Touhou Kaeidzukanote ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice for Windows computers in 2005. It's the ninth installment in the Touhou Project franchise.
Spring has come to Gensokyo, but the flowers that bloom are those of every season at once. Sixteen characters set out to figure out what's going on.
A Spiritual Successor to the PC-98 game Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, PoFV has similar Twinkle Star Sprites inspired gameplay, featuring split-screen duels against the AI or another human player. It too would have its own spiritual successor in the form of Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost.
The otherwise unofficial fancomic compilation Touhou Shikoubana ~ Seasonal Dream Vision includes a Short Story prologue to this game titled A Beautiful Flower Blooming Violet Every 60 Years, told from the perspective of Yukari Yakumo (who did not appear in the game itself).
The game's official website can be found here
(in Japanese).
This game provides examples of:
- Aesop Amnesia: Each of the character's storylines ends with them learning An Aesop. If you play as Eiki, however, which takes place after all of the others, it turns out that everyone forgot or misunderstood what they were supposed to learn.
- A.I. Breaker: The AI doesn't look very far ahead in predicting bullet movements and instead relies on reacting to nearby bullets, so certain characters perform significantly better against AI opponents:
- Aya's high-speed EX bullets and spell cards are easily predicted and streamed by a human player, but move fast enough that the AI is unable to react to them in time to dodge.
- The large laser in Eiki's summon Spell Card comes with a warning tracer which would be an obvious indicator for players to get out of the way, but the AI will try to move out of the way at the last second and get hit because the laser is too wide for them to move far away enough before it hits.
- Medicine's EX poison clouds will slow players' movements, and are capable of piling up their slow effects until a player is just about immobilized. Savvy human players will avoid these when given the option, but the AI will happily fly into the masses of poison, get stuck, and become unable to dodge incoming bullets.
- Arrange Mode: This is the only Phantasmagoria with Extra, and it effectively works as one: You start with no extra lives and have to instead survive long enough against invincible AI opponent without taking damage. While in main game score extends are at 10 million and then every 20 until 90, in Extra it's every 5 million until 40, granting a total of one more life after accounting for less starting ones. Additionally, each side starts with a full gauge and Lv. 10 attacks... which means the AI gets to be aggressive that much faster. Consequently, it's easy to die on any stage, whereas in main game Stages 1-5 tend to be more of filler stages before AI gets serious.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Continuing the
tradition of Prismrivers breaking the game, playing the story mode using Lyrica's alternate costume causes the game to crash after stage 8. There is also another bug that often causes the game to crash after trying to save a replay, particularly with Cirno. - Hold the Line: Every single battle in Extra Stages as Komachi or Eiki are this. The enemy is invulnerable for a set amount of time and you must survive until their time is up, at which they often screw up on purpose.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels are named after various plants:
- Easy: Asian Skunk Cabbage
- Normal: Pheasant's Eye Narcissus
- Hard: Camellia Sasanqua
- Lunatic: Red Spider Lily
- Extra: Saigyou Ayakashi (aka the sealed tree from Perfect Cherry Blossom)
- Move in the Frozen Time: Sakuya's Time Sign "Private Vision" does not freeze the other player if they're also playing as Sakuya.
- No Antagonist: Downplayed; while Komachi slacking off exacerbates the scope, the incident itself is not caused by anyone involved and is instead caused by something outside of Gensokyo causing a massive surplus in human spirits.
- Vicious Cycle: The events of this game happen every sixty years. But there is no real danger save for confused people picking random fights with each other, which is just another day in Gensokyo, and the incident resolves itself eventually.
- Updated Re-release: The Steam release was updated with online multiplayer through direct IP connections, as well as support for Remote Play Together for more stable matchmaking.
