So I Tried Touhou for the First Time... (i have never played a bullet hell)

After years and years of playing hard games, I finally decided to put on my big boy pants and pick up one of the most well known bullet hells out there.
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Back with another video essay review type beat. So glad to be doing these again and making this was a blast yet again. Spent 2 whole days editing this so I really hope you all enjoy this one!
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00:00 Intro
01:07 Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
05:42 Perfect Cherry Blossom
10:02 Imperishable Night
13:58 Phantasmagoria of Flower View
16:44 Final Thoughts
18:02 Outro
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Second Channel:

Touhou Replays

*All gameplay shown here is mine unless stated otherwise
*All sound effects and songs used belong to their respective owners.
Thumbnail Art by me :)

=Contact Me!=
Discord: sleeplessnights
Tag: 5400

#sleeplessnights #touhou #review

Thanks for Watching!

[lord_cirno]

It's pretty interesting seeing the perspective of a new 2hu player. Especially when you say a pattern is "impossible" when it's "pretty easy" to "not that bad" and I can guarantee that you'll be able to think the same thing given enough practice.

[rianthreeden]

"stage 4 of PCB was nothing but pain and suffering" yeahhhh stage 4 is infamous for that lol but if your in the right possisions it can be delt with easily

[Cyril]

PC-98 isn't the same thing as Windows 98.
The first 5 Touhou games were released on a japanese home computer called a PC-98.
It's pretty easy to emulate nowadays.

Nice to see more people posting videos of their first experiences with Touhou, though.

[gtnova]

What I believe some people don't realize when first playing touhou is that the playable character you choose can affect bosses. Like in 8, choosing Reimu will have Marisa as a boss, and vice versa; in 6, Patchouli's spell cards change depending on who you choose

[TaniaAnehina]

12:54 Reisen doesn't control time, Sakuya does. What Reisen does is that she creates illusions and changes your perception of bullets. She has a passive ability that when anybody looks into her eyes they go mad instantly (kinda like clownpiece's torch from LoLK)

Btw in IN you missed a route, after beating Eirin without continues you can do the game again and fight another last boss, which is the true last one

PoFV's IA is indeed scripted and a bit cheating, Shiki Eiki won't take damage unless you survive one or two minutes

[Necrikus]

"...Final boss, Eirin."
Uh... about that...

Still, it's always nice to see more people try out this series. If you were looking for good bullet hell games, you definitely picked the right place to look.

[dreadsoul]

That is when he realize that the community deems you have conquered a game after you 1cc it. I was going insane knowing that information on my first time around but things have changed and I like to do 1cc now.

[treemu]

Couple things about Yuyuko (PCB's final boss).

The pattern you deemed impossible to clear without bombs is there to train you to direct enemy attacks in a way that allows you "safe" damage time. In essence, you move to an edge or a corner of the screen, wait until the homing part of the pattern reaches you, then move away and use these precious seconds to do damage to the boss. This is an essential tactic against homing attacks where you can't survive by simply doing small dodges under the boss.

Second is that technically Yuyuko does not revive herself for the final attack. I mean, kinda, but it's not the Yuyuko you fought up until now. In short, throughout the game Yuyuko has been gathering spring essence (those pink pickups) to resurrect a giant tree so she could free the soul of someone sealed within. To do this the tree needs to bloom fully and the protagonist has the required amount. In the end Yuyuko is defeated, leaving only the almost blooming tree which is enough to weaken the seal to the point that the sealed soul is temporarily freed. This soul is the real Yuyuko. Unbeknownst to the Yuyuko you fought until now, it was her soul that was bound in the tree. The soul is incorporeal and undamageable and manages to expel enough spring essence to cause the tree to go back to hibernation.
The reason the soul did this was that Yuyuko herself gave her life to seal the tree when she was alive. The tree is kind of a demon tree that causes death when in full bloom so Yuyuko's soul's first action was to make sure the tree would stay dormant.

