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I was digging through some old boxes and found a CD that was full of unreleased ROMs, I never knew Touhou was planned to release on the original Nintendo! Conveniently, this week also happens to be the 10th anniversary of Drillimation Systems, the company that developed these games.

These games follow the golden standard when it comes to remakes, they take everything that made the original PC-98 games so good and improves on them immaculately. The graphics are so ahead of its time that I'm not even sure how this game is able to run on an NES, it almost feels like a PC game with how the game visually looks so NES inaccurate compared to "kusoge" on the system like Mario or Zelda. I also really like how these games improve on the old danmaku by stripping away anything that made them unique, "expertly" reprogramming said patterns so they only shoot in a straight line at 12 frames per mile, there's beauty in simplicity after all.

These games are really hard... and I mean really REALLY hard. Even the developer noticed this, so he added a new game type called "Chuhou Mode" where you can take multiple hits per life (I learned about this mode in the Nintendo Power magazine), but I decided to stick with the Normal game type where you die in one hit because I'm just that cool and awesome. The bullet hitboxes are as big as the developer's ego in these games, even extending beyond the actual sprites, good hitboxes in Touhou weren't invented yet back then.

In the Touhou 3 remaster, I really like how Kagami is unlocked from the start, it was a real pain to unlock her in the PC-98 version (her appearance was a popular playground myth back in the day, but I can confirm that she was real). I'm also quite shocked to see that Mr. Toby Fox stole Sariel's design in the Touhou 1 port here for Asriel (I think that's their name, I've never played Undertale), shame on you. Speaking of Touhou 1, thankfully, they renamed "H*ll" to Nether in this remaster, no profanity allowed in my 2hu games!

There are a fuck ton of glitc- I mean "devious traps" in these games that really add a good sense of difficulty and makes you always stay on your toes. One of my favorite bugs is this one where you sometimes get stuck in place and can't move after using the gohei attack in the Touhou 1 remake (this happens in Nether stage 18 in this video), it really makes you cautious of spamming this attack which is a really well designed challenge. During the Touhou 4 Yuuka stage 5 fight in this video, I ended up getting unalived by literally nothing on her Master Spark spellcard, I think this updated attack is justified since the original Master spark was too easy and also getting killed by air is always fun, especially if there's no telegraphing at all.

All in all, I give these games a 7.8/10, not enough EoSD characters.

HRtP LNB (Aether) 0:00:00
HRtP LNB (Nether) 0:15:50
SoEW LNB (ReimuB) 0:31:46
SoEW LXNB (ReimuC) 0:50:22
PoDD NMNB (Kagami) 0:55:21
LLS LNB (MarisaB) 1:16:59
LLS LXNB (ReimuB) 1:35:17
MS LNB (Yuuka Dark) 1:39:14
MS LXNB (Mima) 1:59:37
yameseal 2:05:11

Downloads: https://drillimation.com/touhou-proje...