While searching for worthwhile doujin games, I came across an interesting fangame called
Touhou - Wandering Souls. It's a platformer brawler collectathon RPG, made in RPGMaker of all things. After downloading I found out it's actually western and not a doujin game at all. A western, Touhou-themed brawler made in RPGMaker sounds like the king of all losing propositions, but I gave it a fair shake and ended up liking it a lot. In Wandering Souls you play as Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame and Sakuya Izayoi on a quest to gather the titular wandering souls and discover their source. You start out with just Reimu, but you'll unlock the other two in short order. The gameplay is a hybrid of many different things. You explore sidescrolling platformer stages with enemies, hazards, secrets, and sometimes alternate pathways. Most but not all enemy encounters will lock you into an arena until one side is defeated. Your characters level up from fighting, and you can also increase your strength by finding or buying weapons and accessories. The wandering souls you're looking for are essentially the same as stars from Super Mario 64. You gather souls and defeat a boss to move on to the next area, where you do the same thing until the end of the game.
Most of the assets in Wandering Souls are lifted from other sources. The player characters' and bosses' sprites have been taken from Immaterial and Missing Power and other Twilight Frontier fighting games. A lot of the normal enemies are from Maple Story. The music largely comes from Touhou shmups.
Each character has a basic attack combo with different finishers depending on whether you're pressing up, down, or neither. I find you're almost always better off doing faster, safer combos even if it means less damage. You can't always reliably stun your enemies, and you usually can't stay in one spot for more than a few seconds without a million bullets coming your way, so it's best to do what damage you can and move on quickly. Over the course of the game your characters learn spellcard abilities which need to be charged up before casting. Spellcards cost MP, which regenerates slowly. Every weapon comes with a set of different skills which can be activated with fighting game-style inputs. Skills cost SP, which regenerates quickly.
You can double tap to dash, both in the air and on the ground. Dashing doesn't grant any invincibility frames, but you do take half damage while dashing, so if you can't avoid an attack, dashing through is better than nothing. You can block by holding down. Blocking prevents all damage but repeated attacks will break your guard and leave you vulnerable. It's good for defending against small amounts of damage here and there, trying to block big attacks will get you killed. Wandering Souls does that Getsu Fuuma Den thing where if you walk off of the edge of a platform you can do a single air jump. It's very convenient in general and often necessary in platforming segments. You can freely switch between your three characters, but after doing so there's a cooldown period before you can switch again. The two characters you aren't controlling will gradually recover HP, MP, and SP, and if one dies they'll revive given enough time.
Enemies tend to be heavy on ranged attacks and, per Touhou standards, they favor large numbers of relatively slow bullets. Your hitbox is much more in line with platformer standards than danmaku standards, and when fighting multiple enemies, it won't always be possible to dodge everything. You don't get any mercy invincibility for taking damage, but attacks can stun you and it's not rare for a single mistake to cost a character's entire life bar. This is admittedly a bit euroshmup-like, but it's mitigated by the three character system. When a character dies, their replacement gets a few seconds of mercy invincibility so even in the worst case scenario you've got 3 hit points. Some equipment gives you super armor and using those to prevent stunlock kills does more for your defenses than HP increasing items would. Enemies have their own spellcard attacks and just like yours, they need to be charged up. Their spellcards tend to be far more dangerous than their other attacks. When you see that yellow meter filling up, you need to kill or stun that guy asap; even minor enemies can be really dangerous if you don't give them the attention they deserve. Killing an enemy immediately cancels all of their shots so, even after they've finished charging their spellcard, it's worth finishing them off as soon as you can. Given that your HP, MP, and SP regenerate over time and that being aggressive can put you at risk of stunlock kills, Wandering Souls's combat tends to be fairly defensive, so the spellcard system is greatly appreciated for occasionally forcing risky aggression.
Your normal attacks stay the same throughout a playthrough, but your skills and spellcards improve, so over time your normals become less useful. In the early game your SP and MP are low so you mostly use a combination of normals and low cost abilities. Late game combat is almost entirely about skills and spellcards. Some characters, like Marisa, end up being all about avoiding enemy attacks for long enough to charge up and cast an expensive screen-clearing spell.
