Imperfect Game: Touhou 13 Ten Desires

Hello and welcome to Imperfect Game, less of a review blog and more of an excuse to keep playing video games and call it work. Today I am covering yet another Touhou Project game, this time I am covering Touhou 13 Ten Desires. It’s not one of my favorites but I’ll try and do this game justice in this review.

The main gimmick of this entry in the Touhou Project Series is a death-triggered power-up called the spirit gauge, You collect spirits to fill this gauge, and when you die you go into a powered-up state that's immune to damage for a few seconds before dying as normal. while keeping to the theme of Death and rebirth it doesn’t do nearly anything to outweigh the cost of dying in the first place as lives are hard to come by in Ten Desires, which is a shame as without a good core mechanic an official Touhou Project game doesn’t excel at much in terms of gameplay as the same controls and shot types haven’t changed much if at all from previous entries in the series. Maybe if the gauge had double or maybe triple the time it could at least act like an invincibility power-up but sadly that's not the case.

The Story seems to be that a bunch of dead spirits has started appearing and Reimu and the rest of the playable cast start investigating the cause of it. These spirits appear in-game in a variety of colors like pink, green, blue, and finally white. The pink spirits give life pieces that when you collect enough grant an extra life, the green does the same but for the bomb pieces instead. I think blue gives an extra score and white fills up the spirit gauge but the same is also true of the other colored variants so white spirits may as well not exist. The overall theme for Touhou 13 seems to be death and rebirth or at least just death as not a whole lot looks or sounds like a rebirth apart from the main boss or a couple of characters.

The bosses are decent at best, they seem to either fall just under the standard the Touhou Project had set from past entries. The first three bosses fell flat and just don’t have the Touhou charm usually present in boss bullet patterns. The 5th and 6th stage bosses were the only ones that felt like they met the standard and it wasn’t by much more than the rest of the game. While the 2nd stage boss Kyouko Kasodani (A spirit who controls sounds/echoes) had a neat gimmick in the form of what I think are “soundwave boxes” that bounce bullets that touch it in a different direction. Then you have the 4th stage boss Seiga Kaku making use of former Stage 3 boss Yoshika Miyako (who is a zombie controlled by Seiga) to block bullets from the player and also use her as a turret but other than that most bosses are pretty predictable and boring, still about as hard to beat in terms of Touhou Difficulty standards just boring at the same time.

The Stages were pretty boring, either most of the enemies come from the same place too often or the stages repeat themselves a bit too often. The enemy varieties are not really different either; mostly you’ll just be shooting down fairies and will-o-wisps; they mostly come in lines either just flying or firing a bunch of bullets. While past entries have managed to do more with these simple patterns Ten Desires doesn’t have many good things to say about its stage design as it mostly reuses the design choices that other entries of Touhou Project simply did better.

Then you have the game’s sound design and music, music is good, especially on stage 4’s “Desire Drive” and the final boss theme “True Administrator” sadly I can’t do justice for these songs in words so for that I would simply suggest looking these songs up on YouTube as ZUN’s synth music style is still going strong, though in Ten Desires most of the music was just at the standard for Touhou Project and those two songs are the most memorable for me.

As for visual design, you have the usual criticism of ZUN’s artwork being bad but I personally liked the character designs of the bosses and player characters even if ZUN’s art back then was still in need of improvement. You have decent sprite work for the play area of the gameplay and the bullets look sharp and glowy so while ZUN’s actual artwork may be of questionable quality he knows how to make the actual bullets and special effects in-game look good. The bullets come in tons of different shapes like kunai or arrows, big glowing orbs, or laser beams that curve and bend and the way they move is often dynamic like mimicking falling arrows or a bolt of lightning. Then you have the 3D environments, while the renders of these environments are more than good enough for a mostly 2D game they are of mundane locations like a temple and a cemetery and yet another temple only it’s underground, they all have story reasons to exist if you pay enough attention to the dialog. (which may require an English patch made by the Touhou community, if you're not already using one)

Inclosing I would almost go as far as to say that Touhou 13 Ten Desires is not up to par with the rest of the Touhou series, while my least favorite game in the series was 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom for the absurd difficulty I might have to replace it with 13 due to Ten Desires being bland for a Touhou Game, I genuinely would rather play 15 again at this point. But to be completely fair I will admit the game is functionally playable and the difficulty is the average for Touhou Project while I may not like the spirit gauge system or really enjoyed myself fighting any of the bosses, It’s not a bad game that can’t be enjoyed It’s just one that's not to my liking. This has been Imperfect Game and thanks for reading