[Nokia] Touhou 東方神魔談 ~ The Ancient Square - Hard Mode 1CC (No-Miss)
1,674Also known as Touhou Shinmadan, The Ancient Square is a freeware i-mode Touhou fangame that was preserved last December.
Originally a homebrew that came out in 2010 on one of those old Nokia flipphones. Made to push the hardware to its absolute limits and it's crazy what they did with this.
It has 6 stages, an extra stage, multiple characters, a different stage 4 boss based on shottype, practice modes, the works. Kinda insane.
The music is also quite good, and made by the same guy that did the music for Touhou Fanmade Virtual Autography.
Hard mode is the hardest difficulty in the game.
As far as I know there is no Lunatic or Easy.
Though I imagine Hard is already hard enough on real hardware.
The balance is a little weird, most things aren't that bad, but then you have some attacks that are like borderline impossible lol.
To make this actually playable on a phone, some changes were made to the mechanics.
Shot and focus is now a toggle and there is a weak autobomb.
System is basically Touhou 11, beating a pattern without dying gives you a life piece, collect 5 for an extra life. Bombs are power-based as well, each one consumes 1 power level.
No particularly unique scoring mechanics in this except that power items at max power raise the PIV. For the rest it's the standard score items, graze and spellcard bonuses. The PIV is in the bottom-right corner of the screen for some reason.
This game has the wildest power loss I've seen in a Touhou game.
Difference between power levels is huge and there are barely any power items in the game. Like the entirely of stage 4 only gives 1 power level back. Bosses only drop 15 power per spellcard too it's crazy.
It doesn't help that this uses the Touhou 10 and 11 bomb system either.
Final boss is easily the hardest part of the game.
The patterns are legitimately hard and the boss drops so little power that you can't even get a single power level back. Second spell is a planned bomb as well, so each hit hurts your power output significantly and makes it easily turn into a downwards spiral.
Since emulation for this platform is not exactly popular, the emulator is kinda jank.
You can only play this in a tiny window, so I had to use a custom Lossless Scaling profile to make it fullscreen.
Also not sure if it's the emulation, but there is a slight freeze every time a sound effect overlaps with another, and this has a high chance of also messing up the music. Pausing and unpausing fixes the music, but you can imagine that this makes playing and recording kinda annoying.
The solution I came up with was playing with only the music and manually adding in every single sound effect in post.
Luckily the game doesn't have that many sound effects...
I probably missed a popcorn explosion here or there but hey, let's make this a viewer challenge!
See if you can spot any sound effects I missed and tell me in the comments below!
Game page:
https://womohide.turubeotoshi.com/SHI...
Download the game here:
https://mega.nz/folder/RnlVDYDS#sHrSe... (tohoSINMA)
In the download there are two more Java Touhou games but these are very much not of the scale of this game.
Emulator setup guide:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i...
00:00 - Intro
00:22 - Stage 1
03:06 - Stage 2
06:06 - Stage 3
09:23 - Stage 4
13:25 - Stage 5
18:27 - Stage 6
26:09 - Ending & Credits -
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