Touhou Koumakyou ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil(Japanese: 東方紅魔郷 〜 the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.; lit. "Eastern Lands of the Scarlet Devil") is a 2002 bullet hell video game developed by Team Shanghai Alice. It is the sixth entry in the Touhou Project series, and the first to be released for Microsoft Windows. It follows either the miko Reimu Hakurei or the magician Marisa Kirisame as they battle enemies through the world of Gensokyo to find the cause of a red-colored mist which has covered the sky in the midst of summer.

ZUN, the creator of the Touhou Project, had planned to end the series after the release of Mystic Square in 1998. After graduating, ZUN started work at Taito as a game developer and composed music for games created by Amusement Makers, publishers of the original five Touhou Project games released for the aging PC-98 computer. Leaving Amusement Makers in 2001 but remaining at Taito, he formed the doujin circle Team Shanghai Alice as its sole member, initially applying as a music circle to the 61st Comiket. After being denied, ZUN instead decided to develop a full game to submit at Comiket 62, reviving the Touhou Project series. The jump from PC-98 to Windows represented a "clean slate" for both the series and its developer, and Embodiment of Scarlet Devil served as a soft reboot of the series.

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was released on 11 August, 2002, to positive reviews but low sales, being sold for one day at a single Comiket booth. Over the next few months, ZUN would start to open mail orders online; it soon became a commercial success and earned the Touhou Project a substantial cult following. At Comiket 63, four months after release, there was a single derivative circle dedicated to the Touhou Project; this number would grow to 2,372 circles seven years later, breaking the convention's record. The series' move to Windows allowed for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil to reach a much wider audience than previous installments, having been given retrospective praise for its characters and soundtrack.

Gameplay

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is a vertically scrolling shooter. The game offers two playable characters to choose from, each having two shot types. Reimu Hakurei is more agile and can cover a wide area of the screen with weaker attacks, whereas Marisa Kirisame is more powerful to make up for her narrower attack spread. The player can enter "Focus Mode", which slows the player character to allow for more precision when dodging projectiles. Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is the last game in the series that does not show the player's hitbox while in Focus Mode—this is remedied in Perfect Cherry Blossom. The player has the option to use bombs, which will grant temporary invulnerability, clear the screen of enemy bullets and deal immense damage; however, bombs come in limited supply, meaning they must be used cautiously. Bombs act differently depending on the character and shot type chosen. If the player is hit by an enemy bullet and uses a bomb within a six frame window, they can avoid losing the game. Unique to Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the amount of time in which a player can perform this technique is decreased each time it is successfully done.

Bosses and minibosses appear at the end and middle of stages, respectively. Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is the first entry in the series to utilize the "Spell Card" system. Each boss in the game uses various attack phases, or Spell Cards, of which all are given a name, unlike the previous games' random attacks. These are used in a specific order depending on difficulty and character choice. Each Spell Card has its own countdown timer – defeating an enemy Spell Card before time runs out will grant a point bonus, and a further bonus is given if they are completed without any lives lost or bombs used. When a Spell Card times out, the boss switches to its next attack with no point bonus given. There are 64 Spell Cards in total, and they can be viewed in the "Score" menu once the player has encountered them.

Points can be acquired in various ways. The "Graze" system grants the player 500 points for each bullet they narrowly avoid. Shooting enemies and collecting point and power items that they drop on defeat will also increase the number of points. Points are deducted upon losing a life or deployment of bombs. Power items increase the player's shot power, giving it a larger cone of fire and potential for dealing more damage to enemies, and when at the maximum power of 128, the player can move to the top of the screen to collect all on-screen items at once. Collecting enough points will grant the player extra lives and bombs. The amount of lives the player starts with can be chosen in the options menu – the default is three and starting with less or more lives will apply a positive or negative multiplier to the player's score respectively. A "Play Rank" system also exists, which makes the game slightly easier if the player loses a life, and slightly harder if they score more points.

The game features six stages and four levels of difficulty – Easy difficulty prematurely ends the game after stage five, automatically granting the bad ending. However, due to a bug in the initial version of the game, players could access a broken version of Stage 6 on Easy difficulty by clearing the stage on Normal in Practice Mode, quitting, and then selecting Easy in Practice Mode. Depending on difficulty, a positive or negative multiplier bonus is applied and given at the end of each stage. As with previous games in the series, an additional "Extra Stage" is unlocked in the main menu if the player completes the game without using a continue.