Enemy design tends to be very good and there's a ton of variety. There are weak enemies who are individually harmless, but attack in numbers. Some enemies have relatively weak normals but brutal spellcards. Some can't hurt you very much, but instead focus on trapping you or disabling some of your abilities. There are enemies who exist entirely to support the others, such as by healing them or granting invincibility. One memorable enemy type is a ghost who casts an instant death curse on you. It takes about 3 seconds to take effect and doing any damage to them will stop it, but a lot of the time that means rushing into danger. If you've been cowering in a corner, you might not be able to make it in time. In the worst case scenario you might have to switch to your lowest health character and sacrifice them to protect the other two. My only real problems with enemy design are that the first world's enemies are too tame, and that many enemies can't be stunned reliably, which is part of what necessitates defensive play.
The stages in Wandering Souls are nicely varied and full of secrets. Unlocking a new stage and searching for its hidden items is my favorite part of the game. There are a lot of platforming sections that require skillful dashing and jumping to get through, but they're nearly all optional. Some skills, like Reimu's Fantasy Seals or Marisa's Flight of the Witch, boost your character upwards and can be used to essentially cheat through those parts. One nice feature is that finding a soul doesn't take you out of a level so you can get several, potentially all of them, in one trip.
Every character can equip one weapon and four accessories. Weapons are character-specific, accessories are universal. Equipped items gain experience and power up as you use them. Fully leveled items are something like twice as powerful as unleveled ones, so you aren't always better off switching when you find a stronger item. Definitely do not replace your entire team's weapons all at once as that will leave you with poor attack power and only basic skills. You want to switch one character's weapon at a time and have the other two characters carry her until her abilities are back online.
The item system adds a lot to the game, character leveling does not. As with most RPGs, all it accomplishes is occasionally making your team either too weak to win or too strong to be challenged. Fortunately, Wandering Souls is at least good about convenience features to make leveling relatively benign. Every character on your team shares experience, both for their experience level and for their equipped items, so there's no need to switch someone in to keep them caught up. If your team gets wiped out you also get to keep all of the experience, items, and souls you've found. In some games those kind of rules might kill off most of the tension and difficulty, but here it's definitely a good thing. Should you find yourself overwhelmed by a difficult stage, there's no need to go somewhere easier to grind. Just keep trying. Either you'll figure out how to win as you are, or you'll gain enough items and experience to make up the difference.
This plays out much like it did in Perfect Cherry Blossom
After beating the game you unlock Chaos Mode, which is essentially a second loop with stronger enemies and a few new stages. There are 100 souls in the main game and Chaos Mode adds 100 more. One interesting addition in Chaos Mode is that you can unlock new characters and switch them in for your original 3. Wandering Souls is a long game and introducing such a big feature so late is a cool surprise, but I'd rather they had made at least a few available earlier to bring in some much-needed variety. The unlockable characters are less developed than the main three. Reimu, Marisa, and Sakuya each have a total of seven skills and four spellcards, all of the unlockable characters I've seen have around three skills and a single spellcard. They all come equipped with the only weapon they can ever use, but they're endgame-worthy. Most unlockable characters seem overall less useful than the main characters, though I find Sanae to be outstandingly powerful and easily worth swapping a main character out.
The first few stages are unfortunately a bit dull and give a bad impression of the game. You start with only Reimu and she has no skills or spellcards until her weapon levels up. I find her standard combos to be a bit awkward to use, too. Probably her most useful one is her up combo, which is two quick strikes followed by a kick with a lot of knockback. Pin the enemy against a wall and kick them to death. Once her weapon levels up she gets a useful, shotgun-like skill that does a lot of damage up close, and once you finish the second stage you can use Marisa and her Master Spark. The enemy design also improves quite a lot once you hit the second world. Playing at a higher difficulty won't help in that regard as it seems to only modify stats rather than changing enemy attacks or behaviour. Speaking of, you can't change the difficulty after you've chosen one. I can vouch for lunatic difficulty being fun, challenging, and well-balanced throughout an entire playthrough. Hard difficulty should be a good bet if you don't want to deal with being underleveled. Anyway, if you feel let down by the first few levels, stick with it, it'll pick up soon.
It's definitely a flawed game, but I'm really enjoying it.
You can download Wandering Souls
here. I've uploaded
a brief gameplay sample to demonstrate the basics of how the game works.
Rating:
A+