天下制覇

 

5 days until Touhou 10! Let’s celebrate in style. 

Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil was the big jump from the PC-98 to the current engine. The basic story is that a thick red mist has covered Gensokyo and blotted out the sun. Reimu (or Marisa) heads out to the source of the mist, a dark mansion in the middle of a lake. And of course, like all things, there are a number of demons and other people who get in the way of our heroine as they head for their destination.

Compared to the later games, the engine for ESoD is pretty basic. There’s no real difference between Reimu and Marisa except for their shot patterns and speed. Reimu remains primarily defensive, with weaker shots but better control while Marisa is raw power. There’s no funky scoring or anything to pay attention to except killing bosses and not dying, though there is a hidden variable controlled by the time alive versus the number of deaths that minorly affects a number of difficulty factors and can be great fun to hack and put at absurd levels.

  

Rumia is the first boss that the heroine meets, but she’s pretty much just lurking around the lake. Unlike most of the Gensokyo residents, she’s one of the more… well… feral of the spirits and will eat humans. That said, she’s not particularly powerful or intelligent. She’s the spirit of darkness, but is mostly just able to surround herself in darkness and little else.

   

Daiyousei and Cirno are the inhabitants of the lake. Daiyousei (literally “Big Fairy”) is actually just an unnamed miniboss, but Cirno is a full fledged ice fairy. She has a reputation for being pretty dumb, but she can read, unlike some of the other spirits and is the first to recognize the “flower festival” of Phantasmagoria of Flower View. Due to her hobby of freezing frogs to watch them thaw, a lot of fan works like to  depict her with a Keroro doll. You’ll also see a lot of RPG warrior depictions of Cirno which come from a very popular doujin series called Advent Cirno.

    

Hong Meiling is the hapless doorguard of the Scarlet Mansion. As far as her appearance in EoSD, she’s really a total non-entity, just somebody standing in front of a door. Given her Chinese dress, her stage’s song music (Chinese Tea) and her Chinese martial arts though, she earned the nickname of Chugoku (literally China) and made her way into the hearts of fans. She’s the reigning champion of the Touhou Saimoe and lost in the finals to Yuyuko in the first. Our poor little Chinese girl is the face for the mock characters of Touhou and earned her a place in history for it.

   

Koakuma and Patchouli are the inhabitants of the library. Like Daiyousei, Koakuma is just an unnamed miniboss with Koakuma meaning Little Imp. Patchouli is a relatively permanent denizen of the Scarlet Mansion’s library, having only left once, during the events of Immaterial and Missing Power. She is a very powerful mage, but due to her poor health, can rarely use her magical powers to their fullest. Still, she shows how powerful she can be and the full range of her magic in EoSD’s extra mode.

  

Sakuya Izayoi is one of the relatively few fully human characters in Gensokyo, and the only one at the Scarlet Mansion although there is a fair bit of evidence that she was originally from the moon like Eirin and Kaguya. She’s the head of staff at the mansion and in charge of pretty much everybody outside of the Scarlet sisters. She’s very young, but has the ability to manipulate time however she desires; slowing it down, or completely stopping it. Her signature weapon is an almost limitless supply of throwing knives, though she supposedly will stop time to retrieve them every now and then. Since she’s Remilia’s dog, you’ll see her with dog ears and a tail a lot. Fan works also like to portray her berating poor Meirin for her inability to guard the door to the mansion well.

  

Remilia Scarlet is the vampire who covered Gensokyo’s sun in order to be able to walk during the day. She’s immensely powerful, but prefers to rely on brute force rather than finesse. Even though she’s a vampire, she’s a very peckish and messy eater, tending to get blood everywhere (why she’s called the Scarlet Devil) and actually consuming very little before she’s full so the people she attacks rarely die. She does have the usual vampire abilities and weaknesses… shapeshifting to a bat, an aversion to sunlight, etc, but she can’t control her wings, so her nature tends to be pretty obvious.

   

Flandre is Remilia’s younger sister and even more powerful. Unfortunately though, she’s somewhat unhinged and has been locked in the Scarlet Mansion’s basement for the last half millenia. Unlike Remilia, Flandre has a difficult time controlling her power, so even if she did want to feed on a human, she wouldn’t be able to attack them without completely obliterating them. The wand that she carries with her is supposedly Laevatein, the sword in Norse mythology that destroyed the world. Nobody really knows what the deal is with the lights on her wings, though some people think that they’re totally artificial in some way.