Video Game / Touhou Kouryuudou ~ Unconnected Marketeers

In mint condition, and PSA-graded.

Touhou Kouryuudou^note Rainbow Dragon Cave ~ Unconnected Marketeers is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice for Windows computers released on May 4, 2021, and the first main series title to debut as a digital release on Steam.^note A consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic It is the eighteenth installment in the Touhou Project series.

Mysterious cards containing the secrets and powers of various humans and youkai are spreading across Gensokyo. Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya, and Sanae each set out to find the cause and collect the cards, each with their own motives.

The main gameplay mechanic of Unconnected Marketeers is the card system: after each stage, the player is given the option to purchase a card with money earned during gameplay. Each card references a previous character, and grants unique active or passive effects.

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This game features the following tropes:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: For the Extra Stage, upon defeating Chimata, the protagonists discover that they've obtained the Sky-Blue Magatama, an Ability Card that allows them to breathe in oxygen-free environments, which allows them to properly explore the Rainbow Dragon Cave. Fittingly, this card can only be used in the Extra Stage.
• Ancient Artifact: Misumaru explains in Reimu's alternate ending that the term "Izanagi Object" refers to any item of significance that dates back to the era of the gods, back when such things belonged to no one, now known as "magic items." While by modern times most of them have lost their raw divinity between being given new names or new significances, the dragon gems and other Izanagi Objects inside Youkai Mountain have lost none of said divinity due to being left untouched, making them very powerful and dangerous in the wrong hands.
• Attack Drone: Alice's Shanghai Doll card has a doll home in on an enemy to fire bullets at them.
• Attack Reflector: Sumireko's card reflects enemy bullets.
• Breaking Old Trends: The first Touhou game to debut as a digital release instead of physical.
• Bonus Dungeon: In Stage 4, you visit the Rainbow Dragon Cave, but the toxic air and lack of oxygen prevents you from going deeper. After beating the Final Boss, you obtain a magical artifact that allows you to survive the hostile environment, unlocking the Extra Stage where you go deeper into the cave and meet Momoyo, its boss.
• The Bus Came Back: Sakuya and Sanae are once again playable, the former for the first time since Double Dealing Character and the latter for the first time since Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. Unconnected Marketeers also marks the first time both have been playable in the same mainline game.^note In Hisoutensoku both Sanae and Sakuya can be playable if the game's connected to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
• Call-Back:
  • The mountain kappa, or yamawaro, were first introduced in Wild and Horned Hermit as kappa who had abandoned the river and moved to live in the mountains. Unconnected Marketeers introduces Takane, the series' first named and significant yamawaro character.
  • Many of the collectable card's granted abilities in the reference mechanics or attacks from prior games in the series, such as Reimu and Yukari's side-to-side screen warps from Subterranean Animism and Clownpiece's bullet-blocking moon projectiles from Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom.
• Cards of Power:
  • The main gimmick of the game is using cards with various effects that can either be equipped before starting a playthrough or bought from the bosses you defeat after every Stage. Rulewise, they can only be sold and bought — stealing, giving them away, or receiving them with no payment involved will prevent their abilities from being used:
    • Active type cards grant abilities that can be used at will, such as the Miracle Mallet or Yukari's gaps.
    • Passive type cards grant passive abilities, such as ignoring enemy collision or boosting your character's bomb.
    • Equipment type cards grant additional sub-shots, such as Alice's dolls or Reimu's homing amulets.
    • Item type cards grant lives, bombs and money.
  • It's explained in Reimu's alternate ending that the cards themselves are powered by Chimata's magic as conduits for worship because they're only somewhat made of dragon gems, and are just worthless scraps of paper otherwise.
  • In order to more deeply explore the anoxic depths of the Rainbow Dragon Cave for the Extra Stage, the protagonists use an Ability Card obtained after defeating Chimata that allows them to breathe in oxygen-free environments.
• Collision Damage: Can be defied with Koishi's hat, which negates collision with regular stage enemies. It doesn't work on bosses, though.
• Colony Drop: Clownpiece's card throws a moon forward to clear bullets and hit enemies.
