Going through (almost) every Touhou game in release order #7 - Phantasmagoria of Flower View

[Cosmic]

Moving on from Imperishable Night, the next game on the list, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, is a bit of a weird one, in that I love almost everything about it except having to actually play it.

Like Touhou 3, Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream, PoFV takes on a 1-vs-1 gameplay format, with player 1 on the left side of the screen, and player 2 on the right, with the goal being to simply last longer than your opponent. By pressing Z, you can fire an uncharged shot, but by holding it, you can charge your shot by up to 4 levels. A level 1 charged shot is simply either a wider spread or more concentrated fire depending on the character, levels 2 and 3 clear out all bullets near the user and send a few extra bullets over to the opponent's side (the specific pattern is character-dependant), and a level 4 charged shot clears out all bullets on your side of the screen and sends a clone of the user over to the opponent's side, forcing them to engage in a boss battle against them. This boss battle event also sometimes just triggers by itself, though, and I haven't quite figured out what causes this. By default, you only have access to a level 1 charged shot, but by defeating enemies, a gauge that's split up into 4 bars fills up at the bottom of the screen; level 2 shots consume 2 bars of the gauge, level 3 takes 3, and level 4 takes 4. Level 1 charged shots don't cost anything to use, though.

Now, I've never played the multiplayer for this game, which to its credit actually sounds like a fun time, but the singleplayer gameplay is, to be honest, quite bad. The main issue is that, while you can use charged shots to interfere with your opponent, there's no 100% guaranteed way to actually hit them, and you have no way of setting up any kind of aiming, so you have to be completely reliant on the AI making a mistake in order to be able to proceed. This means that, in practice, you're not actually fighting an AI-controlled character as much as you are surviving an inconsistent, poorly-organized mess of bullets until an invisible, randomly-decided time limit ends, which leads to PoFV quickly starting to feel like nothing more than a less fun version of normal Touhou. I can see what the aim was for this game, but the execution on a gameplay level just isn't there in the singleplayer.

One aspect of this game I absolutely love, on the other hand, is the characterization. This game features 14 playable characters, the highest number in any Touhou game at the time until Scarlet Weather Rhapsody's 15 and still the highest number in any mainline game to this day (until Touhou 19 releases, anyway), and while I haven't played as all of them, from what I've seen, their characterization is excellent, even if there are some quite frankly bizarre inclusions here (why is Mystia in this game). For newcomers, we have Aya, Medicine, Komachi and Eiki, and aside from Medicine, I really like all of them, Aya and Komachi especially being some of my favorite characters in the series. Yuuka also returns from the PC-98 games, although this time she's much less one-dimensionally evil than her PC-98 counterpart. Don't interpret this as meaning I don't like PC-98 Yuuka, mind you, she is very much the fun kind of one-dimensional evil and I like her a lot, but I think this is an interesting progression for her character. Here, she's much calmer than before, seeking to just mess around with the other characters a little as opposed to beating them half to death, and is generally someone it's possible to get along with... until you damage her sunflower field, that is, in which case her violent side from before will come back in full force. My personal theory about this Yuuka is that in between the PC-98 games and this one, she decided to grow the sunflower field herself as a means to help herself calm down and become a bit less neurotic, which allows her to have semi-normal interactions with people usually, but also results in her becoming instantly enraged the moment anyone dares try to damage it.

Returning characters are all written really well here too. Cirno in particular is finally able to grow from the disappointing non-character she was in EoSD to the lovable "strongest" idiot ice fairy most people are familiar with today, and while not everyone gets the same level of added characterization as her, they all feel like characters in their own right, and as someone who finds the large, varied cast of characters to be one of the main appeals of this series, it's really nice getting to see so many of them get a chance to just do stuff and be themselves in this game. I glossed over the newcomers earlier, but they're mostly all great too. Medicine is just eh for me, but even she actually has a defined character with personality traits to point to; she's not boring because she's not a character, she's boring because she isn't one that appeals to me, and unlike every other time I've called someone boring in one of these posts, I could actually see someone disagreeing with me on her. Aya, on the other hand, is my favorite character in the series, and feels almost like she was made to appeal to me specifically. I always love characters whose whole thing is being able to go really fast, so I was going to like her regardless, but even putting that aside, she's just a genuinely fun character to watch, being 100% neutral in basically every conflict and motivated exclusively by what would be the best story for her newspaper, leading to various moments of her just being a general annoyance for the other cast in the best way possible.

