天下制覇

Time to party like it’s 1999.

As winter fades to spring and spring brings the falling sakura blossoms, the residents of Gensokyo gather for a festival and then a feast at the Hakurei Shrine. This year however, a thick mist has descended all over Gensokyo and the residents gather for the feast and party every few days. Our mages and demons, being of stronger and more suspicious stuff than most, head out to discover who is bringing the mist and why the feasts keep repeating themselves.

Immaterial and Missing Power is drastically different from the other Touhou games, though is still canonically part of the series. It is a fighting game developed as a collaboration between Tasogare Frontier (Eternal Fighter Zero, Higurashi Daybreak Kai, etc) and Zun. All of the characters retain their signature styles and most have the ability to cover the screen with all manner of bullets, but the normal fighting game engine has been adapted to balance things out.

The core change is that all projectiles are avoidable with a simple dash. Even though it’s easy to toss out all manner or nonsense, it’s just as easy to dodge through it and punish the other person. This makes the game much more a game of positioning and timing than the usual pressure and combo beatdowns. Many of the characters do have good pressure attacks and nasty combos, but in normal play, those are rather difficult to land and there are few characters who can turn a basic poke into anything particularly punishing.

There are other changes, such as the spellcard attacks (super moves) being usable only after the card is declared in a round and declaration can only happen once per round. The story mode for IaMP is also very different from most fighting games. You’ll have a round of normal combat, then the enemy will enter a spellcard mode where they will typically use only one or two attacks or attack normally while some other hazard appears.

Compared to most fighting games, it’s also extremely well balanced. A fair number of character matchups are skewed, but what works against some characters is a surefire losing strategy against others. Still, some head the top of the pack. Remilia’s sheer raw power and speed makes her one of the best, and Suika has an immensely long dash as well as some great projectiles protecting her as she moves so she’s also up there. You’ll also see a lot of Sakuya and Yuyuko players since both are very good at controlling the flow of a match with their projectiles, and Sakuya has the single best spellcard in the game. Marisa players are also on the rise lately. She’s one of the few characters who can turn basic pokes into nasty attacks, but her recovery time from attacks is pretty awful, so nobody but the best has much luck with her against a skilled opponent. China and Yukari are the bottom of the heap, being slow and having relatively poor damage, but there’s been a new crop of really good players using them lately forcing the other players to adapt and deal with the new abilities, though Reimu has the worst damage in the game… decent spread and coverage on her projectiles, but you’ll be playing defensively almost the entire time.

I wasn’t really certain where to stick Reimu and Marisa, so Immaterial and Missing Power is as good as anywhere else and only has one new character anyway.

   

Reimu is the only priestess in all of Gensokyo, so she’s de facto responsible for investigating any and all strange occurances that may happen in their world. Her power has grown significantly through the series, at first she was unable to even fly on her own, but she’s since become a master of talismen and various forms of exorcism seals. She also has the Ying-Yang orbs, Hakurei Shrine’s strongest weapon. Compared to most of the demons and mages in Gensokyo, she’s pretty weak and unskilled, but somehow still manages to win time and time again. Her costume, with its exposed shoulders and armpits, is also a great deal of interest to many fans for reasons I’ll never quite understand.

  

Marisa Kirisame is the most mundane character in all of Gensokyo, often referred to as “an ordinary black magician.” She’s a powerful magician, but that’s because she trains almost constantly and unlike Reimu, is always trying to better herself. Most of her attacks and moves are lifted wholesale from other characters… even her signature Master Spark which was originally used by Yuka Kazami. This has given her a reputation as something of a collector of other’s items… and occasionally a thief. She’s extremely intelligent, but also very self-absorbed and will often not really pay full attention to what’s going on or why she’s fighting her opponents. She can’t resist a mystery though, and will often head out to confront the crises of Gensokyo just out of curiosity.

    

Suika Ibuki is arguably the strongest person in all of Gensokyo. The only known Oni, she possesses the power to control the density and diffusion of all things as well as preternatural physical and magical abilities. She’s the one who has been causing all the feasts by concentrating people’s “sentiment” on the Hakurei Shrine, and the mist is actually her own physical body spread out very very thinly. She was trying to draw other Oni out of hiding and find some friends of her own kind to play with, but because of Reimu’s honesty, seals, and her own incomplete mastery of her Oni powers, she’s eventually forced to abandon her plan. Still, if the usual convention is followed that the #01 ending is the canonical ending, Suika is the only character to have bested Reimu.