It's kind of convoluted but the Yuyuko you fought anc continues to appear in the series is really the ghost of the original Yuyuko who gave her life to seal the tree.

[technicolormischief-maker]

I think a big part of what makes bullet hells “hard” for most players is just that most players don’t actually have any experience with the genre. Mario would be hard for you too if you waited until your teens or adult years to play platformers for the first time!

[LushieTilde]

Welcome to Touhou!

For the record you don't really have to pay a lot of attention to time in IN. I straight up didn't know the time mechanic was a thing when I first played IN and I still beat it. It only comes into play if you are using all 5 continues or for something else in the game you probably haven't seen yet so I'll leave it a secret. Side note but I really recommend you try 1ccing IN (beating without using a continue), it's the easiest game of the 4 to do and it was my first 1cc too!

[ccfrt]

Pretty cool, it's nice to see a new player's perspective in 2022. This has some pretty good editing aswell.

[feodaron]

Ah, the poor innocent child who plays on normal difficulty and has never seen the extra level bosses. This review made me smile very hard. In any case, welcome, I'm glad that you liked these games.

[marx]

quite nice video, though there's one particular mistake:
NEC PC-98 doesn't mean Windows 98 (though it can be installed there)
it can be emulated quite easily actually, far less resource-consuming than a Windows 2000 VM
also, Touhou games are usually easier when memorized and learned - here's the list of reasons why memorizing and figuring out things works better than pure dodging (though pure dodging is fun):
-Patchouli uses different spellcards depending on which shottype you have. you had the worst shottype and the worst spellcards. (homing Reimu is barely ever good)
-the laser attack is easy if you know what to do - misdirect bullets into a direction away from where the lasers will appear, and repeat that over and over. i haven't played EoSD in a while, but i think that's how you do it.
-Sakuya's misdirection is a trick as the name hints, you actually barely have to move to survive it - just tap slightly to juuust dodge all that and return to the middle once Sakuya is about to shoot out another barrage.
-Sakuya herself is one of the easier Stage 5 bosses on Normal and Hard - she doesn't have much spellcards nor health, her nonspells are pretty easy and the spellcards aside from the last one don't really serve much purpose. she DOES overwhelm a new player with every spellcard she does, but just like Reisen, once you know what to do, it should be easier to pull off than say, Youmu.
-if you set lives higher in the settings of EoSD, bad news, that's a trick - while it does actually sort of help new players in the later three games, in EoSD that means your score is pretty much screwed, which, therefore, means that you will get less lives than someone with the default life counter.
-PCB is the least complex to a new player, but i'd argue it's the actual hardest of the early Windows. EoSD becomes easy once you realize a lot of the tricks, and IN is not that hard aside from Eirin's optional final spell (aGH), but PCB may have an easy final battle, but it still has Youmu, who, unlike Sakuya or Reisen, doesn't simply fall to tricks and requires dodging, a lot of it, and yes, Stage 4.
-also, you get to choose which Prismriver you battle in Stage 4 - first, it depends on choice of player character, then it depends on who you focus on defeating during their first concert spellcard.
whoever told you they're the easiest Stage 4 boss is wrong, unless they're talking about particularly skilled play, in which case i can't tell you because i don't know which are easier to beat on such level, but on just a casual run or on 1cc's, they are a pain both on Normal and Hard compared to some others
-PCB Sakuya is also pretty much the best character to play as when you're a new player, so there's that.
-staying in Youkai form in IN most of the time is actually easier. also, the time mechanic barely even matters if you do a 1cc, speaking of, you need to do that to get to and beat Kagu- huh. no Kaguya? alright then.
-PoFV is based off PoDD, an older Touhou game, and is mostly a similar game to Twinkle Star Sprites, but PoFV deviates from it far more, and i like that.
-also, each boss in PoFV eventually dies no matter what - to kill the final boss, you have to either get lucky or just survive for 5 minutes, since around after that mark, the boss will start doing dumb mistakes and eventually die, which you seemed to realize.
-it's better to keep a Gauge 4 always, since it deactivates the boss appearence on your half of the screen and activates one on the other. unless you're in a particularly tough situation, it's better to always have it prepared.
-ehh, i wouldn't really agree. i'd say EoSD is the worst, since aside from the EXTRA, it really doesn't have much going for it, especially since it's pretty much an inferior version of LLS+MS.
also, you can also go forward in terms of Touhou games - but remember, whereas the PC-98 ones are actually mostly easier on Normal (and harder on EXTRA), Touhou games starting with MoF only get harder, as you can no longer set lives higher (it's better to do a run of at least one game before that without the extra lives set higher in options, since getting used to it by playing a new game is way harder), and SA is most likely a game you will NOT like if you don't like memorization, as that is pretty much the key to even surviving that game. then comes UFO, which is even harder. TD is easy, even if stingy on resources, DDC is easy but only if you know which character to pick, LoLK is pretty mad and everything after that ranges in difficulty wildly, but unless you cheese it with dozens of cards, UM (18) is also one of the harder ones. good luck if you do play any of those in the future