Eiki and Komachi are also great, and I enjoy their dynamic a lot. Eiki is the Yama, the one responsible for judging people who've died and deciding if they get to go to Heaven or Hell, and as a result, has a tendency of intensely lecturing the living about the morality of their actions. She often comes across as an annoyance who never shuts up to anyone who encounters her, but at her core, she's a genuinely good person who just doesn't want to be forced to send those around her to Hell; she's a character who's easily and undebateably a "good person" who's motivated purely by helping others, but is still flawed not just in spite of that but as a direct result of it, which is a surprisingly rare and interesting thing to see. Komachi, on the other hand, kind of just doesn't want to work. She's this series' "not-Charon" character who ferries the souls of the recently deceased over to Hell, but has a tendency to slack off, leading to her being consistently berated by Eiki. Aside from just being a generally entertaining character, she's also the first penultimate boss character in the Windows series who distinctly doesn't fit into the trope of the dedicated servant to the final boss. Her loyalty isn't to Eiki as an individual, it's to the Yama and her job as a Shinigami, and even that loyalty is questionable; if Eiki was somehow overthrown and her position was taken by someone else, Komachi probably wouldn't go that out of her way to help Eiki and would likely just continue as she had before, something which can't be said of Sakuya, Youmu or Reisen. I don't inherently dislike any of those characters, mind you, it's just nice to have some variety.

It might seem strange that I've just written 3 paragraphs about just the characters, but they're a large part of what I like about this game, so I felt it was deserved. Anyway, onto the actual story. Basically, some kind of unspecified event has happened in the outside world, causing dead souls to flood into Gensokyo at an unprecedented rate; this incident also happens to coincide with Komachi not really feeling like working on that particular day, so the souls end up possessing various flowers around Gensokyo, causing an unusually large amount of them to bloom, something which whoever the player chooses to play as immediately goes out to investigate. After a bit of running around, they run into Komachi, beat her up for being lazy, and then are confronted by Eiki. There's a quick battle with her, and then the game ends, and you get to see your character's ending, which focuses on a different aspect of the story depending on who you choose. It's fairly simple, and I don't have much to say about it, but it works, and it doesn't have any obvious flaws, so I like it. It's really here more to give an excuse for gameplay and character interaction than anything, and that's something it does a good job at. I will say that I really like the character endings, though, the ones I've seen (Cirno/Reisen/Aya/Komachi/Yuuka) are all great.

Lastly, the soundtrack; unlike the last two games, I really don't have a whole lot to say about this one, it's just a generally pretty good soundtrack. It is mostly remixes, which is understandable, but the handful of new songs added to the game are all really good, and have a very particular feel to them which I quite enjoy, even if there are none which stand out enough to me for me to mention them individually. Also, while I'm here, I'd like to mention before ending this post that I actually really like this game's art style. Most ZUN art is pretty hit or miss for me, and I generally prefer the newer stuff, so it's surprising to me that I like the way the character art looks for this game as much as I do. It's not perfect, mind you, I loathe Reisen's portrait in particular here (although that could be partially down to the fact this game is responsible for getting rid of her cool black coat), but most of it is really nice, I like it.

So, that's PoFV! This one is a bit weird, and my thoughts on it are a bit mixed, but in spite of the fact I don't enjoy playing it, I actually quite like it for what it does with the various characters of the series, and for the fact that it introduces two of my favorites in Aya and Komachi. Overall, very strange game, but a good one nonetheless, I approve.

