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Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith.

By Rya Bread / December 29, 2007

I really want to complain about this new Touhou game. I love the series and have spent months playing each and every installment from PCB on, getting fairly good high scores in all of them, yet I was really disappointed by this one. Let me explain why.

First of all, the options in Mountain of Faith are more limited than in previous games.

For one thing, in this game you can't enable/disable the "slow down if there are many bullets" option, which I guess isn't too bad because I liked it both ways.

However, what I don't like at all is that there's no SlowShot option anymore. The lack of SlowShot basically destroys the traditional feel and flow of the Touhou series. Just to elaborate, because some people might have never heard of SlowShot, in previous games this feature enabled you to map Shot and Slow on the same button. Meaning if you are tapping the button you'll move fast but fire a weak shot, while if you keep it pressed you'll move slower but fire a stronger shot [Same as this works in Cave shooters, basically. --Ed]. In Mountain of Faith this option seems to be completely missing, so if you want to get the SlowShot effect you now have to keep two buttons pressed at the same time. This puts additional stress on the fingers and makes it way harder to press another button on top of those. It totally changes the feel of the game, so that now it tests how good your pad/stick is and how good you are at pressing buttons, rather than how good your tactics and reflexes are. I don't like this at all. Of course some people might have hated the SlowShot feature in the first place, but there should at least be an option to enable it so everyone can fully enjoy the game. I wonder why ZUN decided to remove it; maybe because it made the game easier without penalizing your score? Well who knows, but it really made me enjoy this game WAY less than previous ones.

The second thing is rather minor, but I still don't like it. There's no bullet scratching bonus... at all. Someone told me that scratching increases your faith, but every time I tried it it never did. You still get the "bullet-scratching" animation when you get close to bullets, but it doesn't seem to give you any faith or points. Why remove a scoring mechanism that was like essential in every other Touhou shooter to begin with? Well, I don't like that it was removed.

Third thing, and this is NOT minor: the scoring system's pretty damn shallow. I know a friend of ZUN personally, and he told me that ZUN wanted to make this game easier to understand because some players had trouble understanding the mechanics of his previous games. Especially in the case of Imperishable Night, even really big Touhou fans still had trouble figuring out how to maximize their score, even after playing it for several months. So apparently he designed MoF so that it's easy to understand how to max out your points (simply: by getting lots of faith).

Personally, I enjoy games with complicated mechanics much more. At least if you don't HAVE to understand them to beat the game. I prefer games like Imperishable Night or even SaGa Frontier that have such complex systems that there's no straightforward guide for them, so that they always retain this "mysterious" feel about them.

Mountain of Faith is completely missing this. After the second playthrough I had figured out the whole mechanism and could already go for a high score...

Fourth thing I don't really like is that, in contrast to previous games, when you continue you are sent back to the beginning of the stage. This is just lame. Seriously, after you use a continue you don't really care how you play anymore, you just wanna end that run and try again. Being forced to replay the whole stage just pisses me off and makes the game feel more like work than fun. It's like those old RPGs where you could only save in towns and if you died on a boss you had to play through a two-hour dungeon again. Nobody wants that shit anymore except some hardcore players, and those guys have enough games that cater to their needs already. Touhou was never like that. I don't like this new direction the series is going.

Fifth thing I don't like and I find rather important too is that you can't see your SCORE when you are saving a replay. Usually, in older Touhou shooters when I 1CC the game I always overwrite the replay with the lowest score. However, this isn't possible anymore because the game doesn't show you your score! I might end up overwriting my best run! I can't even check if my current score is better than that of my previous run with the same character. I COULD check the replays before starting to play and write down all the high scores (you can see them when selecting a replay but not when in the process of saving one), so that I'd later know which one to overwrite. But why give the player extra work by forcing him to do so? What's so hard with displaying the fucking score and difficulty and character when saving the fucking replay? Who cares about the date and other useless info that you might want while selecting a replay but not while saving one. ZUN should just remove that stuff and put actually useful information in there.

Sixth is the artwork. Come on, it's so ugly! ZUN draws everything himself, so how does he end up with such bad artwork? All the other artists I know keep improving. I guess he just didn't put any effort into it. Very disappointing.

I bet there was another thing I didn't like about the game but I can't recall it right now. [I am sure you'll get back to us when you do. --Ed]

I should also mention that this game is slightly harder than previous ones in the sense of surviving (its mechanics are way easier to understand though, as I already mentioned). This is especially the case during the stages. While in previous games I almost never died mid-stage (only on bosses), in MoF it often happens that I also die during the stage (but maybe this is also because there's no SlowShot option and it's getting on my nerves and makes my life harder). The difficulty of the bosses varies a lot. Overall I find them slightly easier than in previous games, but a few of their patterns seem almost impossible to evade (by twitching them, at least).

However, although enemies and some boss bullet patterns are harder in this game than in previous ones, overall it's not much harder to play through, because you get WAY more bombs (each bomb costs you an option, which you can get back pretty quickly by collecting power-ups).

I usually prefer playing Touhou shooters without using any bombs, though. Using bombs somehow feels like cheating, and I'm only really satisfied if I can 1CC the game without using any (at least on Easy and Normal modes). Played that way, Mountain of Faith is definitely harder to beat than previous games.

Anyway, I still enjoyed this game, however compared to ZUN's previous masterpieces it's really disappointing.

One of those masterpieces, Shoot the Bullet, has already been reviewed on insomnia. As always, check the Touhou Wiki for in-depth system explanation and more information on the series in general.