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Hi there, my name is Lavvie! I am very happy a place like this exists. I remember finding Touhou videos when I was a kid and falling in love with the pretty patterns. It quickly became a big hyperfixation for me, but I could not find anywhere to get the games. Fast forward to around 2019 or so and I saw some games officially up on Steam! I bought Hidden Star In Four Seasons as well as Wily Beast and Weakest Creature. I downloaded EOSD today and it is wildly different from the two games I got on Steam. I never really bothered to interact with the community, but rather was content to play games in my little corner. Now, my desire to make friends in the community have begun to outweigh the desire to be in my comfort zone. I am very happy to be a part of the Touhou community!

Well, here we are, the last of the PC-98 games! I really love this one. In a way, Mystic Square, also known as "Shinki gets her home trashed by random strangers through no fault of her own", kind of feels like a culmination of everything the PC-98 games have been so far. It plays similarly to Lotus Land Story, which although I haven't played PoDD, I'm going to assume is the best of the previous PC-98 games gameplay-wise, and adds Mima and Yuuka as playable characters, each with their own distinct shot types and endings. Additionally, it's also a fair bit harder than LLS was - not as hard as most of the Windows games, mind you, but hard enough that my inclusion of the fact I managed to 1cc it as Mima on normal in this post is purely here for me to brag about being able to do that, as opposed to an attempt to demonstrate the game's lack of difficulty. Anyway, onto the game's story. Basically, demons from Makai have opened up a kind of tourist agency and are flooding into Gensokyo in unprecedented numbers, prompting either Reimu, Marisa, Yuuka or Mima to head into Makai to try and sort the situation out. Structurally, it is very similar to SoEW and LLS' stories of "strange new world causes incident, main character go in new world to solve incident", but the added dimension of the Makai incident being caused by a tourist agency of all things as well as the expanded roster adding extra dimensions to the story still makes this my favorite of the PC-98 stories. As you might have guessed, this game's story also doesn't take itself too seriously, leading to, in my opinion, potentially the funniest game in the series. Reimu and Marisa's stories mostly take themselves seriously, but Mima and Yuuka's might as well be glorified shitposts, and I kind of love them for it. Mima is just an absolute menace of a character who just wanders around Makai mercilessly bullying anyone she comes across, and when she's asked why she did all this by Shinki at the end of the game, she just says it was to "let off some steam" (thanks to this game I am now firmly a part of the "bring Mima back for Windows Touhou" crowd). The game also features a running joke where she'll consistently tell obvious lies and have them be followed by "(lie)" at the end of her sentences, which should not be as funny to me as it is, but oh well. Similarly, Yuuka is also mostly just here because getting to fight strong people sounds fun to her, and like Mima, is a pure demon with no regard for anyone's life but her own, with this game being where her infamous "genocide is just a game, after all" line comes from. Pretty much every encounter in Yuuka's story can be summarized as some unfortunate soul running into her, being either scared, confused or both by her intense bloodlust, and immediately getting curbstomped shortly after. My opinion that this game is one of the funniest in the series is largely carried by the fact that I find these types of characters really funny for some reason, so if you don't also find them funny then you probably won't enjoy a lot of this game's humor, but I still enjoy this game's writing a lot. Humor aside, the game's also just filled with tons of really cool set pieces that do a great job at conveying the tone and feel of their particular areas through visuals and gameplay. Stage 2's whole flying stars effect does an excellent job at making you feel like you're flying through another world, and is perhaps the single most visually impressive thing in any PC-98 Touhou game, and the rapid onslaught of enemies in Stage 5 excellently conveys the feeling that this entire world has suddenly come together all at once in a single combined effort to stop you from getting any further, contrasting excellently with Stage 6 being mostly barren, being potentially the easiest stage in the game aside from the first and using a single unmoving background, as if at this point Shinki is just throwing whatever she has left at you to get you to just go away already, but by now, you've already burnt through all of her most powerful forces. Additionally, I also just... really like a lot of this game's characters. This technically marks Alice's first appearance in a Touhou game, although she's very different in both design and personality (honestly I think I prefer Windows Alice), but aside from her, Louise's interactions with the main cast are all just generally really funny for one reason or another, Yuki and Mai's whole dynamic is really interesting to me, and still in my opinion the most well-executed version of the "fighting two bosses at once" concept the Windows games would go on to try out a handful of times, and although she's far from the best character in the game, Yumeko is basically a trial version of Sakuya, which at least makes her somewhat interesting to me. Also, Shinki did nothing wrong and deserved better, justice for Shinki. Moving on from the writing, I think it's worth noting that this is by far the most visually impressive of the PC-98 games, and it's clear that ZUN really wanted to push the engine to its limits with this game. The previously mentioned Stage 2 in particular has a really cool effect going on, and Alice's background in the extra stage is also particularly notable in this regard, but this added level of visual polish extends to most aspects of the game. Additionally, the soundtrack, like in LLS, still holds up excellently, and I'd put both games' soundtracks on a similar level of high regard, actually being more enjoyable to me than some Windows games (although I would rank this game very slightly higher than LLS). Grimoire of Alice is an overall great song, and potentially my favorite thing to come out of any PC-98 Touhou soundtrack, but it's far from the only banger this game has to offer, with End of the World ~ World's End, Legendary Illusion ~ Infinite Being, Crimson Maiden ~ Crimson Dead, and Last Judgement all being similarly excellent examples of why I believe this to be the best PC-98 Touhou game soundtrack overall. The Stage 3 theme is also another great one, perhaps my favorite in the game if we ignore Grimoire of Alice, although I have no idea why ZUN thought calling it "Romantic Children" was even close to a good idea. Overall, Mystic Square is an excellent game that still holds up perfectly to this day, and a great way to cap off the PC-98 Touhou era. Additionally, although I'm still largely convinced the LLS lag issue I had was purely something on my end, it's worth noting that this game for some reason runs perfectly fine for me, as does everything else in this series. It's not particularly relevant to the rest of this post, but it did feel worth mentioning, so I tacked it on at the end here. Anyway, Mystic Square absolutely slaps, go play it right now if you haven't already.

