Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - zero out of one

Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - 0/1

I knew what I was getting into.

 

I find that I have the uncanny ability to draw an analogy comparing any game to a fictional girl I make up in my brain for that very purpose. What this says about me, I cannot say, though I figure it is something either very sad or something extremely sad. Regardless of my little mental irregularities, I think the Touhou games are an area where this skill comes quite in handy.

The series of games is actually pretty hard to explain to begin with. You play as shrine maidens drawn in a lolita style (both in their apparel and, ahem, chest sizes), who ride brooms or fly and shoot enemies with magic while dodging their magic “bullets” which often spread in large elaborate patterns called “spell cards”, each stage is punctuated with little dialogue scenes to let you know you are indeed still playing as a little girls that shoot magic. Additionally each game has its’ own little gimmick for getting high scores, as is par for the course in most bullet hell games.

Anyways, back to my first sentence up there, Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is like that girl you see all the time, on the street or in the library, who you find very attractive but have never really talked to, and maybe you’ve talked to your friends about her and they’ve never heard of her but admit she does sound intriguing. Then one day you strike up a conversation about how her watch looks nice or something similarly irrelevant, and you get to know her and find she likes monster trucks and sleeps in dinosaur pajamas. Also she has a French accent which makes some things nigh indecipherable.

Haha. What?

Touhou 6 may not be easy to get along with, but all that work pays off when you get to see her fishnet panties (this is a kid-friendly site, so there will be no mention of her hairy vagina). And now I feel weird for associating little magic girls with fishnet panties. Congratulations, now you feel weird too. But chances are, you’re pursuing this girl for the wrong reason. You’re either doing it because you like seeing panties, in which case, there are plenty of better ways to do that, or you ended up liking her personality. Well unless you are exceptionally gifted with navigating her um, conversations, (nice one Sergio), you’ll probably be hearing the same thing over and over again. Perhaps this is a problem with all girls who are… uh… well that are bullet hells.

Oh! Girls that talk a lot. See? It’s a gift. The point is, you’re likely only playing Touhou the game because you think lolis are neat. Well that’s a poor incentive to subject yourself to gameplay that is interesting, but will leave you feeling hollow when you spend three hours straight memorizing the easy mode patterns then reach the end and find you need to beat the game on normal without continuing to get anything that approaches an ending, which translates to ol’ Monster Truck weirdo having a snaggletooth. Sure the music is pretty catchy sometimes, but uh... I MEAN, her voice may be soothing, but what does it matter if she doesn't say anything worthwhile?

This is actually a piece of clip art I accidentally uploaded, but I'm leaving it in cause it sort of looks like a bullet pattern.

If you’re playing the game for the shmup aspect, which is indeed somewhat entertaining, then you should really just go play Einhander, Ikaruga, Gradius, Radiant SIlvergun, or any other of the wealth of shmups throughout the ages.

…I mean uh, go talk to those other girls that love to make out and give you a massage after a hard day’s work.

AOOFAD and Silent Hill 3 Exciting Explosion Review

AOOFAD and Silent Hill 3 Exciting Explosion Review

Yeah this took about five minutes to whip up.

There are two things that make good video games. Likewise, good video games are good because of the same two things: atmosphere and mechanics. Without these two elements a game is either bad, or not a game in my opinion. Things like story can be found in a book, graphics in movies or television, but mechanics and atmosphere are unique to the interactive medium.

That’s not to say a good game can’t have a good story, or a bad game has it’s graphics to blame. I love the Phoenix Wright games for their story, and I love seeing a painstakingly rendered historic city stretch out before me in Assassin’s Creed. But these are just contributions to a whole, facets that catch the light and bend it towards the center of something that’s worth seeing or isn’t. That’s what we’re all about here, right?

Mechanics and atmosphere. Games like Tetris are good because of their mechanics, games like Jet Set Radio are good because of their atmosphere (it’s basically a barebones Tony Hawk clone made awesome by style and FUNK). Games like the Fallout series are good because of their synthesis of the two elements. The atmosphere influences the gameplay and vice-versa. I mean, you wouldn’t scrounge and pick up every little piece of scrap and ammunition unless it was the apocalypse, right? The point is, the two elements can be present alone or together, and with that said I arrive at the review proper.

All of Our Friends are Dead. Yeah.

