I've been surrounded by Touhou fans who jump in once in a while talking about Touhou stuff or showing me some Touhou pictures and doujin and decided maybe I should join the fun. So, I obtained a copy of Imperishable night from my intelligence network and tried it out. It was quite a pretty game. A lot of digital artwork and effects really caught my eye. The first things I noticed were that it was full of girls drawn with a style you usually see in childrens' books. Also, the game doesn't use the mouse. The only keys available are the arrow keys and Z and X.

After you select start game, you get taken to a menu where you choose the difficulty. I decided to try out the Lunatic Level for starters, being completely oblivious to the words "Easy Level" at the beginning, I went pochitona and went into the character select screen.

Whoever it was that designed the art in this game must be some sort of an artist, or at least a really talented person in the arts. The girls in the character selection screen were all drawn in a reddish hue to complement the theme of the game. The usage of colors were just right and there aren't any really interfering "foreign" colors and that really made the character selection screens nice and relaxing.

Of course, there were Alice and Marisa and I was like, OMG IS THAT THEM!? I watched the flash video of Oh No Marisa Stole The Precious Thing. It was like... really popular with me because IOSYS really makes nice music. Though after I got their albums, I only stuck to one or two songs.

There is also a ghost! This is where I realized that you choose a girl and a monster pair. I have no idea how this is gonna affect your gameplay but I am guessing that the girl will have different skills, whereas the monster will have something special that allows you to do cool things during the game. Well, I should play to find out.

And then there's Ms. Scarlet as far as I could read. Well, she sure looked red. But then, it fitted the background so no complaints there.

I then started the game and there was a bit of talking before the action began. It's good that they kept the talking to a minimum and put most of the time in the game to well... the game. It was pretty uninteresting at first will small fries coming at me. I quickly learned to use the ghosts's cool little skill which allows me to fire in multiple directions at a time. Basically there is some sort of cloud that lags behind your previous position and it duplicates a round of shots from you in its direction, giving you the ability to fire at 2 places at once.

The bullet patterns are pretty nice and they spread out like massive fireworks. The worst thing however, is actually dodging those bullets. Soon I found myself dodging bullets more that I was trying to fight. It was incredibly difficult trying to follow the little holes that the bullets left in order to stay alive.

The minions started getting pretty strong and fired bullets in my direction. I was desperately running circles around them to avoid the bullets. I got killed several times at this stage and it started getting frustrating

After a while, I managed to clear the minions and then it just got high-level insane. I ran into what I think was the boss after a short heated conversation on good and evil and they somehow resorted to fighting and spraying bullets like they were trying to wash a car or something. There were so many bullets I didn't really care about shooting the guy. I was just concerned about how the hell you get out of the bulletmania.

I got killed several times and decided... nah I'm too sleepy tonight... maybe next time I'll get that green-haired dude.

written by astrobunny \\