Plot

Setting and Prologue

The Touhou Project is set in Gensokyo, a region sealed from the outside human world and primarily inhabited by anthropomorphic yōkai alongside a small number of humans. One of them is Reimu Hakurei, the miko of the Hakurei Shrine located within the Great Hakurei Barrier which separates the two worlds. The main protagonist of the series, she is often tasked with resolving supernatural "incidents" caused in and around Gensokyo. Marisa Kirisame, the other main playable character of the series, is a smug human who has become a magician through sheer hard work and generally prioritizes self-interest and her own kleptomania over the interests of others. The player chooses either to play as Reimu or Marisa, who each have separate scenarios.

In the summer of the game's events, the sky over Gensokyo becomes covered in a thick scarlet mist. This event, known as the Scarlet Mist Incident (紅霧異変), blocks out the sun, causing the temperature to drop and making the environment cold and dark. The mist is toxic to humans, forcing them to stay inside their homes for safety. Reimu becomes determined to find the cause of the mist to prevent it from spreading to the human world, while Marisa sets out hoping the person responsible possesses valuable items to collect.

Main Scenario

The heroine traces the mist to its source at the Misty Lake (霧の湖). Here, she encounters Rumia (ルーミア), a yōkai with the ability to manipulate darkness. Proceeding to the lake itself, the heroine faces the area's guardians, Daiyousei (大妖精, lit. "Great Fairy") and Cirno (チルノ), an ice fairy who freezes water and attacks with cold projectiles.

The protagonist arrives at the Scarlet Devil Mansion (紅魔館), the source of the mist. Guarding the gates is Hong Meiling (紅 美鈴), a yōkai wearing traditional Chinese martial arts attire. After defeating her, the heroine enters the mansion's underground library, defeating custodian Koakuma (小悪魔, lit. "Little Devil") before confronting the librarian Patchouli Knowledge (パチュリー・ノーレッジ), an asthmatic magician who has lived for over 100 years and commands powerful elemental magic. As the heroine approaches the mistress's quarters, she is stopped by the head maid, Sakuya Izayoi (十六夜 咲夜), who manages the household and possesses the ability to manipulate time and space, allowing her to freeze time and throw innumerable knives. The heroine then confronts the lord of the mansion, Remilia Scarlet (レミリア・スカーレット), a vampire who has lived for over 500 years. Remilia reveals she created the dense mist to block the sunlight, allowing her to move freely during the day. Upon her defeat, the mist clears, and Remilia compromises by using a parasol to shield herself from the sun.

Extra Scenario

A few days after the incident, Remilia visits the Hakurei Shrine. However, a harsh rainstorm begins to brew around the mansion, preventing her return. Remilia realizes that Patchouli has cast the storm to prevent Remilia's younger sister, Flandre Scarlet (フランドール・スカーレット), from escaping.

The heroine returns to the mansion and discovers Flandre in the basement. Flandre has been confined there for 495 years due to her emotional instability and her terrifying ability to destroy anything she wishes. Flandre challenges the heroine to a battle; upon her defeat, Reimu promises a future rematch, while Marisa taunts her with quotes from the poem Ten Little Indians.

Development

Background

ZUN in 2016

After the release of the previous Touhou Project game, Mystic Square in late 1998, ZUN, creator and developer of the series, graduated from university. Mystic Square was intended to be the final Touhou Project installment with ZUN "sealing" his doujin activities – he had originally planned to stop with Lotus Land Story. He would go on to work at Taito as a game developer, and also composed music for various games created by members of Amusement Makers, the publishers of the previous five Touhou Project games, like the Seihou Project. ZUN left Amusement Makers in 2001, but continued to work at Taito until 2007, meaning each Touhou Project game until Mountain of Faith was developed concurrently with ZUN's work at Taito, which include Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color, Bujingai, Graffiti Kingdom and Exit, as well as other games that were ultimately cancelled. ZUN would reenter doujin activities by establishing his own doujin circle, changing his developer team name from "ZUN Soft" to Team Shanghai Alice, although initially the circle was not meant to develop games. ZUN applied to Comiket 61 under the name as a music circle, but was rejected. ZUN would instead decide to develop a game before the next Comiket, reviving the Touhou Project series. An announcement was then made on ZUN's blog promoting the game.

