Hello there! My name is Digi, and I'll be doing this here liveblog. This will be a nuzlocked playthrough of Touhoumon Puppet Play Enhanced 1.8.
There's been a few liveblogs of Touhoumon here, so you may already know a bit about this series. Still, I'll assume you might not have heard of this before, and take a moment to explain. And by a moment, I mean three pages. Lets just get this boring stuff out of the way, shall we?
I've never played Touhou, but what I understand of it is this: its a series of shooters, based in a fantasy world of magic, separate from our own. Oh, and nearly all of the characters are adorable little girls. Touhoumon, originally a hack of Pokemon Fire Red, is what happens when fans take those adorable little girls, and place them into the pokemon universe. The original Touhou Puppet Play has since spawned more variants of the same concept, including Touhoumon Blue, Another World, and World Link.
I've been playing through World Link for about a month and a half now, and I have a pretty decent grasp of the mechanics and Puppets it holds. As a result, I decided to take that knowledge, go search out this game, and...
Promptly throw it all out the window, because it is useless to me. I had might as well be playing an entirely different game.
WL and AW both have very little in the way of major changes to the pokemon game mechanics. There were adjustments to the type chart, such as bug no longer being weak to fire, or steel being SE against dark, but there were very few of these overall. Getting used to the types of the Puppets took a bit longer, but I was rather surprised with how quickly I picked up the information. I still have to reference the wiki, but not nearly as often as I used to.
1.8, however, changes things. A lot. Nearly half of the existing types have been removed and replaced with new ones, and as a result the type chart is almost completely new. Examples of new types include dream, beast, miasma, wind, heart, and more. Some of these are mostly just reskins of previously existing types-miasma is very similar to poison, for example. But poison definitely did not used to be SE on water. Wind is essentially electric, and works about the same as far as its weaknesses and strengths go. Reason is also very similar to psychic. But then there are types like Faith, Beast, or Heart, which don't have much resemblance to anything.
For a full chart, see this: http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Touhoudex/Type_Chart
Second chart on the page.
Anyway, these type changes also mean that I have to completely re-learn the types of nearly ever Puppet in the game. A good portion of them are completely re-typed, even if the types they were in WL still exist.
Additionally, evolutions work completely different in this game. WL and AW had a bit of a confusing system, with only some Puppets having access to the high BST "Last Word" form. Many stopped at Ex, the equivalent of a final evolution in pokemon. This made many Puppets useless past a certain point in the games, especially since said games got a serious ramp-up in difficulty near the end. You are forced to only use Puppets from a certain, small group, and to build teams that can counter Puppets from an equally small group.
This game appears to be, if nothing else, far more balanced. From my limited understanding, Puppets evolve once. First you will have the 'chibi' form, written as cName. So a Chibi Alice is written as cAlice. Once evolved, the name will simply be Alice. They also have the option of branching out into different paths via various 'Heart Stones'. There are attack Heart Stones, Defense Heart Stones, and so on. Most Puppets seem to have at least one, usually no more than two of these available. They do Exactly What it Says on the Tin. A Puppet that may evolve with a Attack Heart Stone will turn into a form much more oriented towards its respective attacking stat, and receive a name such as AAlice. I'll get into this more as we progress.
One last game mechanic to note: There is a physical/special split in this game. Whooo? Each attack has a 'physical' or 'special' symbol next to its power when on the pokemon info screen. To be honest, I'm not sure what that does for this hack. I can't recall ever having a Puppet that was handicapped by the lack of physical/special split. But hey, what do I know? (Answer: NOT MUCH.)
For now, the rules!
- 1. I may only capture the first Puppet encounter on a route. Only one capture per cave. ):
- 2. If a Puppet faints, it must be perma-boxed, and can no longer be used.
- 3. Everything gets nicknamed.
- 4. Dupes clause. If I already own a given Puppet, living or dead, and I find it as a first encounter, I may try again on that route until I find a non-dupe Puppet.
- 5. Don't know if there are shinies here. If there are, and I find one, I can use it. Do not look a gift Arceus in the mouth.
- 6. The rules may be tweaked if needed.
I believe that's all the rules I need-I don't feel like making this challenge any more difficult on myself. I'm playing this more or less blind, but I am referencing the wiki and that type chart constantly.
The wiki I will be using: http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Touhoudex_2
However, the wiki is not always complete. I may also use a Pokemon Editor to take a look at Puppets when the wiki does not give me the information I need. Mostly, this means movesets.
The last I want to mention is that this game's text is largely unedited. I believe the only change is Pokemon —> Boneka, the word this hacker uses for Puppet. Keep in mind that instead of translating the original Japanese version of this game, the game changes have simply been applied to an English version of Fire Red. Then again, it may be just as well that they leave the text alone. AW and WL both had...questionable uses of English. In any case, I will skip over the games plot and general dialogue. Unless I note otherwise, assume it is unchanged from Fire Red.
I've never done this liveblog shebang before, so please feel free to comment or critique my writing. I have a fair bit of progress made in-game, so updates here should be pretty steady.
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