I don’t think it’s a secret I have a fascination with Mima. The fact she was such a key part of the franchise and just fell off the map never fails to stir my fascination. But my boys Juunimeta and Eulogous have expanded that interest into the general 98 era. If I did a fan game, it’d probably be based on that part of the history.
There’s a $5 game on Steam I can’t remember the name of. The premise is simple; you play as the Devil who has purchased a rundown apartment block. You attract various monsters to live in your apartments, keep them happy and use them to fight adventurers and heroes come to loot your stuff. I think a concept like that would fit Touhou well. Imagine playing as a vengeful Mima come back into Gensokyo to rescue your apprentice from the evil shrine maiden who has bewitched her with concepts like ‘friendship’ and ‘Youkai are bad, m’kay?’
You would go through a series of stages you could customize for a sidescrolling dungeon, and populate it with various types of ghosts, youkai and demons to defend it. Some could work well together, while other types hate each other. You could customize rooms to optimize your monster choice or throw in traps. Cast spells to give minions an edge. Recruit various characters from the PC-98 and Windows era as a dungeon boss, all as various heroines or generic fantasy characters fight their way into your dungeon. With the end goal of traversing the levels and making a dungeon so deadly, it takes down Reimu herself. All to bathe the land in darkness and rescue your surrogate daughter.
Juuni, Eulo and I were chatting the other week over what Yumeko would look like were she reintroduced. The idea gave me a concept for a 98-focused RPG adventure. Yumeko the Sword-Maid wakes up in a world I can only describe as ‘the dimension of irrelevance’. In this strange new world, you have to recruit allies like Elly, Gengetsu and Satsuki, marching your way through a dull hellscape to try to find your way back to Gensokyo. The only way back is the Yin-Yang orb, which Mima tells you can grant wishes. Would probably put a lot of focus on character-interactions, maybe with a morality system which affects the ending. For instance, if you ignore Mima, she decides to become the god of this new world. If you have high affinity and low morality with her, she may choose to train you as her shrine maiden. Or if you have high affinity and high morality, she will use her wish to see Marisa one last time to say good-bye.