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I'm a sucker for stories where the plot is little controlled by outside factors, instead entirely determined by the grinding of characters against eachother. A Rube-Goldberg machine of psychology, where every toppled domino only craters an even larger one. The unfortunate cowardice present in other works is that we don't get to see much of it. The human mind is hard- but not for WARHOUND. Where other writers would cower, Rho writes nothing off screen. You will see the characters she makes you love fall to pieces, and you will watch and understand every step along the way.
That is important- no one improves over the course of WARHOUND. Everyone is flawed and traumatised; and they aren't allowed to be. There is a person who requires them. This rogue's gallery of guilty transgenders exist to be taken advantage of by a perfect human being: Handler.
She is a simple fascist storm in black leather, written to be perfect. All actions done by her (and by those around her) have the exact consequences she desires. Normally, a character as frighteningly intelligent as her must be tested to the reader, proven; but here, this doesn't have to happen. You feel her presence in every single scene, even when she's not there, she controls the words out of everyone's mouth, on the same level as the writer. She's ontologically above every one else- literally ascended in terms of writing, because she is not a person. She is something that you just accept. As an axiom hardcoded into the story, Handler cannot be harmed or stopped. No weapon grasped against her shall prosper. You can't fight a storm. You just take shelter.
The only critique I have of Warhound is its prose- alot of it is simply weak. Rho repeats a similar structure many times, and the language and vocab use just never blew me away. However, this issue is foremostly present in the first half of the book. You can clearly see Rho improving throughout, and whilst I was still not enamored with it, it became far better towards the end. Her prose still does not hold a candle to her skills in structure or character writing, but it doesn't need to. The best scenes in Warhound are tense, jolting mech fights at a speed. When the actions are as complex as the specific movements of giant robot martial arts, often the best way to write is a precise explanation, and let structure handle the rest.
I can't understate how good the combat scenes actually are. I don't read much, but I believe the medium has little effect on the art itself, so long as it is accounted for. That's why reading the battles the characters are shoved into feels as quick as watching JJK. I got that guttural desire to read as quick as possible. Move my eyes as quick as they could sprint. I pressed my face against the pages like I did as a kid on the TV screen watching Dragon Ball Z. It's really proved to me my own belief- as I've simply never read combat as well-written.
Not to mention that for the majority of the story, the mech that our focus lands upon is Theaboros: a mech designed for cutthroat, risk-reward maneuvers. It's got wings powered by antimatter. Any fight with her is made much more entertaining simply by presence. There's 3 fights with Theaboros at the spearhead, and they all feel different and fresh.
It's also because each fight fucks over Kione (the pilot) even more than the last. That final one rips her soul out. Through the mech. No gun could hurt her as much as the words spoken into her cockpit.
- Handler
Oh, and every scene is shockingly hot. There's no men either. 9/10
I can't get across to you how captivating the world of MOON is. The NPCs, the style, the underlying themes are all so beautiful and unique. It's ending had my soul sobbing. If you want to experience a game that lets you sink into a place beyond reality, where each moving part is strange and weird, but somehow still slots together whilst playing with the boundaries of fiction; you should play MOON.
But you probably won't enjoy it. The gameplay of MOON is interesting at first- it has this fascinating live-schedule system which does not shy away from allowing the player to sleep in. If you need to meet an NPC at 2pm, you best be in bed by midnight! However, this mechanic falls apart for 80% of the game. You have an ACTION LIMIT- if you do too much stuff you will DIE. And you will *lose progress*. This is very engaging at first, but quickly falls off as your action limit gets so large the threat dissipates. You can just start waiting. I can't stress how much a mechanic of this game is Waiting. Waiting and doing Nothing.
And sleeping doesn't help- the walk speed of the player is so slow that it ends up being optimal to simply wait at the spot you need to be. Have you ever played an RPG, and really payed attention, such that when you are done and the world is finished, there is little left to do to attain 100%? It's only a matter of backtracking through the whole game and maybe using a guide to find the stuff you've missed. It's dull, but it's the afterparty, so it doesn't really matter. The entirety of MOON is like that. That's the entire thing. Much of the endgame was me just sitting there, literally watching the clock. And you can't ALT+TAB! It HAS to be fullscreen and actively selected to run. I actually just sat there and read Books. In real life. Books I've wanted to get through for *months* because MOON made me WAIT. I have 23 hours of play time. I guarantee a good half of that I did nothing for.
And there's this bird guy. To 100% the game, you must collect all the love, and one bit of love is locked behind this minigame. You guess which color bird will turn up, and you can bet money on it. To obtain the bird-guy's love, you must predict each of the birds correctly. There is then a minute of cutscene where this guy strums his guitar as you watch the bird saunter slowly on by. That is it! You guess the color and if it doesn't turn up, you try again. I spent IRL hours at this minigame, literally birdwatching. For the purpose of poetic satire, I put on a video of paint drying whilst grinding (and it did feel like grinding) this out.
I hate to be so negative and mean (genuinely! I love this game), but how it feels to play the game beyond the artistic value should at the very least be *considered*. I do Get It- but to say that gameplay is disconnected from a game's artistic value, and exists merely to placate the attention span of humans is a huge disservice to game design as a concept. One time I watched an old friend futz around with the controls of Doom Eternal (a game that has a lot of connection between gameplay and value), and refuse to change them. I asked them why, and she answered "it's how the developers intended it to be played!"
