SET SPELL CARD ~ ATTACK
Greatest mesmeric mist of all time. The magic mist is missing power!
Touhou Suimusounote ~ Immaterial and Missing Power is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice and Twilight Frontier for Windows computers on 2004. It's the 7.5th videogame installment in the Touhou Project franchise.
The unusually long winter has passed, followed by a brief spring, and now Gensokyo enters summer. But despite the Cherry Blossoms having long since fallen from the trees, its inhabitants find themselves continuing to hold flower-viewing parties at the Hakurei Shrine every three days, surrounded by a strange mist. Who is compelling people to gather and feast, and for what purpose?
IaMP is the beginning of Touhou's Fighting Game subseries, featuring 11 playable characters and a focus on projectiles. For more gameplay info, see the wiki
.
The game has two official websites (both in Japanese): by Team Shanghai Alice and by Twilight Frontier.
This game provides examples of:
- Calling Your Attacks: You choose one specific spell card (Super Attack) out of three for each of your life bars, but it cannot be used until you pause to input the Declare command. Doing so will send the player into a temporary "spell trance", during which the card's attack can be used repeatedly until you run out of meter.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: The reason it was so hard to find the person behind the mist spreading everywhere is because the mist itself was that person.
- Final Boss, New Dimension: When Yukari allows the Player Character to see Suika, they're transported... somewhere with swirling mist, mountains, and a huge broken moon. It's actually a "floor" that's right above the Hakurei Shrine.
- Genre Shift: The first game in the franchise that's a fighting game. Prior to this point, all games were shooters of some kind.
- Gratuitous English: The "Missing Power" mentioned in the title and a few other places in the game - in context, it seems to mean that the power is hard to notice or understand.
- Interface Screw: Suika's final attack, Hyakumanki Yakkou ("Night Parade of One Million Demons", sometimes
Woolseyised as "Pandemonium") destroys elements of the interface as it progresses. - Jerkass Has a Point: From Reimu's route:Reimu: "[Remilia] looks like the kind of person who'd do something like this, so I came to teach her a lesson."
Sakuya: "Don't punish people for what they look like. Even if she does."
(later)
Sakuya: "Milady is most definitely probably not behind this." - Mana Shield: The player's Spirit gauge drops whenever they block a projectile, or block a melee attack while in the wrong stance (standing, crouching or aerial); mis-blocking a "Guard Crush" attack will completely empty it. While your Spirit gauge is empty you cannot perform specials or projectile attacks, and your blocks become less effective.
- Mascot Fighter: Described as a "festival game", focused on bringing together characters from past titles rather than introducing new ones. Its mechanics are also rather unusual for a Fighting Game.
- Multiple Life Bars: Players have two bars of health, each with an associated Spell Card. Once per round you can declare a Spell Card, which both restores health and adds a powerful attack to your moveset for a short time (fuelled by your Spell Card Meter). Bosses in Story Mode can have more than two healthbars and activate a Spell Card for each one, similar to the Shoot 'Em Up games.
- Regenerating Mana: A character's Spirit meter will refill itself when not being used. You can also refill it by collecting "spirit items" which appear whenever you knock a character to the ground, or strike them with an attack while they have projectiles on the screen.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The reason Suika didn't have a clear motive for causing the parties is because she didn't have any motive beyond "more parties" in the first place (she was disappointed by how Yuyuko's extended winter cut flower-viewing season short).
- Smart Bomb: IaMP has two mechanics based on the "spirit strikes" of the Shoot 'Em Up Touhou games:
- Hitting an opponent while they have projectiles on the screen will convert them into spirit items which are autocollected by the player.
- There are also expendable bomb items which can be used in one of three ways: as a Combo Breaker, as a non-damaging attack which pushes an opponent back and restores your Spirit, or to perform a Roman Cancel with fixed damage.
- SNK Boss: Technically every character counts as one in Story Mode. While the first two stages only give bosses two spellcards, it keeps increasing until Stage 7 boss has six (although Stage 6 and 7 bosses are the same for almost everyone). Each lifebar will have a spellcard which can be either a way stronger of the playable version's spell card, or a completely new one. Unlike the player character, however, the AI is not limited by the usual limits and will keep using it until that lifebar is drained, and sometimes just straight up having massive damage reduction and being Immune to Flinching outside of specific parts of the spellcard cycle. Depending on the spellcards the character has, this can range from somewhat annoying but still rather fair (such as Marisa spamming Stardust Reverie or Alice's Artful Sacrifice throwing multiple dolls) to things that feel like they were meticulously hand-crafted just to burn an entire life (Youmu's Double Wheel of Pain, Remilia's Queen of Midnight, Yukari's Infinite Speed Flying Object or Suika's Night Parade of One Million Demons).
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Rather than usual Fighting Game triangles like "Strikes beat grappling beat defending", IaMP and its sequels run on "Projectiles beat melee beat graze". This leads Touhou character recreations to be particularly notorious in M.U.G.E.N, where most of their opponents lack the tools to deal with them.
- Title Drop: The phrase "Missing Power" appears in the name of Suika's Leitmotif ("Fairyland's Onigashima ~ Missing Power") and several of her attacks.
- True Final Boss: A weird double-layered example: you can only fight Yukari if you have not continued yet, and if you have continud on Yukari, no Suika for you. Both of these scenarios have different bad endings, too. Yukari and Suika only have one ending, with one credit clear being mostly for bragging rights.
- Videogame Dashing: A major part of gameplay - characters using a dash, super-jump or certain Dash Attacks are considered to be "grazing", making them immune to projectiles. Characters can dash up to twice in midair, or three times for Remilia.
