Touhou 東方聖戦影 ～ Forlorn Souls of Wicked Past (Demo) || Lunatic No-Bomb Clear (Marisa)

Lately, the western fangame demo dropped out of nowhere and basically went all out, steamrolling everything on the path. Even FDF III demo does not seem so shiny anymore. That's some giga chad energy here lmao.

Yep, what they said is true - it really is THAT good. One of those rare occurrences where pretty much everything is done right and works altogether.
The graphics and presentation, stages design, colors used, banger music, lots of QoL stuff baked into it... and the gameplay is damn awesome! Could count even more things I love about this demo.
Basically, it wipes out every other fangame easily, with the whole presentation and gameplay you get from this demo alone.

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The gameplay and system is pretty much a dopamine rush, a lot of stuff happens everywhere.
Not gonna lie, stages require a lot of planning and routing, but if done right they reward you lavishly.
If the bosses alone weren't dynamic and bright enough with their patterns, then we get even more - a boss fight synced with the music! To be exact, the Miko boss fight. But I think it's better to show than to explain - just see it yourself, it's so epic. Basically IKUSAAAAAAAN!, but you can shoot down the attacks instead of having a forced timeout.

But how it's done is also an interesting thing. There's a cumulative countdown across the first 2 nons and 3 spells, then another one across 4 more spells and a nonspell.
It works even better, since when timed exactly, you enter the survival spell just when the music enters the bridge section.

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The system here is lining up 5 tokens of the same color.

There is classic red, green and blue colors giving live or bomb pieces, or PoV items.
The rarer rainbow token grants all three, dropped by some enemies on stage and as a reward for capturing spellcard and timing kills on spells and nonspells. They can also match with any token color.
When collecting token, bullets around you get canceled and you gain some i-frames. Getting five of a kind gives a bigger cancel and 2 full seconds of i-frames.
Comes in handy when you want to chain multiple tokens together - Stage 3 shows it very nicely.
Getting a certain amount of token line-ups in a stage unlocks a Last Spell.

On boss fights, you can get a "Nicely Timed!" bonus, which you can get on nons and spells.
It grants an extra rainbow token when acquired. On spells it also doubles the spell capture bonus.
The mechanism is actually really simple - just kill the boss when it is "charging". Basically, when effect circle appears and collapses, and characteristic sound effect plays.

Many enemies shoot revenge bullets on death, which can be mitigated by pointblanking.
The pointblanking is also good on medium and big enemies having a colored aura, as they drop the additional piece on death when killed in close range - of course, piece depending on the color.

The base strategy here is to chain the tokens into five of a kind as much as possible.
Do not be afraid of pointblanking - it is actually very helpful in this game.
Kill the bosses' attacks within "Nicely Timed!" window for most tokens, as explained above.
Some strats you can see in this video. Many other No Bomb runs also contain useful routes, so check them out.

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Not gonna lie, it is an awesome fangame, one-of-a-kind I'd say with all the stuff packed into it. Much I've explained in the beginning, so not gonna repeat that here.

I must say it, the Lunatic difficulty here is just BRUTAL. For real. A lot of routing and a lot of attempts to make a reasonable clear.
And that's just first three stages, we're just halfway there lmao. With a 45 minutes gameplay in the full release, it will be a real challenge.
But it is so rewarding to learn it, once you overcome all the obstacles after many, many practice sessions. Feels like playing arcade games once again - a lot of practicing, for that one incredible run.
I've heard that the current Lunatic gonna be rebranded, and we will get a more adjusted difficulty in its place. Well, this one might be an "Overdrive" difficulty then.

And yeah, Marisa here is not well balanced...
While Reimu has smaller hitbox with weaker shot, Marisa has... not much better shot, proving not so effective in a Miko bossfight. Ichrin is currently the most tricky one, but with her focused speed she's kinda unusable.

Also, guess this one is made in Danmakufu. This is just marvelous, I didn't notice it until much later into the game lmao

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:26 - Stage 1 - Flood Strikes Hakurei Shrine
07:50 - Stage 2 - Brilliant Sun Shines on Senkai
14:01 - Stage 3 - Rupture of the Mausoleum
22:25 - Credits

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FSoWP is available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/31...

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Enjoy! And I hope you'll stay for longer!