[PC98] Touhou 2 ~ Story of Eastern Wonderland - Hard 1CC (Reimu B)

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Published on August 8, 2023 7:41:19 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_vKAqUj2c

Game:

Story of Eastern Wonderland (1997)

Duration: 23:14

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Hooh boy. Well, I got my original Normal 1CC for this game SEVERAL years ago, but I wasn't recording it. This time around, I do have a Hard 1CC to show for it.

The long running Touhou series has always been heavily associated with frantic bullet hell gameplay, and it was the second entry in the series, Story of Eastern Wonderland, that started that. Released at Comiket 52 in August 17, 1997 alongside the first game, it is FAR more recognisably a Touhou game than the original, which was a Breakout-like with some light shmup motifs. You play as Reimu Hakurei, back in the days where she dressed up like an actual shrine maiden and dyed her hair purple. You can choose between three shottypes, which affect your shot patterns and your speed, unusually.
Although this game is an actual shmup like the rest of the series, you'd be remiss for thinking it plays much like the rest of the series at all. SoEW is a *weird* game, shall we say. It has 5 stages, rather than 6 like the rest of them. If you also played ANY of the later games, you would see that the Focus mechanic to slow your character down so you can actually flippin' dodge any of the bullets in the videogame is conspicuous in its absence. Everything about SoEW feels just a little bit off. Truth be told, this is probably the least popular game in the series. At least HRtP not even belonging to the same genre Touhou usually does gives it some novelty points. SoEW... just feels like the later games do, but much worse. The stage design is very uninteresting and oddly sparse and uneventful, while the bosses are weird to fight and not very fun themselves. The difficulty curve is consistent in its inconsistency. I also can't really get a good grasp as to the hitbox size and movement feels oddly laboured, so dodging is an exercise in futility a lot of the time.
Hard difficulty isn't that much harder than Normal mostly because this game just feels so inconsistent it's like you can die while trying to do anything. Thankfully, resources are plentiful (even if the game caps your lives at 5, thus I took some intentional deaths to mitigate that) so you can reduce most of the late game to just shoving bombs down the bosses' mouths until it ends. Still, the late game isn't THAT free, Mima can soak up a lot of damage, so uh, if you take any lesson from this video is to not spam her as desperately as I did.

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