• Continuity Cavalcade: All Ability Cards in the game, with the exception of generic Life Card and Spell Card, are based on characters from previous games. As a result, you can see several of these references at once every time you open the card shop.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Stage 2 of Sakuya's scenario, she references the first time she climbed up Youkai Mountain in her Scarlet Weather Rhapsody scenario.
  • Takane mentions to Sanae in her scenario that she helped the Moriya Shrine install its cable car to Youkai Mountain's summit, which was a major subplot of Wild and Horned Hermit.
  • Misumaru tells the protagonists that the Dragon spheres are Izanagi Objects from deep within the earth, a concept first introduced in Neo-traditionalism of Japan when Maribel ends up traveling to Yomi.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The sequel, 100th Black Market, states in its tutorial that "the magician defeated the market god", which would make Marisa's route in the game the canon one. Though, whether Marisa defeated Chimata while carrying the Blank Card is left ambiguous.
• Gambit Pileup: In the game's final act, Megumu sics the player character on Chimata and sets out to betray her, but Chimata has pre-empted her by opening the market early. Tsukasa, while pretending to be little more than a messenger, is playing both of them against each other. And in Marisa's Extra Stage scenario, Momoyo outplays Tsukasa by threatening her so she won't tell Megumu about her deal with Marisa.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The Ability Cards are being sold, so every time a boss is beaten, they start selling the cards to the heroine, justifying the shopping system.
• Gathering Steam: Momoyo's Ability Card works by making you stronger with every enemy you defeat as long as you don't die or bomb.
• Hidden Elf Village: According to Takane's notes yamawaro live in hidden cliffside hideouts whose entrances are obscured by the forest surrounding Youkai Mountain, and take on a communal lifestyle.
• High-Altitude Battle:
  • The final battle against Chimata takes place under a moonlit sky ringed by a rainbow halo.
  • Inverted with the Stage 4 and Extra Stage battles, which take place deep underground.
• High-Speed Missile Dodge: Unlike most other Touhou games, in most circumstances, grazing bullets does nothing in this game, and there isn't even a graze counter on the HUD. However, if you have Yuyuko's card equipped, any bullets you graze have a random chance of being deleted.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Aya's card. If you stop shooting and move unfocused, your hitbox will straight up disappear for an instant, and when it does reappear, it'll be incredibly small until you focus, stop moving or start shooting.
  It's the ability to cause hitbox crimes that only a tengu can.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels are named after social classes or economic policies, with an inversed relationship between social rank and difficulty:
  • Easy: Noble Level
  • Normal: Commoner Level
  • Hard: Vagrant Level
  • Lunatic: Komuso^note Fan-translated as "Nihilist Monk" Level
  • Extra: Free Markets & Open Guilds Level
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Gluttonous Centipede, unlocked by defeating the Extra Boss, steadily increases your damage output over time and only resets if you die or use a bomb (hits negated by Eirin or Eiki's cards don't count as dying or bombing). After a few minutes of play, you can dispatch stage enemies pretty much instantly and take down bosses in record time, making it by far the most powerful card in the game.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Yukari's card lets you warp between screen edges, with its description saying:
    A card that's popular amongst many humans and youkai, because "what is a screen edge, anyway?" is a great topic for getting people's interest.
  • The Sky-Blue Magatama is what allows the player character to breathe when exploring the oxygen-deprived mines. Its description pokes fun at the idea that the mines would simply have oxygen for the sake of the plot:
    Some humans think that dungeons have breathable oxygen just like everywhere else, but that's a big misassumption.
    The only ones who can breathe easily in dungeons are video game characters.
• Lethal Joke Item: In-Universe. If you take the Blank Card after defeating Megumu, Chimata notices and points it out. The player character complains that she got "the most utterly useless Ability Card around", upon which Chimata gets offended and informs her that the Blank Card is "the one and only card that can control ownership", which essentially means it's the most powerful card of them all.^note The reason this trope doesn't apply out of universe is that the card is never presented as a Joke Item to the player; only the playable characters treat it as such.
• Lighter and Softer: Compared to Wily Beast and Weakest Creature's dreary trek into Hell and the Animal Realm, this game is far brighter and colorful, and more about discovering the secret behind the collectible cards.
• Motif: Money pickups replace the traditional score pickups, and the new characters introduced are related to money in some way:
  • Mike is a money-gathering maneki-neko, Takane is the leader of the economy-building yamawaro, and Sannyo runs a gambling hall for youkai.
