#[ it's okay mokou thinks she's super cool-- ]

[doedipus]

top five 2hu

I actually already have a list of 2hus here, but here’s some more that I think are fun/interesting/look cool

1. komachi onozuka

she shows up a lot in a few of the touhou manga series and spinoff games, but she mostly sticks out to me because of “the shinigami’s rowing the boat as usual,” a doujin published through ZUN’s touhou magazine. it’s this very discworld-esque story about komachi grappling with the power she has over people due to her job collecting the souls of the dead, and whether it’s okay for her to play favorites or otherwise let her own personality influence her work. it’s super good and there’s some scenes that are total tearjerkers, I love it

anyway that’s the one I want to shove in everyone’s face rn, I’m gonna read more the rest of these since it’s gonna be long with a lot of images

read the shinigami’s rowing her boat as usual

2. kutaka niwatari

idk much of anything about her, but I love her design so much. the long flowing tail feathers. the neckerchief. the tuft of hair that’s supposed to be like a rooster comb. the tiny chick peeking out. god I love everything about her design it’s so good

3. fujiwara no mokou

another one that I like mostly based on her outfit. she’s about the closest there is to a butch touhou, so she stands out a lot, and I like her pants. very stylish. one of these days I’m going to attempt the imperishable night extra stage and actually fight her, but I am not very confident in my touhouing ability

4. aya shameimaru

she’s perpetually Up To Something and every time she shows up she ends up hatching some elaborate scheme to gain more influence over the human village and usually mess with mamizou specifically. she’s also one of the many bad influences on kosuzu in forbidden scrollery, which itself would be enough to make me like her a lot

5. clownpiece

everything about this character is an enigma

what the hell is that name

why is she dressed like an american flag

where is her right thumb

so many questions that will never be answered

#competitive ranked lists

[crystalelemental]

I’m gonna post about my separate AoCF thoughts here.

It’s a lot of fun!  I think the partner system is cool, but I do think there’s a bit of an opportunity cost there, as some characters are never the direct lead.  That’s generally not a huge problem, but...Doremy is one of them.  You have to swap in to play as Doremy.  Which means I didn’t really play as Doremy very much, which is sad.  I’m also gonna admit to being a little sad at the lack of victory animations.  Those increased the overall smug level of the previous games by like 80%, so it’s a little sad to be lacking them.

But let’s not pretend I know shit about gameplay mechanics.  I’m here for characters and story.  Story is...actually really interesting.  The Urban Legend incident is ongoing, and the antagonists, Jo’on and Shion, have spread a rumor around about Perfect Possession that allows people to do this partner system.  Basically, one person is the “master,” who is the main player, while the other is the “slave.”  Word choice, game.  But the subordinate can possess the master and take over in every way, including physically.  There are two conditions that are expressed in this.  One is that a master can select the subordinate willingly by consenting to the pairing.  The alternative is that the subordinate can possess another person if they drop their mental guard.  These two conditions set up the sisters’ plan to swap out Shion, a poverty god who guarantees an absolute loss, as the subordinate of the opponent, and makes your subordinate work for Jo’on, who throws them out to fight instead.  This way, any opponent pair beats the shit out of each other and they’re unscathed.  It’s a really clever plan!  Apparently so clever that Yukari can’t beat them and considers this a big enough deal to actually get involved.

The entire story seems to be about just beating them, but there are a lot of chapters that seem to have...nothing at all to do with them.  Instead, we focus on the Dream World.  Apparently, the Dream World is in chaos because the Perfect Possession switch can release the dream selves into the real world, where they go berserk because they’re a lot less inhibited and go berserk.  Doremy expresses that this seems to be a kind of catharsis, where they release this pent up irritation and eventually settle.  Doremy even yells at Yukari about how things are getting messed up and how she’s supposed to be fixing the problem and not be impacting the Dream World.  I love that Doremy can do that.

Ultimately, they don’t intersect much.  It’s kinda like two stories running simultaneously, side by side, but not really intersecting.  The dream world stuff ultimately has nothing to do with the whole “beat the sisters” thing Yukari’s got going.  The only real tie-in is that the Yorigami sisters’ penance is to catch all the dream selves and return them to the Dream World.  There’s also a big thing about Sumireko, her dream self, and the doppelganger that’s her urban legend all fighting each other.  That was fun, and probably setting up for 16.5 when it comes out.

Which leads into characters.  Jo’on and Shion aren’t that interesting to me.  Nowhere near like Kokoro or Sumireko for me.  Shion seems okay, but ultimately, I feel like her popularity is coming from being cute, mistreated, and generally a sad-sack.  You know, like Koishi and Flandre.  Their popularity comes from that sad history and being mistreated and cute.  She’s not a bad character, but her archetype has been done elsewhere and more interesting for me.

