Otakuism

Finally, it’s here! A glimpse at the newest Touhou game, Mountain of Faith. If the demo is anything to go by, than MoF will defintely be different than its predecessors.

Several things have changed in MoF, especially the power ups and bombs. This has to do with the introduction of options. Options are just little things that fly around your character shooting more bullets, used to popular effect in Gradius. You start off with no options and can move up to five total. Your power up system is like this: Instead of a gauge, your power is numbered through decimals, like 1.0 or 4.75. Each whole number grants you a new option, with a total for four at 5.0. This new gauge also dictates how many bombs you can use. One bomb is equivalent to 1.0 on the power gauge, so you go down every time you use a bomb, except for when your at 5.0, then you can use one bomb for free. There’s also belief points, which are the green stars and circles floating around. Getting those activates your belief meter, which goes down over time. To stop it temporarily, all you have to do is kill more enemies. The higher your belief meter is, the higher points you get.

Some other game differences are there’s only two characters at the beginning, Reimu and Marisa, each with three different styles of shooting. Bombs don’t appear to be anything special, just clearing a certain area of bullets. You can also auto collect all the items on screen if you move to the top of the screen. In previous games you had to be full powered to do this, but you can do it whenever you want here. The other difference is continues. Instead of continuing right from the spot you were killed at, instead you start that stage all over again. It can be pretty annoying, especially when you rely on continues to complete a stage, but you do have unlimited continues. To me, the difficulty here is harder than the previous games, especially on the bosses spell cards. Stage 1 is alright, but it really cranks up on stages 2 and 3. And that’s just on a normal mode. I’d probably get killed if I played hard or lunatic.

In all other categories, MoF is looking to be a winner. Graphically, this is the best game ZUN has ever made. The motif this time is autumn, so the screen is constantly filled with floating leaves and colors. The backgrounds are more detailed and lively, too. You end up looking at the background more than the bullets about to kill you. But the in-game portraits are downright terrible, worse than even emodiment of scarlet devil. Please ZUN, stop drawing while drunk and get the artist from Immaterial and Missing Power to do the portraits. The three new characters introduced are interesting, in that weird Touhou way. There’s Minoriko, the stupid goddess of the harvest; Hina, the gothloli goddess of curses, and Nitori, a weird kappa thing. Aya might also be in the full game, as Nitori mentions meeting a tengu. The plot seems to be Reimu heading up the mountain to talk to a god that wants to close down the shrine. I’m interested to know who the god is, and if we’ll see Mima at all, since she is a god of the shrine, so to speak. Musically, things are good. No stand out tracks yet, but they’re nice to listen to. The remixes will probably be better anyways.

Zombie Reimu will eat your brains.

Overall, the demo is a hell of a lot of fun to play, and I can’t wait for the full version now. Shouldn’t be that much longer I guess. I need to polish my skills some before than. Despite loving Touhou games, I’m really bad at them orz.