and boss coins to unlock additional characters and to do this you will battle your way through the same mazes many times to try to find the loot you need.
– Real player with 127.4 hrs in game
I have no complaints. Yukari nailed me to the wall with a literal train and then chen stole my clothes - violated and abused - I died underneath the Express line to Gensokyo.
I was also chased through the incident by a perverted testicle wearing panties who was licking in my general direction!
On top of being violated by pervert spirits, I had to deal with these annoying heat seeking bullets that really messed my day up.
In all seriousness I think this game could be harder. You have to delve deep into the alternative dungeons if you want any kind of challenge. One such dungeon makes all the enemies HUGE (a common trend with Touhou games (size)) and so all projectiles were scaled with the enemy. One boss already had projectiles that could drown half the map, but after trying this mode I literally couldn’t see my screen because it looked like a Korean village during an air raid holy crap lmao
– Real player with 69.9 hrs in game
东方鬼神玉 ~ I wanna be the Yin-Yang orb
Big event in Gensokyo! The coins in Hakurei Shrine is missing!
Although there weren’t many coins, if it was discovered by Reimu, it would be an epic disaster!
In order to stop all this, you need to control the Yin-yang orb of Reimu, head to the magic forest of night, go through the maze of barrage laid by the fairies, and recover the lost coins.
This is a well-designed barrage labyrinth game. You need to collect gold coins and turn on the machine while avoiding the barrage to pass the level.
Although it is a labyrinth, it is still dominated by gorgeous barrage of high difficulty and refuses complicated roads.
This game incorporates the setting of the unlimited challenge of the I wanna series. You will be teleported to the nearest archive point when hit by the barrage. And you can reborn for unlimited times.
If you like to challenge difficult and interesting barrage, don’t miss it!
Operation
Keyboard
WSAD or arrow keys to move
Hold SHIFT to switch to low-speed movement
Press Z or Enter to save near the save point
Press ESC to open menu
A total of 3 archives can be created, press DELETE to delete the archive
No mouse needed
DANMAKAI: Red Forbidden Fruit
Cute little STG that feels like a nice and huge love letter to Touhou (especially PC-98’s vibes). I will write my pros and cons with the expectation that the reader is at least somewhat fond of Touhou.
Pros:
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4 difficulties, 6 stages with an extra stage. Very Touhou-style
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Mechanic is simple enough to understand. The tutorial video helps.
-
The difficulty is generally digestible. You can go ham on resources once you master the mechanic, but isn’t that true of most STGs and Touhou games anyway…
– Real player with 22.7 hrs in game
A hilariously unbalanced game with a bomb mechanic that can be spammed to hell and back. Once the player has figured out how, where, and when to bomb graze, its difficulty becomes trivial, and the game becomes a fun novelty. A veteran shmup player should be able to clear Lunatic in under 10 credits.
While there is little challenge to be found in the main game, there’s plenty of extra content to keep yourself busy with. There also seems to be a hidden condition for what I think is a TLB or something equivalent, but I’m too lazy to confirm it.
– Real player with 16.8 hrs in game