Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Best in series"

Touhou as a series has provided many excellent games in the SHUMP genre. The games are, as a rule, visually breathtaking, excellently designed, and manage to combine a high level of difficulty with a high level of fairness (if you die, it's nearly always because you made a mistake, not because the game killed you with something you couldn't see coming).

Despite the general brilliance, most Touhou games have some mechanical aspect that I'm not really fond of. Early games generally don't have the dot that shows your hit box, and don't have auto-collect. Imperishable Night I find great, but it has the extra long death bomb window which I don't like playing with (as it dulls my reflexes for all the other games). Mountain of Faith I also find very good, but has some glitches with collision here and there, and glitches with damage, and the final boss is not well designed (one of the cards is not considered possible to beat on the Easy difficulty). Unidentified Fantastic Object has the colour changing UFOs that drive everyone up the wall.

Subterranean Animisim, however, is pretty much flawless. It takes the excellent "power = bombs" mechanic introduced in Mountain of Faith. In previous Touhou games you wanted to make sure you used every bomb before you died. In SA and MoF you were punished for bombing too much, but as long as you bombed rarely you wouldn't run out; this makes the focus more on the gameplay, and less on the bomb gauge. The implementation for using power as bombs in Subterranean Animism is also an improvement. The problem in Moutain of Faith being that many enemies dropped too much power, so you could bomb almost constantly in some levels. Additionally, your damage doesn't go down between 5 and 4 power in MoF, so you weren't always sacrificing something significant in order to bomb. In Subterranean Animism, if you bomb, then you will take a short-term power loss.

I have typically focused more on playing Touhou games and less on scoring high. Subterranean Animism makes this more possible than ever by making extra lives unrelated to score. In changing the extra lives mechanic, it also gives little incentives to learn how to deal with each boss attack (since if you do without dieing, you get 1/5 of a 1up). Graze (when you get close to bullets) is an excellent mechanic in Touhou games as it rewards you for taking risks, but in most games it's a score mechanic so I don't use it much. Subterranean Animism made me care about Graze by making it a collection mechanic: yes I do want my powerups! At the same time, SA doesn't remove score--all the scoring mechanics are there for people who want to play the game from a different angle. It just changes it so that new players don't need to be taught about a dozen scoring mechanics, and can just start playing.

All six characters are different in very interesting ways in SA. ReimuA fires straight ahead and lets you teleport to the other side of the screen. ReimuB has slight homing with a "laser" effect of hitting all enemies in a line, and she lets you collect all powerups on the screen by taking your hands off the keyboard momentarily. ReimuC lets you change the direction you're shooting in, and lets you move very fast if provided don't shoot. MariA has dolls with frickin' laser beams on their heads...and 8 bombs. MariB lets you switch between shot patterns, and has theoretically the most damage but it's quite difficult to take advantage of it (she deals the most damage if she's shooting backwards from above the boss). MariC instead of a normal bomb gets a shot shield, that lets you take a hit without dieing. Every one of them has rather distinct advantages. Perhaps not perfectly balanced, but then again I've met people with preferences for each one.

The difficulty is actually rather well done in Subterranean Animisim. Touhou games in general are known for their difficulty, to the point that the creator is often accused of not actually testing the Easy difficulty. This is one of the few Touhou games where the Easy difficulty feels legitimately Easy (relatively speaking), and doesn't have a moment of "Ooookay, nobody tested this, did they?" At the same time, the hardest difficulties for those who want challenge, manage to be harder than they are in most other Touhou games. In other words, the difficulty levels really do exactly what they were meant to do.

Design-wise the game is also a step up. Several attacks use ideas that had received little or no exploration earlier in the series. Attacks that use gravity against you, for instance. An attack composed almost entirely of shots that don't move, for another. Enormous balls of fire, for a third. And more. Additionally, the Stage 4 boss is basically a collection of "best of Touhou attacks"--using a different set of classic attacks for each of the six characters. (Thanks to this boss, I remember a time when I cared less about beating the game than I did about seeing stage 4 for all six characters).

Bottom line, I realized a while ago that I was playing Subterranean Animisim more than any other game. There's an enormous list of things I like about the game, and basically nothing I don't like about the game (which is unusual--for most of my favourites I can name 20 things that could be done better, but ask me what I'd want to see improved in SA and...I'm not even sure; maybe some slight tweaks to the Extra stage?) Frankly, there's a strong argument that Subterranean Animism is the best game I have ever played.