Youyou Kengeki Musou is a doujin game from the doujin circle Annkake-Spa. They’ve recently released a demo of their game that demonstrates the central mechanics of the game. What follows is a first impression of the two-stage demo that they released a few days ago. The scope of the game and how well polished it feels is something that is to be commended for a doujin work from both the gameplay, music, and quality of the visuals.
Kengeki is an action game that plays like the recent and well received Bastion from Supergiant Games. The video at the top of this post shows off the gameplay. Youmu has a normal sword attack and four special moves: charging forward, a ranged attack, and an area of effect spell hitting nearby enemies. The last is a super attack that does large amounts of damage and has a long cooldown. Fighting is a fluid process with a satisfying ability to chain combo attacks together. The game had three bosses, Cirno, a giant frog, and Marisa. Learning how to adapt to each bosses set of attacks is key. Marisa, for example, uses a combination of beam attacks and throwing star bullets your way. She tops off the battle by occasionally using a giant beam that you have to avoid by running circles around her. I felt that all the bosses were challenging, but still fair. It was satisfying learning how to avoid the attacks of the enemies and react to them to succeed. The levels occasionally branch out into different places, encouraging a level of exploration to find treasure pots that contain upgrades to the number of special moves Youmu can perform. Finally, checkpoints are placed frequently enough that it never becomes frustrating to fail and have to redo something over again.
This game will be released at C81, and I encourage everyone to at least check out the demo for an example of the amazing talent that exists in the Touhou scene.
Further Reading:
Have only started playing the full version. It’s fun alright and I like the fact that the Boss are actually accompanied by their own theme songs