Based WBaWC enjoyer, welcome :D

Have you ever stumbled upon something you were not expecting to se be connected with the Touhou community and games? What would be one of the places where you were not expecting to find Touhou, but still found it? In my case, probably the connection I was never expecting to make was between Satou Rina and the Touhou fan-game Koumajou Densetsu 2. How does it come? Rina was the voice actor for Reimu in that game. To my surprise, the voice actor for a lot of characters that caught my interest (and one that I really like a lot) proves to have also been involved not only with Touhou, but also one of my top 10 favorite 2hus. Now, she not just the voice of Tanamachi Kaoru, Eula and Tennessee & California, but also the voice of our favorite red-white miko. And since her birthday was just a week ago, back on the 2nd of May (funny how it coincides with my father's birthday), I would like to wish a belated happy birthday to Rina. And now, enough fanboying on my side... What are some of the most unexpected connections and contributions to the Touhou community you have seen? Is there anything or anyone you were not expecting to do anything connected to the series?

I used to go by Youmu Eulogy for a bit a very long time ago. Got into Touhou via Soku and played Youmu a ton. Added "Eulogy" to it because it sounded thematically fitting for a half-phantom, and was kind of a joke to myself that my youtube channel was dead or something. Current name is derived from that, but wanted to go more general-use than relating it to one character.

Huh, nice to see I am not the only one. Also two things: 1) wait, Rina was involved with one more Touhou fan-game?! That's awesome! 2) You have made me curious for the Cirno and her VA part now....

I would say the best way to introduce someone to Touhou is the fan music! Iosys...Beatmario...Cool&Create...and of course Alstromeria Records! If she likes the fan music, show her the original music then tell her about the games!

Ah, fair. Fortunately Touhou is a decently easy series to get into relatively speaking, as you can start with basically anything other than SA/UFO/TD/LoLK and be mostly fine (and TD should be fine too if you don't care about story). Also, I'd strongly recommend figuring out how to get the Steam games patched, it can be annoying but a large part of why I love WBaWC so much is for its story and characters (even if the first 3 stages are kinda mid in that regard for me), so it'd be a shame to see that get overlooked entirely. And hey, if you can't figure it out, there's no shame in just downloading them off here too, you already paid for them after all.

Huh, lots of new people appearing on this website lately. Another warm welcome from me!

My username is my character! I made Lavvie on my first semester of college. Before then I had a previous character that didn't fit me anymore. She had a good run, 2014 to 2021 or so. Lavvie symbolizes embracing myself and my quirks more, so she means a ton to me. I adore my silly purple fox!

Eagle is fun, but I slightly prefer using the wolf spirit. Also, I get not being able to get past stage 3, but trust me, it's 100% worth it, WBaWC is potentially my favorite mainline game in the entire series and it's almost entirely down to stages 4/5/6 (as well as the extra stage). Oh, and I have a question, are you playing the games with the English patch, or just playing them in Japanese and using the wiki to get an idea of the story?

Thanks! I got em a long while ago, though. :p Thinking of picking up Phantasmagoria of Flower View :3 Glad the games are on steam so people all over the globe can contribute to ZUN's beer fund!

Welcome to Moriya Shrine Lavvie! Hope you'll enjoy talking around here and it's cool that you bought some of the offical games already!

My first Touhou game was was Hidden Star In Four Seasons! I never beat any games yet...but I did get pretty far in EOSD!

for about 3 years or so got introduced to it by a friend in an indirect way through songs, mainly because we played osu my first "touhou game" was touhou luna nights, which isn't actually from the original series, but yeah didn't actually play any of the games besides EOSD because I just don't feel like it

Thank you for the warm welcomes <3 how long have you been involved in Touhou?

welcome king

Apple more specially grannie smith . The hit of sour and sweet, soft skin good color. Everything's just peachy .

Welcome! Hope you like it here. This is the spot where I’ve tried to jump into the actual community too, so just have fun and enjoy the experience!

Actually, I had the same experience when I picked up Azure Reflections, the side-scrolling STG fangame. Cirno was the third playable character in it, and throughout my playthrough, I couldn't get my mind off of her very distinct voice. I knew I'd heard it from somewhere, but I put my finger on it. Then I made it to the credits and found out that she was voiced by Yuka Iguchi. For the record, if you haven't played Azure Reflections to hear it for yourself, I strongly encourage looking up a playthrough to hear her voice. It's fantastic casting, and I consider her voice to be the canon Cirno voice. Yuka's got a lot of VA roles under her belt, but I knew her specifically because she played my favorite character, Hinata Miyake, from my favorite anime, A Place Further than the Universe. After finding that, I also found out that she voiced Tewi in A Summer Day's Dream. Much less interesting, but it also showed me that Reimu there was played by Mai Nakahara, who plays Nagisa Furukawa in my second favorite anime, Clannad. So yeah. It was cool to see that everything related to Japan does eventually come around to Touhou if you look hard enough. Oh, and @CountVonNumenor, you probably noticed, but in Azure Reflections, Rina Satou does reprise her role as Reimu there too. It wasn't shown in the list you provided, but I figured you'd appreciate it.

There is a bit of a long story about the origin of my name, which I have written about in the AMA thread to begin all AMA threads. Probably the shortest version would be that I have gone through a variety of names beforehand, and the current one is a combination paying homage to my previous names. (also came as a need when I started my own DA art page...)