Deal with it.
Touhou Kishinjounote ~ Double Dealing Character is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice for Windows computers in 2013. It's the fourteenth videogame installment in the Touhou Project franchise.
Minor youkai are becoming aggressive for no clear reason. At the same time human tools are coming to life, including the weapons of Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame and Sakuya Izayoi. Suspecting a connection between these incidents, they set out to figure out what's going on.
The game features the updated Item Get auto-collection mechanic. When you auto-collect, either by passing the Item Getting Border Line, using a bomb, or reaching/defeating a boss, you will get bonus points and life/bomb pieces based on how many power and point items are auto-collected within a certain window of timing.
The game's official website can be found here
(in Japanese). It is notable for being the first game to be released internationally and in a digital format (alongside the usual physical format), on Playism.
This game provides examples of:
- Animate Inanimate Object: Three of the bosses are tsukumogami prematurely awakened by the powers of the Miracle Mallet. The same effect is responsible for creating the player characters' Evil Weapons.
- Animating Artifact: The Miracle Mallet can cause tools to prematurely transform into tsukumogami. Three of them achieve human form and are fought as bosses; another three are weapons wielded by the Player Characters, which became more powerful at the cost of making their wielder more bloodthirsty.
- Antagonist Title: Seija Kijin is the titular double dealing character, a manipulative Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist and False Friend who started the incident just to cause chaos.
- Anti-Frustration Features: If you activate Sakuya-A's bomb, which is a time-limited Single-Use Shield, but you don't get hit, three bomb pieces (eight of which make up a full bomb) will spawn as the shield expires.
- Arc Welding: After multiple years of new factions and locations being introduced in the aftermath of the Moriya Shrine's arrival, Double Dealing Character integrated old settings into the ZUN's modern style of worldbuilding.
- Autobots, Rock Out!: Every boss theme is some form of rock. Stage 4 is especially unique for including a biwa and koto as its rocking boss theme.
- Ax-Crazy: Marisa and Sakuya become more and more unhinged over the course of the game if you play as their Type A variants ("use her cursed weapon"). Reimu, however, averts this trope even in Type A, holding on to her usual self.
- Bizarrchitecture: The Shining Needle Castle is a floating castle that also happens to be upside down due to the power of the Miracle Mallet used to create it wearing out.
- Breaking Old Trends: The staff roll theme, "Mysterious, Mysterious Tools", would drop the "[Word] Dream" subtitle that every staff roll had used since Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream. Later games would continue this new trend.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Seija has the ability to flip anything over. What does she use this on? Your screen.
- Covers Always Lie: Shinmyoumaru's silhouette on the cover edits out the weapon from her in-game portrait, presumably because it's too easily recognisable.
- Difficult, but Awesome: The bonuses system in this game requires you to auto-collect a large number of items at once, which entails going to the top portion of the screen, which is not always possible or safe, or deploying a bomb, and bombs are a relatively scarce resource in the series. A skilled player can easily keep bombs in tow at all times and max out their lives counter and keep it that way even if they take hits, as you can get an extra life with as few as three auto-collects.
- Easter Egg: "Reverse Ideology" sound extremely similar to itself when played backwards.
- Empathic Environment: The fourth stage is strange in the sense that it beats in rhythm with the music.
- Foreshadowing:
- One line from Marisa in Hopeless Masquerade has her start to mention that her mini-Hakkero has been acting strangely, only to decide It's Probably Nothing.
- Stage 5's background flips (but mercifully, not the actual gameplay elements) sometime before you even meet Seija, giving you a warning as to what's to come.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: In most Touhou games, different character types only make a difference in terms of gameplay, and maybe the Stage 4 boss's attacks. Here, however, the two types of each character are "use their affected weapon" (Type A) and "don't use their affected weapon" (Type B) and are an important plot point. For Marisa and Sakuya in particular, if you play them as Type A they undergo some...interesting personality changes as the game progresses.
- Hate Plague: Something is causing various, normally non-violent youkai to become aggressive. It seems to be affecting player characters too; Marisa and Sakuya become Ax-Crazy if you play through the story with their currently cursed weapons.
- High-Altitude Battle: The Extra Stage boss fight against Raiko takes place inside a magical storm cloud high above Gensokyo.
- Hitbox Dissonance: During Sukuna's timeout Spell Card, the player character and their hitbox increase dramatically in size. However, Marisa and Sakuya's hitboxes are slightly larger than the hitbox graphic would suggest, which doesn't happen with Reimu.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels are named after gemstones.
- Easy: Emerald Level
- Normal: Aquamarine Level
- Hard: Ruby Level
- Lunatic: Hope Diamond Level
- Extra: Magnesium Level
- Ominous Floating Castle: The eponymous Kishinjou, extra-ominous for being upside-down.
- Public Domain Artifact: The Miracle Mallet wielded by the Final Boss.
- Recurring Riff: Many stages and bosses repeat the main verse or have slight variations of Kid's Festival ~ Innocent Treasures.
- Red Herring: The bosses in the demo are youkai whose myths have become hybridized with those of similar European monsters - a ningyo/mermaid, a rokurokubi/dullahan, and a werewolf who transforms into the extinct Japanese wolf. This pattern is not continued in later stages until the final boss, where Shinmyoumaru the kobito is conflated with dwarves.
- Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: For stage 6, overlapping with Boss Remix. The stage itself, the Final Boss and the endings all use variations of the same theme.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The protagonists' weapons had been moving around on their own for quite a while, but they didn't think it was a big deal and left off investigating until the scale of the incident got out of hand. Wild and Horned Hermit confirms that they started coming to life before the previous game. While some of this could be explained as the weapons subtly influencing their masters' minds, the main factor seems to have been simple laziness.
- Vanilla Unit: The weapons of the three protagonists are acting oddly. At the start of the game, you can choose whether you want to use the cursed weapon. Choosing not to gives you a more basic shot type.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Marisa-A. Her cursed weapon is her iconic mini-hakkero, replacing Magic Missile with a flamethrower as her focused shot. It has limited reach, is very weak at a distance and while it gets really strong at very close range, getting that close to the enemies and bosses to begin with is rather difficult, especially in higher difficulties.
- Violation of Common Sense: One tactic for scoring-based runs is to die on purpose to get more bombs, since bombs trigger autocollects and this game's bonuses system is based around autocollecting a large number of items at once. Given that a good player can easily maintain a big stockpile of lives thanks to how extra lives are earned in this game, this is less dangerous than it seems, at least compared to other games.