[HyperVanilo]

Jun'ya Ōta, the creator of Touhou Project, must beat his own bullet patterns without losing a life or use a bomb with controller (I don't know if he is still using controller or not), that is nuts.

As nuts as GeoDash level creator with their demon level.

[MegaTronen]

12:23 Well, it isn’t a new feature, you can death bomb in every touhou game (except for the pc-98), the only difference in Touhou 8 is that the window is a lot bigger during spell cards and it cost 2 bombs instead of 1. Also while speaking about touhou 8, there are 2 final bosses. After beating the game 1 time so can you replay the game again with the same character. And after getting to the end of stage 5 so do you get an option to go path B which means that you will fight Kaguya instead of Erin, this is also necessary if you want to play the extra stage. You can also unlock the extra stages in the other games that you have played if you beat it without using any continuous if you didn’t know that. The difficulty in the extra stages is higher than the normal game (lunatic mode is still harder) so I would recommend getting a bit more familiar with the bullet hell games before trying it.

Nice video

[MrNoobomnenie]

Good video! Was very interesting to listen about your experience. Hope, you will make part 2 about 10-18 games

[JanxZ]

Unsurprisingly, this literally describes my first experiences with Touhou, but DAMN when I saw this video in my recommended I thought this was gonna have at least 1k views, You seem to be a very underrated channel considering the production value of this video and absolutely deserve more than 79 subscribers. I definitely look forward to watching your future videos in this style!
この動画の質は抜群ですよ！




(By the way, you don't need a windows 98 pc but a Japanese PC-98*00* which you can get an emulator of really easily ;P [perhaps future video continuation?])

[MochiyaRandom]

"Stage 4 of PCB was nothing but pain and suffering"

Meanwhile, another pro-touhou gamer: "Oh this is just the beginning."

[SuppahTenko]

This poor lad when he discovers that it only truly counts as beating the game when you use no continues. It's 1CC or bust.

[somefries]

7:27 Patchouli pretty much varies her spellcards based on which shottype and character you chose, she's hard because when you play at hard mode or lunatic mode, her true power gets unleashed, the clock lasers rotate faster and the bullets block your path without mercy, there's a spellcard where she blocks the sides of your character with lasers and shoots core bullets(big bullets with the hitbox on the transparent part) at you and another one where she randomly spreads bullets while a cascade of bullets fall from the left side of the screen. However, the prismriver sisters depends on which sister you've damaged the most, but they're not really that hard, i successfully beat them in lunatic mode and they weren't that hard as Patchouli, that's because unlike Patchouli, the sisters have patterns that are easier to understand or avoid, since the bullets are slower but invade the screen, however you learn how to avoid them since there's always a safe exit somewhere in the danmaku.