The game was initially developed under the title Touhou Kouchakan (東方紅茶館, lit. "Eastern Tea House"). A track composed for this early version, "Shanghai Kouchakan ~ Chinese Tea," was kept in the final release, though the game's title was eventually changed to Touhou Koumakyou as the story concepts solidified.

Conception and design

The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil brings things back to the starting point, by curbing the game systems that change the difficulty in obscure ways while at the same time pursuing the natural fun of dodging bullets.

As PC-98 usage in Japan declined in comparison to Microsoft's Windows architecture around the late 1990s, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil marked the first time ZUN programmed a Windows application from scratch. As ZUN was more familiar with APIs and DirectX and was relatively unfamiliar with the application level, he spent considerable time creating libraries and tools for the game. Some libraries were borrowed from the Seihou Project; Ponchi, a member of the Seihou Project's development team, is thus given a credit as "Program Support". As a result, little time remained to improve the game's presentation, and ZUN resolved to focus on improving the next game. The game engine developed for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil would later be reused for the games Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night. In 2013, ZUN stated fragments of code from the game were still being reused in Double Dealing Character.

As Embodiment of Scarlet Devil would be the first release of Team Shanghai Alice and their first game created for a wider audience, ZUN felt that the game would need to leave an impression. This resulted in the game's Western theme, unlike most other games in the Touhou Project which feature predominantly Asian themes. This also allowed the game's plot to be contained within its own narrative – Embodiment of Scarlet Devil does not mention or feature any PC-98 era characters bar Reimu and Marisa. Now regarding his past works as juvenilia, the jump from PC-98 to Windows represented a "clean slate" for both ZUN and the series: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil essentially serves as a soft reboot. ZUN has since remarked how the general theme and direction of the Touhou Project only started to come together during the development of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Some references are used from other material, mainly from the 1939 Agatha Christie mystery novel And Then There Were None for symbolism and dialogue in the game.

ZUN's general goal for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was to avoid over-complication, and to let the player have fun simply dodging bullets. The Spell Card system was created by ZUN in 1999 while working on the Seihou Project, and was intended to be a means to identify bullet patterns with names as well as adding depth to his characters. ZUN further stated that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil itself was created for the purpose of introducing this system, and it has been featured in every game after. ZUN also had interest during development in making a bullet hell game in which the player could switch between two characters easily during gameplay, as he believed there were few games that incorporated such a system. He would ultimately decide against this, believing that having playable characters who had not been previously introduced would be unnatural, and so this system was reserved until Imperishable Night, when he had determined enough characters had been introduced to the series. A demo version containing the first three stages was also distributed online on June 10, 2002.

ZUN has stated his intention to re-release Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on Steam, but due to compatibility issues when running the game in full screen on Windows 10 or later, the frame rate does not have a limit, causing the game to move at abnormally high speeds and rendering it unplayable. A similar bug was known to ZUN upon the game's release. Fan patches to remedy this have since been released, but ZUN stated that he was unable to fix the issue himself, as he had lost the game's source code. In a May 2020 radio broadcast, ZUN confirmed the loss of the source code, making a direct port impossible.

Character design and cultural references

The game's characters were designed to fit the Western theme while maintaining specific gameplay roles. ZUN designed the Stage 1 boss, Rumia, to be the weakest boss in the game, intending for her "strong-sounding" ability to manipulate darkness to serve as an opening "punchline." While the mid-bosses of Stage 2 and Stage 4 were initially left unnamed in the game, fans nicknamed them Daiyousei (lit. "Great Fairy") and Koakuma (lit. "Little Devil") respectively, names which ZUN later adopted in fan responses and data books.

Several characters draw inspiration from other media. The head maid Sakuya Izayoi was heavily inspired by the character Dio Brando from the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, specifically his time-stopping abilities and knife-throwing attacks. Flandre Scarlet's dialogue and her theme song, "U.N. Owen Was Her?", reference the 1939 Agatha Christie mystery novel And Then There Were None.

Official guidebooks released in the years following the game, such as Touhou Gumon Shiki: Perfect Memento in Strict Sense (2006), further elaborated on the setting and the characters' backstories. For example, these works clarified that Remilia Scarlet's claim of being a descendant of Vlad the Impaler is false, and established that Patchouli Knowledge suffers from anemia and asthma.