[Eulogous]

4 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Now, I've never played the multiplayer for this game, which to its credit actually sounds like a fun time, but the singleplayer gameplay is, to be honest, quite bad. The main issue is that, while you can use charged shots to interfere with your opponent, there's no 100% guaranteed way to actually hit them, and you have no way of setting up any kind of aiming, so you have to be completely reliant on the AI making a mistake in order to be able to proceed. This means that, in practice, you're not actually fighting an AI-controlled character as much as you are surviving an inconsistent, poorly-organized mess of bullets until an invisible, randomly-decided time limit ends, which leads to PoFV quickly starting to feel like nothing more than a less fun version of normal Touhou. I can see what the aim was for this game, but the execution on a gameplay level just isn't there in the singleplayer.

You've just summed up almost exactly the same problems I have with the Phantasmagoria games as a whole. Of all of these type of games I've played, I will always lean towards 3 as the one I prefer over the others. Bombs being divorced from the meter is just better in my eyes, as I kinda hate having a Bomb remove my ability to do a basic Level 1 charge attack. 19 seems to have fixed it a bit, but not completely (it fixes not being able to use Lv.1 charge after Bombing).

I like the idea of the systems, having different attacks based on the meter/character, having characters all have different charge rates, and shooting enemies charging said meter faster, but the vs. format is very messy. It's supposed to be a competitive side-by-side shooter, but what I'm doing to my opponent isn't clear with having to pay attention to all the nonsense on my screen, the AI isn't allowed to die until an arbitrary time limit is reached (which giving an AI advantage that isn't made clear to the player is what I'd categorize as "cheating"), and playing well to save up for a big attack that likely won't touch the AI undercuts the meter's purpose a bit outside of clearing nearby bullets. Wish the meter system got adapted into a mainline game, with like extra Power Tiles/Point Tiles/Gimmick Item charging it or something.

Most of the time when I play this game I have no idea what's even going on in the fights. I'll attempt to try and focus on survival, but then seconds later my opponent just straight up dies and I win I guess, onto the next match. Komachi's unlockable route being a collection of sudden death fights is really cool, but we arrive back at the "AI only being allowed to get hit after a while" problem.

6 hours ago, Cosmic said:

One aspect of this game I absolutely love, on the other hand, is the characterization.

This is really the only reason to play the Phantasmagoria games. The fairly large amount of characters, some who are returning minor bosses, being able to interact with each other and get development is a huge drive for me to put up with the gameplay.

6 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Lastly, the soundtrack; unlike the last two games, I really don't have a whole lot to say about this one, it's just a generally pretty good soundtrack. It is mostly remixes, which is understandable, but the handful of new songs added to the game are all really good, and have a very particular feel to them which I quite enjoy, even if there are none which stand out enough to me for me to mention them individually.

I enjoy pretty much every new song outside of Yuuka's new theme. It's lame in comparison to both her boss tracks from LLS, and even when I take it at face value, the song is extremely repetitive and boring.

Overall, I think this a pretty "meh" game with some actually good ideas executed very poorly. Touhou has a huge emphasis on its characters and music over the gameplay, which are done well in this game, so I can see why it'd be appealing in that regard. Multiplayer looks like it could be fun with a friend, though.

[Cosmic]

9 hours ago, Eulogous said:

This is really the only reason to play the Phantasmagoria games. The fairly large amount of characters, some who are returning minor bosses, being able to interact with each other and get development is a huge drive for me to put up with the gameplay.

Yeah, same. It's the only game in the series where I'm willing to play it on easy mode, since that makes the gameplay feel just kinda whatever as opposed to actively infuriating, and I'm not really here for the gameplay to begin with. Anything else I'll play on normal or harder, but this one in particular I'll make an exception for. I just want to see the character interactions and endings, I really don't care for whatever else it's trying to do.