You know you're a Touhou fan when you use a quote from a Flash vid that features Yukari and Reimu in a manzai routine for the title of your blog entry.
I suck at Touhou games, it's a fact. All the games I downloaded? I baleeted them. Too hard. And like I said, not a big fan of Shmups. Still, I got music. By the way, I also have the MIDIs from the first three Touhou games for Windows that had them. It's all good. Then I discovered a Touhou game that, while not by ZUN, is still enjoyable.
Megamari.
If you don't know, Megamari is basically Megaman 1 and 2, but with Touhou characters. The plot is absurd, and the twist is your characters are the bad guys! (bad girls?) All Patchy wants is to protect her books! Why must Marisa and Alice fight everyone for them? Whatever. It's a Touhou game, the story isn't what's important.
The game plays like Megaman 2 more than anything else. You can change between Marisa and Alice on the pause menu, kind of like how you can change between X, Zero, and Axl in Megaman X8. The bosses are all characters Touhou fans will recognize, and recognizable characters also show up as baddies in the stages. The graphics are pretty good. It's about the quality of a latter SNES-era title. The music is great. It's all original, although it doesn't sound like Touhou music. It sounds more like . . . Megaman music, but it's great though.
There's just one problem with Megamari:
IT'S FUCKING HAAAAAAAAAARD!!!!!
Yeah, they kep two traditions alive; the difficulty of MM2, and the difficulty of Touhou games. But my god, the actual MM2 wasn't this hard. I was able to beat MM2 back in the day, on an actual NES no less. Megamari isn't quite as hard as MM1, but that's because it's not as imbalanced as MM1 was. (Oh, FYI, I can't beat MM1 without save states. You try completing Iceman's stage without save states. Go on, I'll wait.) Oh man, the Angry Video Nerd would have a field day with Megamari's difficulty. I have completed Sakuya's stage and Reisen's stage, but every other stage kills me. Reimu's stage isn't too hard, but Reimu herself is lethal. And Yuyuko cheats, I swear. Oh, and don't get sucked into the gaps, if you want to preserve your sanity.
Oh, also, there is no save feature. You have to use a password, just like in the day. I know this is tradition, but come on; I haven't use a password in a commercial video game since 1998. (MDK for the PS1 is the last game I ever played that used a passcode of any kind. And even then, I think saving on the memory card was an option.) It's an inconvenience, yes, but you'll just have to live with it.
So why then haven't I given up on Megamari yet? Simple. You see, I'm actually good at 2D platformers. I suck at Shumps, but 2D platformers? I can handle that. Megamari is not impossible, it just requires a lot of practice.
And besides, who doesn't want to pass up a Megaman clone where every character is a magical girl? Exactly. And the music, I definitely love the music. That's something else Touhou and Megaman are known for.
P.S. the portraits for the bosses on the level select screen are cute. Even Youmu looks cute. Hmm. If that's the case, she may very well be my favorite Touhou character.