Music

The game's soundtrack was originally composed for the Roland SC-88 Pro sound module; ZUN decided to arrange and re-record the soundtrack in WAV format using a Roland Edirol SD-90 he had recently purchased, just before the game was released. As a result, two versions of the soundtrack exist; however the original MIDI files will only play correctly on an SC-88 Pro, meaning the WAV version of the soundtrack is by far the most recognised. ZUN has stated he was aiming to give the game's music a "brighter" feel over prior instalments by attempting to add jazz-fusion elements to the soundtrack, and that Remilia Scarlet's theme "Septette for the Dead Princess" and Flandre Scarlet's theme "U.N. Owen Was Her?" were the songs he most thought of as representative of the game. "Septette for the Dead Princess" is a homage to Maurice Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess. The name of "U.N. Owen Was Her?" is taken from "U. N. Owen," a pseudonym used in Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. Quotes and references from the book are also used in Marisa's dialogue. In August 2021, the game's soundtrack was released on Spotify along with all later games in the series.

Reception and legacy

Cosplay of Flandre Scarlet at Comiket 102

Upon release at Comiket 62, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil sold considerably better than previous entries in the series. Because of this, initial circulation of the game was limited, later being sold through online CD retailers. In a 2018 retrospective review of the game, IGN Japan's Shin Amai named Embodiment of Scarlet Devil the best game of 2002, calling the bullet hell mechanics mediocre, but that the level design, music, and presentation's charm made the game a "masterpiece" that would go on to become one of the most popular Japanese games of all time. In 2013, ZUN stated that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the overall best-selling Touhou Project game. The game has never been officially released in a language other than Japanese, but fan translation patches for the game have been created. ZUN does not plan to give any Touhou Project game an official English translation, stating that he has more faith in his fans to handle localization than a third-party company.

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has become well-known for its music. Cirno's boss theme "Beloved Tomboyish Girl" was later remixed by doujin group IOSYS into "Cirno's Perfect Math Class" in 2008, a song which ridiculed the apparently unintelligent nature of the character, leading to her becoming an Internet meme. Flandre's boss theme "U.N. Owen Was Her?" is notable for creating an Internet meme and spreading the popularity of the series in the West. It has been remarked that the 2008 viral video "Ronald McDonald Insanity" or "McRoll'd" which remixed the song with samples of Ronald McDonald was the first contact with the Touhou Project for thousands of Western Internet users – the two videos share over 21 million views as of July 2021. It is also known for its use in the rise of the Black MIDI scene, which involve MIDI compositions that contain extremely high numbers of notes. Arrangements of the game's music have appeared in other video games, such as Touhou Luna Nights, Music GunGun!, and Groove Coaster, while Konami released a remix album for Sound Voltex titled Sound Voltex Ultimate Tracks -Touhou Koumakyou Remix-.

Beyond music, the game's characters have achieved significant popularity, resulting in commercial collaborations and starring roles in derivative works. Cirno's popularity, bolstered by the "Perfect Math Class" meme, led to a collaboration with McDonald's Japan in 2021 to promote their beef stew pie. A second collaboration followed in 2024, featuring a new music video where the lyrics of "Perfect Math Class" were humorously changed to "Burger Burger." She also appears in the rhythm game Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! and is the protagonist of the fan-made roguelike Mystery Adventure of Cirno! 2.

Rumia, despite being the Stage 1 boss, has maintained a dedicated fanbase, resulting in her inclusion as a DLC character in the licensed rhythm game Touhou Spell Bubble and high-end merchandise such as watches produced by fashion brand SuperGroupies. She is also the lead character in several action fan games, including Yoiyami Dreamer and Nage-Rumia. The residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion—Remilia, Sakuya, Patchouli, and Flandre—appear frequently in secondary games, such as the 3D action RPG Touhou Koukishin: Adventures of Scarlet Curiosity and the RPG Horafukiyama no Marisa, where the four characters serve as commentators on the player's actions.

Unofficial anime have also been made for the game. Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~ The Memories of Phantasm(幻想万華鏡) by the circle Manpuku Jinja adapted the plot of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil to anime form, while characters from the game also appear in Musou Kakyou: A Summer Day's Dream(東方二次創作同人アニメ 夢想夏郷).

See also

Notes

External links

  • (in Japanese)
  • at IMDb
  • (in Japanese)
  • (in Japanese)