Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is worthless garbage and I can’t stop playing it.
Let’s start this off by mentioning that I don’t know a god damn thing about Touhou. I guess it’s a series of games, many of which are fan-made, about little anime girls? That is all I know. I saw this particular game on the playstation store and the main art was pretty and the screenshots made it look like some kind of light action-platformer. I was just intrigued enough to pick it up one day when it was on sale.
The moment you start it up you’re given a scene of two girls chatting away about being bored and wanting to fight stuff. One of them is Sakuya, a maid, and the other is Remilia, a preteen vampire in a bonnet. We’re given a choice of which one we’d like to play as, and I chose Remilia. I chose wrong.
The moment I hit the attack button for the first time I knew exactly what kind of experience was in store for me. Remilia’s fighting style of choice is a vague swiping motion. She uses her nails as a weapon, but her nails aren’t particularly long so it all just looks like she’s pawing and slapping her way in helpless darkness. Further enforcing this wild, aimless swiping is the fact that there’s no lock on feature of any kind. Enemies are fairly sparse and not really grouped together, creating an affair reminding me of the first Drakengard game on PS2, where you run from one small gang of enemies to another, rehashing the same tired combo. If the enemies were at least more densely packed (ala Dynasty Warriors) the fights would feel more satisfying, if still shallow, as you’d hypothetically mow down hoards of foes.
The majority of the creatures encountered are little fairy girls comparatively not much smaller than yourself, which is an odd choice for a monster, seeing as how adorable they are, particularly later on when some of them wield lances and knives for some reason. Also included in the enemy mix are dogs, birds… frogs?! And mushrooms. Terrifying.
You’re given about a dozen skills to use and allocate to three buttons. The game immediately hands over all the skills to you within the first couple of levels. I quickly found my favorites (some musou-style radial hoard control stuff) and used them exclusively. After playing for a few days I still am not sure where my skill meter is. There are some shapes and gauges that fill and deplete but I can’t find any meaningful connection with them and my skill use or anything else.
Remilia herself is an awful excuse for a character design. She’s comically short, and exclusively colored with an over saturated pink, save for some purple bat wings. And of course her frumpy little bonnet is featured prominently. Is she a vampire? A bat? A little girl playing dress up? We don’t know. And there are no costume changes, or even visible weapon or armor swaps to speak of.
Items generously explode from every single monster, but usually I don’t know what they are, except when the game tells you that a weapon or accessory has been acquired, which is very, very often. Weapons of no real value or use are doled out like candy, fated to be sold to an item shop you eventually gain access to, but offers almost nothing to purchase in return. Interestingly the shop is the the most graphically impressive part of the game, colorful, cluttered, and filled with random things.
The whole thing is strangely unbalanced and half-baked.
But it’s easy and breezy and just keeps going, without any real walls to your progress, like a slip n slide. Once you finish one character, you can start the whole thing over with the other, if you wish. But the levels are exactly the same, and there are no unlockables.
At the end of every level you go against another little girl who has some hackneyed reason to fight you. I get the feeling these characters are all beloved by fans somewhere.
Of final note is the last level, an immense library set perfectly on a grid pattern, with a seemingly endless amount of floors. It goes on forever and ever and I don’t remember what happens at the end. But I did it. I played the whole thing and I regret nothing. It’s the video game equivalent to a sleepy drive down a country road, or waiting in line at Starbucks, or vacuuming your entire house. It’s not aggressively irritating or shoddy. It just is.