That's weird. We should not treat developers as holier than thou deities who have any more say on the interpretation of a work than any other sentient person. Death of the author! It's bad to put anyone on a pedestal. The common rebuttal to this is that the work was made and influenced by the developers biases, surroundings and pledges. It's worth looking at the inherent anti-semitism in Harry Potter, or the pessimism in Hell Screen, or kickstarter goals. Decisions made due to outside forces. These messages are influences that come from the author unwillingly, and to embrace the death of the author would be to act like these don't exist.
To this, I say go for it. A work is interpretable in ANY context- including the context in which the author made it. The statements...
"a work can be interpreted as if it fell from the sky one day"
and
"a work can be interpreted as the pure brainchild of a flawed human being"
...can and should co-exist. The base is the same- freedom of interpretation. That's all reality is in the first place! Merely perception, and our memories of our perception. That is what it means to be conscious.
A little off topic... erm. All that is to say, at least consider the gameplay in your rating. However, if I gave them equal weight, I would place the gameplay of MOON around a 2.5/5 and the story at a 5/5. Is MOON a 7.5/10? What mathematical formula takes a piece of art as an input and outputs the correct weight between GAMEPLAY and ART? The answer is, really, a clue to why rating an art on a numerical scale is a bad idea. However, I rate them anyway- just know not to analyze the number with scrutiny. After all, it's been a long time since I've played MOON now. Months. I've forgotten how bored I felt, and all that is left is how moved and changed I was by it as an experience. I think that's how you rate art. Your personal experience.
And to that extent... there are *some* things I liked about Birdman (his name is 鳥男 (Tori otoko), or, Bird man). His face is perpendicular to your view, so you can never actually see the front of his face. When you finish his game, correctly predicting all the birds, he turns to you, and reveals his long ass beak. He is a bird. He is not called Birdman because he is a guy who likes to bird-watch. It is because he is Just a Bird.
There was, actually, something inherently beautiful in just sitting there, waiting, watching. It indicates you've reached a point of total submersion in the world. You've absorbed all of it's juice. If you play MOON... just play it. Don't 100% it. Tune yourself to the world and stop listening when you've heard enough.
It is your own personal experience.
It is your own personal experience.
In the end, when I finished MOON...
...I actually did go back, for no particular reason. Just to see the birds again.
Kera-ma-go...
Touhou is very cool. It's been on the edge of my media sphere for a very long time (see: UT/DR, Enter the Gungeon... and, well, everyone's seen Bad Apple, right ?!) and I finally got the push to play it recently.
[a screenshot of TH01: Highly Responsive to Prayers]
I thought a lot about the creative process while playing TOUHOU. What it must have felt and been like for ZUN to put these out into the wild. It's quite unlike anything I've ever seen, and a cursory glance at it gets across how visually unique it is. As someone who has tried, and failed, to make serious, large scale creative projects many times, TOUHOU is a little inspiring. The games are short but tantalizingly sweet, artistically juicy, and above all, scream of individuality. Looking around today, it's pretty easy to see games that could have been made by anyone (see: any Modern triple A game). So, when I play games like this, I feel a certain peace.
TH01: Highly Responsive to Prayers will certainly hold a special place in my heart. While the staple of the TOUHOU franchise is certainly it's curtain shooter danmaku style, the first game in the series is entirely different. You are locked to the ground, only capable of moving left and right. You can slide, shoot and attack- but the only thing that can progress the level is the Hakurei Yin-Yang Orb, a yin-yang colored beach ball you bounce around into cards and bosses. Getting hit by the Hakurei Yin-Yang Orb or by the bullets sent out by enemies, bosses, or cards on LUNATIC difficulty, loses you a life.
Despite it's simplicity, the moveset is robust and of a high skill ceiling. After I finished the game on normal, I perused the wiki page to see I had missed several movement mechanics. There's power sliding, moving flip kicks, rapid firing, and even the bombs (a staple of the series, that remains even when this style of gameplay does not,) I missed entirely. The tech is crazy, bro, and it makes the gameplay very satisfying. To defeat bosses, you have to bounce the ball in such a way that it strikes them on the top of the head. This is pretty precise, and you'll have to do this 10-20 times depending on the boss. I actually much prefer this. It felt very good to score damage- in the other games, you navigate a ship space-invaders style, holding Z to shoot bullets. This steers the game into a style where the player focuses primarily on Dodging- as all you need to do damage is hold down Z. Titles past TH04 even allow a homing gun. I like it, and it's certainly integral to the identity of TOUHOU as we know it today. But there is a certain satisfaction from defeating bosses in TH01 that I didn't feel in the other games.
It should also be noted how difficult these games are. On my first playthrough, I used 35 continues to beat the entire game. For this, I got Bad Ending #2, and the shrine blew up. As seen above. To attain a good ending, you would have to beat the entire game with no continues- a very challenging feat. This is a theme of the series, and in later titles, you must do it on a difficulty above Easy. The bullet patterns are devastating, aiming moreso to paint an image on screen than focus on the player. This hails from arcade gaming- it's better for passerbys to see impressive feats of skill and visual impressiveness than for meager, player focused attacks.
[yukari's danmaku from TH07: Perfect Cherry Blossom]
This is another hallmark of the TOUHOU franchise, and I really love it. I grew up playing Enter The Gungeon, a bullet hell roguelite that does NOT do this. Bullet patterns are very tailored to the player and the movement you can afford. ETG is extremely good, but there's just something about the TOUHOU style of bullets that makes the player look insane. I remember seeing clips floating around in the early 2010s of advanced TOUHOU players clearing stages on LUNATIC, and it firmly implanted in me what skill as a style looks like. I'm glad TOUHOU is so hard. It wouldn't look the same if it wasn't.
Lastly... Reimu Hakurei is a lesbian pervert. From like the second game. It rules.
