A DJ's quest to Take Over the World.
"To understand the ten desires of a human is to know them fully. In the past, the present... and the future..."
Touhou Shinreibyounote ~ Ten Desires is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice for Windows computers in 2011. It's the thirteenth videogame installment in the Touhou Project franchise, and the start of the "third generation" of Windows games.
It's spring, and both Gensokyo and the Netherworld have become filled with divine spirits - nascent, fleeting gods born from the desires of living things. Seeing that the spirits are being drawn to something near the Human Village, Reimu, Marisa, Sanae and Youmu head out to investigate.
The game features the Divine Spirits mechanic - a second class of collectable items that appear when enemies are killed, bosses are damaged, or at certain scripted events. In addition to boosting the player's lives, bombs or score, some spirits can fill up a "Trance meter" which can be discharged to enter a temporary Super Mode.
The game's official website can be found here
(in Japanese).
This game provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Extra lives cost more fragments as you gain more of them, which results in it only being possible to get a few of them throughout the game. Worse yet, there are no 1-Up items anywhere in this game, only fragments.
- Already Done for You: Perspective Inverted. Mamizou found out that the heroines have already defeated Miko, the person whom she's called for by Nue to defeat. Doesn't stop her from fighting said heroines, just because. Considering Mamizou's power, perhaps the heroines should just stay at home.
- Anti-Frustration Features: From this game onwards, you don't have to finish a stage during a playthrough to unlock it for practice mode, you only need to reach it.
- Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: The four playable shot types fit this bill, and in that order, too:
- Balance: Reimu has homing amulets for range and concentrated needles for damage.
- Power: Marisa does very high damage with her narrow ranged lasers and powerful concentrated missiles.
- Skill: Sanae has wide shots specialized for range and crowd control.
- Gimmick: Youmu works differently altogether; her unfocused shot is nothing stellar in terms of power or range, but instead of having a conventional focused shot, she has a strong, wide Charged Attack that is unleashed after holding down for long enough then releasing the shot and focus buttons.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The Final Boss is a Gender Flipped version of Prince Shoutoku, who despite her public endorsement of Buddhism was secretly transforming herself into a Taoist immortal.
- Boss Banter: A first for the series - during the Final Boss battle, speech bubbles will appear over her and her summoned allies.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Kogasa states that she keeps losing to Yoshika because she always times out.
- Call-Back: In Perfect Cherry Blossom, Letty was the stage 1 boss because she was the obvious suspect for that game's incident, but she had nothing to do with it and drastically held back her power as a result. Here, Yuyuko, the actual culprit of Perfect Cherry Blossom, ends up in the exact same position Letty was.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: Nue calls in Mamizou to deal with Miko, but by the time she shows up, you already beat her to the punch. Mamizou decides to fight you instead.
- Charged Attack: Youmu doesn't have a conventional focused shot. Instead, she charges up while in focus, and if she waits long enough before unfocusing, she releases a high damage slashing wave.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Gray Spirits give points equal to the current Point Item Value, and fill more of the Trance meter compared to other spirits; Blue Spirits increase the Point Item Value; Purple Spirits are Life Pieces; and Green Spirits are Bomb Pieces.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Downplayed. Unlike with previous Windows final bosses, Miko's final spell doesn't have a bomb shield, but it does have bomb armor, that is, it takes reduced damage from bombs.
- Creepy Cemetery: It's revealed that Myouren Temple has a very vast cemetery in its backyard. Our heroes fight the jiangshi Yoshika and her very oppressive poisonous kunai danmaku over it. Then it's revealed that the Buddhist monks deliberately built the cemetery over a different mausoleum to prevent their rival Taoist liches from resurrecting themselves.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: This was the last of the few games in the series where completing the game on Easy wouldn't unlock the Extra Stage. Strangely, you still have to play Easy if you want to unlock the Overdrive spells, as doing so requires you to capture the equivalent spells in every other difficulty, including Easy.
- Game-Breaking Bug: The game would crash if you are not using a bomb, a valuable resource, when the Survival Card of the Extra Boss ends. This is the second last attack in the entire game. Even worse, that makes it impossible to capture in Spellcard mode because you aren't given any bombs to start with. Be grateful the patch for that only took 4 days after release.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Kogasa complains that she can't defeat Yoshika due to her healing gimmicks, because "no matter how much I shoot her, I always lose by timeout", which doesn't make sense either way in terms of gameplay; if Yoshika is the boss, then she's the one who loses in case of a timeout, but if Kogasa is the boss, Yoshika is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and thus her healing gimmicks would be meaningless.
- Harder Than Hard: The new Overdrive mode. It's an extra difficulty added to specific spellcards (one for each non-cameo character) that's unlocked by capturing that spellcard on all other difficulties. They range from being the next logical step up after the Lunatic version to being much, much worse.
- Healing Boss: Yoshika Miyako can use spirits to heal herself in Recovery "Heal By Desire" (where shooting at her spirit flunkies causes her to absorb them and heal) and Desire Sign "Saved Up Desire Spirit Invitation"/Desire Sign "Score Desire Eater" (where she occasionally launches some spirits, and you have to collect them before she can absorb them and heal).
- Hypocritical Humor: Kyouko warns Youmu, who has been cutting down fairies left and right, that "the temple has a strict ban on killing", but when Youmu doesn't back down, Kyouko delivers this gem:Anybody swinging around sharp swords and committing unneccesary killing in the temple......is to die here!
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels are named after prayers for stuff that supposedly ranges from easy to impossible to achieve.
- Easy: Prayer for health and long life
- Normal: Prayer for traffic safety
- Hard: Prayer for business prosperity
- Lunatic: Prayer for IT data security
- Extra: Prayer for protection from danmaku
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Youmu. Instead of narrowing her shot, holding the Focus button halts her shot in order to charge up a powerful melee attack. Her hitbox also shrinks while charging.
- Mercy Invincibility: Inverted - if you've filled at least one flame in the Trance meter, then getting hit will cause you to enter a shortened Trance automatically and die only when the timer runs out.
- Multiple Endings: You're given a 'Parallel Ending' if you beat the game on normal or higher with at least three bombs in stock (bombs from unused lives don't count).
- Not Me This Time: Stage 1 has the Player Character travel to the Netherworld, figuring that since it's an incident about spirits Yuyuko is likely to know something. Reimu outright accuses Yuyuko of causing the incident herself. The exception is Youmu, who was with Yuyuko the whole time and is challenged to a fight as a test of her abilities.
- Super Mode: Trance Mode, activated by gathering enough divine spirits to fill up the 3 flames on the Trance meter. For 10 seconds the player is invulnerable, has powered-up attacks, and increases the effectiveness of spirits they collect. If the player is struck by an attack with at least 1 flame filled, they will enter a shorter Trance state before dying.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Yuyuko has apparently figured out exactly what's going on, but finds the idea of simply telling the Player Character too boring."I doubt that some troublesome individual is about to make a return, or that there's any secrets or anything in, say, the cemetery behind the temple..."
- Variable Mix: Each stage and boss theme has both a standard and "spirit world" version, the latter playing while the player is in Trance.
