Just recently, Touhou Chireiden, otherwise known as Subterranean Animism, has been released at Resaitai 5, in a demo form. Don't get me wrong, since I like the Touhou series (even though it might not be the best bullet hell game, and also features poorly drawn girls in silly outfits,) I was pretty excited to hear about this game coming out. While Mountain of Faith took a faster route, which I both praise and shun it for, Subterranean Animism went a little bit too far in terms of the difficulty curve. Because this game is now fast paced, that means bullets go considerably faster than they did in previous Touhou games, making both dodging bullets and destroying enemies a very hard task. Combine that with extremely unbalanced enemy health, you all of a sudden begin to feel like that you are no longer good at Touhou. The enemies are extremely durable, making waves of enemies a lot harder to destroy, which when combined with their speed, the game is all of a sudden having problems in the fun department.

Gameplay itself has returned to the Human/Youkai team system implemented in Imperishable Night, but the only playable characters are Reimu and Marisa. Each character has their own traits, which combined with a different youkai partner, adds to different abilies. Too bad the only characters that have artwork only appear to be Reimu and Marisa at the moment (but yet, this is a good thing, since I don't want to see ZUN butcher the artwork of one of my personal favorite characters, Alice.)

Speaking of the artwork, assuming that you have played Mountain of Faith, and are aware of the memes of the Touhou community, Reimu looked like a zombie-ish shrine maiden. For Subterranean Animism, the artwork took a massive nose dive, and now the characters look like fucking dolls. Their arms and legs are stubby, and lack knees and elbows. On a good side, at least Reimu and Marisa have had *some* pigmentation returned to them, but overall, Marisa ended up looking better than Reimu.

The music is still up to my expectations, with it's well composed pieces (except the title.)

But why am I nit-picking? This is only a trial, and hopefully this game will be fixed when the full version comes out.

Be aware that I will cover Scarlet Weather Rhapshody a bit later, once I learn the mechanics of the game and once I know what those moon runes are trying to tell me.

Photobucket of my screenshots. Will be updated as I take more.