All of Our Friends Are Dead(amalgam really) - one out of one - Henry Arrambide

All of our friends are dead. – 1/1 – Henry Arrambide

We play, we push, we want to finish the game. We kill what’s thrown at us, chase whatever goals are fed to us no matter how little sense they make. Use what mechanics are given to us, because they’re all that we have within the game, all that we can do to survive, push forth, make sense of things. It’s satisfying, destroying whatever stands between us and our end – every little pop or crumble as our foes burst into blood and fail before us – we did that, we accomplished that. Sure, it was only in the context of this game, only inevitable considering there is no ultimate game over pushing us back to the start – all we can do is move forward. The game wants us to - we can choose to just stop, but it's too damn appealing. We want to beat and conquer this…thing before us, and in the end what does that even mean? You still have your real world debts and duties at the end of the day. I highly doubt having all the achievements in Modern Warfare 2 will somehow fix that. The question that it boils down to is why? Why do we play? Not just why do we play All of our friends are dead, but games in general. That's something only the individual can answer.

Easy to learn, tricky to master, pickup and playable – I think the best games aren’t the ones that ask you to take fifty hours of your time and invest in their intense dictionary of terms and rules. WRPG’s suffer the most from this, feeling to me as if they lack any real structure outside their shell of DnD derivatives. That’s another rant. A game should be accessible from the start, laying out the core rules in the first ten minutes or so, and then allowing the player to work from there. Length shouldn’t be an issue – granted that there can be games which cut themselves short and length is a glaring problem – but in the big picture, a 6 to 10 hour game shouldn’t be a problem when executed well. You can comeback with your knowledge of the rules, apply them better, have fun. Speed running, or just a lazy afternoon; if done well a great game can be played for almost ever. Mega Man and Contra still hold water today; Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (not counting the fabulous remakes which change the rules and make the games playable again), not so much. There has to be a lasting friction - a feeling that you, the player, are actually doing something within the game world.

In a way, I guess this is going to turn into a small review of Spiderman: Web of Shadows, a game I was forcing myself through when a friend recommended All of our friends are dead. Web of Shadows avoided the flaw of investment – it doesn’t ask the player to hold out and follow its rules. Spidey is given a weight to his controls that makes you feel like you’re slinging a person through the air – each swing and shot has a momentum to it that’s just right. The game isn’t about mashing the swinging and the jumping, but controlling it, limiting it and using it properly. The character is a vehicle, a real superhuman machine. Mission accomplished. For all intents and purposes – do not play Web of Shadows. That momentum is wasted by a game that asks you to use that avatar to follow markers from point A to point B, collect 2000+ tokens littering the land, fight with a needlessly complex albeit fun combat system – through the same three mission types a million times over for ten hours too long. All in the most awkward graphical detail. You will be seduced by Spidey and then tricked into doing his chores. Web of Shadows was a game so in tune with its physics and how the player interacted with their avatar – yet totally unaware of how to make the avatar interact with the world. Mario runs and jumps, so let’s place him in an environment where the floor is glass which will shatter at any small application of pressure – now walk twenty miles to the right without making even a crack in that damn glass. I guess it had something to do with the development team, or the fact that it was under the Marvel license. Someone cared about that game in the start before every other interest vested in the game mandated that it had to contain Wolverine and be finished at a certain date - so Wolverine was awkwardly thrown in, and the missions, rather than well structured, became filler and padding that added length to the game. 

There’s that connection between the player and the avatar, the avatar and the game-world, and thus the player and the game-world, which is so rarely utilized in gaming. There’s multiple levels to work with that could really be used to effectively tell a tale in ways no other medium could – and that’s what the best games do. Not push us through cinematic choke points of text and dialogue so burdened with references to outside works of philosophy or literature which render personal interpretation null – all while making us play an entirely different game between cutscenes in which the mechanics of the game are totally divorced from otherwise in-universe rules. No, you want what the player does to feel like it has some weight in the world, make the player question not only what his avatar is doing, but why he is doing those actions with his avatar.

All of our friends are dead is by no means the best game ever, but it is a damn fine exercise in these mechanics. Pick it up, learn the rules, execute everything. Wonder what it all means. The game wants you to think about it – so get to it. Give it a shot.

En ruin twist and tumble, forget the smell of home

No soil beneath our footsteps, no marrow in the bones

Listen at us will you? Share with us your head

Do hide behind the iris...as all of our friends are dead.