[PC98] Touhou 1 ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers - Normal 1CC

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FamilyTeamGaming

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Published on September 11, 2022 4:52:43 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KTbTjANpZo

Game:

Highly Responsive to Prayers (1996)

Duration: 17:35

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1

(Special Thanks for mu021 and his chat for the help, congrats on the LNN)
It's been a hot minute and a half since I last uploaded Touhou to this channel, yet I decide to kick back into the scene with THIS, which can only be considered Touhou by the most generous of standards.

Touhou 1 ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers was developed throughout 1995 by Jun'ya Oota "ZUN" of Team Shanghai Alice and first shown (and copyrighted) in 1996, yet all sources point to it being released alongside its sequel, Touhou 2 ~ Story of Eastern Wonderland, in August 15th, 1997. So, despite the amusing thought experiment that the Touhou series spent its time in diapers as a crappy Breakout clone instead of the vertical bullet hell shmup we all associate it with now, that seemingly never happened.

Honestly, this seems poorly documented, but you can blame nobody for that. You can't tell me you would've looked at this back in '97 and told me you'd expect it to become "historically significant", kickstarting what is arguably the biggest indie series of all time and a backbone of internet pop-culture to this day. Touhou nowadays is renown for its amazing music, enormous cast of memorable characters, frantic bullet hell gameplay and incredibly dedicated fanbase which produces fanart, fangames, fanmade music albums and even entire fanmade anime series at a nonstop machinegun pace, influencing many other indie games to follow in its path, most famously of all Toby Fox's Undertale. And it all started with this one unassuming piece of, quite frankly, shovelware?

I apologise to the niche fanbase of people that actually grew to appreciate Touhou 1 over the last couple of years, but I can't deny I kind of don't get it, heh. It's not like this game is meritless, but it absolutely feels like nobody would care about it if it weren't incidentally part of a series that would much later on be the stuff of legends.

I can take a shot at defending this game, though. I think "crappy Breakout clone" as I joked about previously is somewhat ignorant, despite that being the sole impression a lot of people in the community have of the game before playing it. It IS superficially similar to Breakout in that you have a ball, something to bat it at and something on the lower part of the screen to bat it with, but that's about where the similarities end. The ball here actually has physics, pretty nice ones too for an indie game in such an outdated platform. You actually have to manually bat the ball as well, either by throwing amulets at it, kicking it with your awesome sommersault-kicking skills or slapping it with your Gohei stick, for instead of just some lifeless paddle, you control a little Shrine Maiden: Reimu Hakurei! (not that you'd know that without reading the manual though. She's looking pretty different here than what you'd come to expect from her, too).

I do believe the main problem with this game is a simple question: Why this gameplay? And why this execution of it too? Why did ZUN decide to mix elements of bullet hell with a pseudo-Breakout format? This game feels like it REALLY wants to be a shmup, but it just isn't and it does no favours to either half of the conjoined twins forms the gameplay. Since this style was never revisited and that the game only came out with its sequel that, while still very different than modern Touhou games, at least belongs to the same genre as them, it makes me wonder why didn't he just make the shmup he probably wanted to make from the get go. While it's extremely unique game, just like ZUN's art, it's unique because it's bad and nobody wants their work to look like that.

This game DID at least lay down the foundation for the rest of the series in a few ways. The music is extremely memorable in typical Touhou fashion, even if understandably a little undercooked compared to later games. The all-female cast the series is known for is already here and you've got some interesting designs in this roster, mostly notably this game is obviously the debut of Reimu, but also Mima, a character who would go on to become the closest thing to a tritagonist the PC98 canon ever got, before hilariously getting shelved never to be seen again. And of course, this game is still a bullet hell in a very broad sense... The bosses are grandiose and fire very interesting, dense patterns of bullets at you that you have to read and creatively dodge. Not being able to move vertically is a definite pain I feel.

If you're browsing through the PC98 catalogue, you really should add all of the Touhou games to your library. While not be the best the series has to offer, in the West this series is virtually all the platform is known for. If you're a Touhou fan, I'd recommend this if you're feeling adventurous and want to better understand this series' history. I do not think I'd recommend this as a traditionally "fun" game to play though. Even if you're on a quest to 1CC the entirety of the series, few would blame you for skipping this one.

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