Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

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 scrolling shoot 'em up game developed by Team Shanghai Alice. It is the sixth game in the Touhou Project series, and the first installment to be released for Microsoft Windows. The story 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.

Touhou Koumakyou ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
CD-ROM cover art, featuring a silhouette of Flandre Scarlet
Developer(s)	Team Shanghai Alice[a]
Publisher(s)	Team Shanghai Alice
Composer(s)	ZUN
Series	Touhou Project
Platform(s)	Windows
Release	JP: 11 August 2002
Genre(s)	Bullet hell
Mode(s)	Single-player

ZUN, the creator of the Touhou Project series, 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music for games created by Amusement Makers, publishers of the original five Touhou Project games released for the long-outdated PC-98 computer. Leaving Amusement Makers in 2001 but remaining at Taito, he formed the one-man doujin circle Team Shanghai Alice, 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.

Due to the handmade nature of indie doujinshi works, initial sales of the game were low, being sold for one day at a single Comiket booth. Over the next few months, ZUN would start to open mail orders online for the game. Embodiment of Scarlet Devil received critical acclaim upon release, and the series soon developed 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, and it remains one of the most acclaimed entries in the series, with physical copies of the game having been self-published and sold in the years since release.

Gameplay

Main article: Touhou Project § Gameplay

An example of gameplay in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, illustrating the game's basic mechanics

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up. 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.^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[1] 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.^[3]

Bosses and minibosses appear at the end and middle of the game's 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.^[3] 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.^[1]

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.^[1]

The game features six stages and four levels of difficulty – Easy difficulty prematurely ends the game after stage five, automatically granting the bad ending. 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.^[b][1]

Plot

Setting

The Touhou Project is set in Gensokyo,^[c] a region sealed from the outside human world and primarily inhabited by anthropomorphic yōkai alongside a small number of humans.^[4] 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.^[1]

Story

In Gensokyo, the sky becomes covered in red mist, blocking the sun in the middle of summertime, which becomes known as the Scarlet Mist Incident (紅霧異変). Reimu becomes determined to find the cause of the red mist, as if left alone, the mist would spread across Gensokyo's border to the human world.^[5] Marisa hopes that the individual responsible for the mist would have valuable items to collect.^[6]

The player's chosen heroine observes that the mist is coming from the direction of the Misty Lake (霧の湖).^[7] Travelling in that direction, she encounters the yōkai Rumia,^[8] and later the ice fairy Cirno,^[9] determining neither are related to the mist – instead, the Scarlet Devil Mansion (紅魔館), which seemingly appears from nowhere, is discovered to be the cause.^[10] The mansion's guard, Hong Meiling;^[11] resident anemic witch, Patchouli Knowledge;^[12] and time-stopping maid, Sakuya Izayoi,^[13] all attempt and stop the intruder from reaching the lord of the mansion, Remilia Scarlet, but fail. Remilia, a vampire,^[14] states that she created the mist to block out the sun so that she could feel comfortable during the day. After defeating Remilia, if the player has not used any continues, the mist clears, and Remilia compromises with using a parasol in daylight.^[15]

A few days pass, and Remilia returns to the Hakurei Shrine to talk with the heroines, leaving care of the mansion to Sakuya.^[16] However, a harsh storm brews around the mansion, and Remilia confides to the heroines that she cannot return to the mansion in this weather. Remilia then realises that Patchouli has cast a storm over the mansion to prevent Remilia's younger sister Flandre from escaping.^[17] The heroine encounters Flandre in the mansion, where she claims she has been locked in the basement for close to five hundred years,^[18] before Flandre offers to engage in a battle with the heroine. Upon defeating her, Reimu promises a future rematch between the two,^[19] while Marisa simply taunts her with quotes from the poem Ten Little Indians.^[20]

Development

Background

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.^[21] 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.^{[22]: 487–488} 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.^[22]: 501 ZUN would instead decide to develop a game before the next Comiket, reviving the Touhou Project series.^[23] An announcement was then made on ZUN's blog promoting the game.^[24]

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.

ZUN's blog (2002)^[24]

As PC-98 usage in Japan declined in comparison to Microsoft's Windows architecture around the late 1990s,^[25] 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, a lot of time was put into 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.^[26] The game engine developed for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil would later be reused for the games Perfect Cherry Blossom^[27] and Imperishable Night.^[28] In 2013, ZUN stated fragments of code from the game were still being reused in Double Dealing Character.^[22]: 472

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.^[29] 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.^[30] 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.^[31] 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.^[31]

ZUN's general goal for Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was to avoid over-complication, and to let the player have fun simply dodging bullets.^[24] 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.^[32] 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. However, he felt that having playable characters that 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 of the game, containing the first three stages, was also distributed online on June 10, 2002.^[33][34]

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.^[1] 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.^[35]

Music

The game's soundtrack was originally composed for the Roland SC-88 Pro sound module. However, 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.^[32] 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,^[37] 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.^[26] "Septette for the Dead Princess" is a homage to Maurice Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess.^[26] 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.^[26] Quotes and references from the book are also used in Marisa's dialogue.^[26][20] In August 2021, the game's soundtrack was released on Spotify along with all later games in the series.^[38]

Reception and legacy

Further information: Touhou Project § 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.^[24] 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.^[39] In 2013, ZUN stated that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the overall best-selling Touhou Project game.^[22]: 493 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.^[40]

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has become 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.^[41] 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.^[42] 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.^[43]

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,^[44] 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

• 2002 in video games
• List of video games considered the best

Notes

1. Ponchi, a member of the Seihou Project development team "Shunsatsu sare do?", is additionally credited as "Program Support".
2. Continuing on any difficulty will automatically grant the player the bad ending on completion, preventing this unlock. The "Extra Stage" prevents continuing.^[1]
3. Japanese: 幻想郷, Hepburn: Gensōkyō, literally "Land of Illusions" or "Land of Fantasy"