Jo’on, by comparison, almost got to be really interesting.  She’d be a lot more popular in my book if she’d actually stuck with her change.  See, Jo’on is a plague god, whose deal is she takes over people and scams them out of money, then uses that wildly to buy herself a bunch of nice things.  She’s got nothing save up, but is highly materialistic in that sense.  When she and Shion lose, Jo’on is sent to train with Byakuren at the temple to turn around this lifestyle (Shion lives with Reimu, because no one else would take her in, which was super cute).  But in their actual route, Jo’on starts to talk about how the material possessions didn’t make her happy.  See, the sisters, as plague and poverty gods, are pretty universally disliked and never got to know happiness.  So Jo’on, having discovered that those possessions weren’t doing it, starts to wonder if maybe Byakuren’s right.  By the end, she’s rejected the offer from Dream!Kasen to go back to that lifestyle and refuse to aid Yukari, and even tells Yukari flat-out that she’s going to go back to the temple and continue her training.  Which is really cool!  Shame that the ending explains that she gets tired of the minimalist lifestyle, and runs off back to her old ways regardless.  Oh, but she’s changed a bit in that she only steals from those who can afford to lose a little.  Which...almost counts for something?  Really, it feels like a negation of potentially really great development for a character.  She could’ve been the Kokoro...

Shion doesn’t really get that and just teams up with Tenshi to take over the world.  Which, as we see in WaHH, does not happen, but they are super cute.  Which is why I kinda like Shion a bit better.

Doremy is fantastic in this game.  She’s surprisingly polite for a Touhou, and is pretty high on the mom-scale.  She babysits the dream world selves, and is pretty indulgent with Reisen’s dream self.  It’s kinda really cute?  But at the same time, as protective as she is of the dream selves, she’s pretty intense with Yukari about resolving the incident in Gensokyo that’s messing with her turf.  Also, holy shit her portrait is adorable.  She’s so cute, it’s unbelievable.

Miko pretty much does what she always does.  She’s all about research into the mechanics of what’s going on.  Which, given that and her team-up with Byakuren and their respective subordinates, gets hilarious.  Byakuren actually stands out more for me this time.  It’s hard to exactly pinpoint why, but I feel like she just got some better moments overall?  Her placing faith in Yukari and then finding out almost immediately that Yukari withheld critical information and almost certainly knew they’d lose was an interesting view into her character.  Her dream self was also way more relatable than Miko’s.  Miko just...kinda shows that she’s a bit of a prick toward others that she looks down on.  Byakuren just confirms that the training of her disciples is just to make her life easier, which is hilarious.  Futo and Ichirin are a ton of fun.  Their usual banter gets way more intense when they’re teamed up, and their ending is them thinking they’ve surpassed their masters as a duo.  Miko’s surprisingly cool with that, almost proud in a way.  Which I didn’t expect, but it’s nice.  Honestly, Miko’s public face is great, it’s just the introspective to her thoughts that shows she’s got some problems.

Reisen continues to be underwhelming as a playable character.  Really, her dream self is an interesting introspective, but that’s about it.

Kokoro gets a fun thing where she’s analyzing emotions that tie people together as partners, ultimately to be used as part of Nitori’s latest invention.  Mostly I just love this because Kokoro’s getting better about reading emotions.

Koishi’s got fun banter and, once again, accidentally bumblefucks her way to being first to the plot.  Marisa helped.

Sumireko gets her interesting conflict between herself, her dream self, and her doppelganger, with a weird philosophical stance of who’s the real one and whether it matters.

Sukuna continues to be the least interesting character in these games.  She doesn’t really do anything too interesting, aside from partnering with Tenshi.

Tenshi is a fun character always.  Her nonsense is eternal, and she does explain why she got kicked out of heaven.  That said, a lot of her interactions with Sukuna do not carry the same level of engagement as her interactions in the manga.  Personally, I blame Sukuna.

Mokou and Mamizou is a partnership I never would’ve expected, but it’s great.  They’re just aiming to be the strongest, and when they lose to the sisters, they’re amazed at their strategy and are hyped to work to overcome it.  I really liked that.  It’s unusual for Mamizou to not be more in the know than she is, but it worked out well here, and being early in the game, sets up the Yorigami sisters as a bigger threat.

Which I guess...leads us to Yukari.  Yukari can be fun, but as far as the role of “Boss before the final boss that knows what’s going on” goes, she’s not as engaging as Mamizou.  I think a lot of it comes from how she approaches it.  She gets all her information from others, which irritates me even more because I just read CiLR, where her chapter focused on trying to get Ran to answer questions under her own power rather than giving computed answers.  For being focused on finding your own answers, you sure did rely on others to tell you all the fine details of this incident.  Hell, it even feels like she set them up to fail just so she could learn things, going so far as to withhold information from Miko and Byakuren to let them lose and see what happened.  It’s fine, but not as much fun or as well explained.

Nothing that changed my perspectives all that much.  Really, it’s a good collection of new interactions, but I’m not as engaged with Yukari’s performance this time around, and Jo’on losing character development really bothers me more than it probably should.  Still fun, always great to see new interactions, but ultimately not my favorite.

#touhou #antinomy of common flowers