  • Tsukasa, Megumu, Chimata, and Momoyo are all part of a scheme to make wealth off of Dragon spheres, while Misumaru is trying to stop them. Individually, pipe foxes like Tsukasa bring wealth but at a price, Megumu seeks to bring greater wealth to the tengu, Chimata is a goddess of the marketplace whose pose even resembles a dollar sign, Momoyo is being paid in Dragon spheres and serves as the supplier for the whole operation, and as a centipede also serves to represent wealth.
• Multiple Endings: Each scenario has two endings based on whether or not you bought the Blank Card following Stage 5, due to it actually being Chimata's personal Ability Card.
• Obvious Rule Patch: The previous two games had a glitch where using a bomb on a survival spell would cause it to produce a health bar, letting the player shoot it down like any other spell. It seems ZUN really couldn't fix the glitch directly, as this game solves the issue by simply having the boss leave the screen entirely during survival spells.
• Out-Gambitted: Tsukasa has been manipulating everyone else involved in the incident, as shown in Stages 5 and 6. However, in Marisa's Extra Stage scenario, when Momoyo agrees to share the dragon gems with Marisa after their fight, Tsukasa tries to stop her by warning that Megumu will not like to hear about it... so Momoyo simply threatens Tsukasa into not telling anyone about it.
  Momoyo: As long as you stay silent about it, I'm guessin' we don't have a problem. Right, Tsukasa?
  Tsukasa: My, my. If Miss Momoyo is threatening me, I suppose I'll have to oblige. I can't possibly win, after all.
• Plot Coupon: The Sky-Blue Magatama. During the main story, the player character can't get very far into the mines because of the lack of oxygen. In the Extra Stage, however, they bring this magatama that allows them to breathe and explore the mines further.
• Powerup Magnet:
  • Nitori's card increases your item collection radius.
  • Kanako's card lowers the item border to about halfway up the screen, making it easier and safer to autocollect items.
  • The trope no longer applies to focused movement, however, as the increased radius from focusing that had been implemented since Mountain of Faith has now been applied to unfocused movement as well, meaning you now have the same item collection radius at all times, and that radius is higher than the default radius of older games.
• Rainbow Motif: The game is described as being a "refreshingly popping rainbow shooter"; its aesthetics are generally multicolored, the main title theme is called "A Rainbow-Spanning Gensokyo", a rainbow appears at the end of stage 1, each character's weapon has a rainbow sheen in their artwork, and the titular Rainbow Dragon Cave is reached at the end of stage 3. Also the final boss, Chimata, has rainbow-colored clothes and fought against under the lunar rainbow.
• Scenery Porn: Stage 5 begins with the sun setting, and after a transition, the scene transitions from sunset to a star-filled night sky for the latter portion.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Eiki's card lets you negate deaths by paying up 200 coins every time you get hit. Its name is even "Money is the best lawyer in Hell".
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The Blank Card runs on this trope. As Chimata explains, it's "the one and only card that can control ownership". This allows its user to bend the rules of the market by exchanging it for all of the next shop's rare cards at once, when normally, only one card may be purchased at a time.
• Shout-Out: Momoyo's "Mushihime-sama's Resplendent and Restless Daily Life" Spell Card is a reference to the danmaku game Mushihime-sama by Cave.
• Soul Jar: According to Misumaru's profile, magatama can contain souls inside of them, and can be used to store abilities, temperaments, and even memories. It's for this reason that Megumu and Chimata desire them, or to be more precise the Dragon spheres they're made out of, as they're the main ingredient in the creation of Ability Cards.
• Splash Damage: Suwako's card makes your base shots create explosions on impact that damage neighboring enemies.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Unlike their last foray deep underground during Subterranean Animism, Reimu and co can't go deeper down within the Rainbow Dragon Cave at first because it's so anoxic that following their fight with Misumaru in Stage 4, they start suffering from oxygen deprivation and need to leave.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Misumaru tells the protagonists that the Dragon spheres have existed long before the birth of mankind, and are beyond human understanding.
• Took a Level in Badass: Lily's card runs on this trope. It summons Lily as an enemy, and when defeated, she drops a bomb fragment, or a life fragment every three summons. She starts out barely a nuisance, firing only a few bullets, but she gets more dangerous the more you keep summoning her.
• Wrap Around: Yukari's card lets you travel from one edge of the screen to the other, just like Reimu's ability when partnered with her in Subterranean Animism.

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