The Let's Play Archive

Fantasy Maiden Wars E

by BlitzBlast

Part 71: Reimu, Keine, Generic Fairies

Alright, time for my contribution to this thread. Let's talk about the options menu, because there's some cool stuff in there.



Chronicles is an encyclopedia of all the characters that appear in the game. It's a reference to the Gensokyo chronicles, which will be discussed later on.
Music Room is the sound test mode, where you can listen to all the stage, event and character music that comes up in the game, the name is an homage to the Music Room option in every touhou game ever.
Spellcards is a list of every spellcard encountered in the game, and how many times it's been captured on each difficulty, it's pretty much pointless (Also, one of the spellcards Misdirection is bugged, so it won't show up at all).
Scenarios is a timeline of the story, along with a quick blurb summarising each chapter, Blitz is using these as episode previews.
Glossary gives some backstory and details about the touhou universe.
Finally, system allows you to change the game's settings.
After every chapter I'll be posting the new chronicles and music entries. I'll be posting a few glossary entries after every few chapters. All these updates are

Chronicles

Reimu

quote:

The Hakurei shrine maiden duty is to hunt down youkai and resolve incidents, and is supposed to deal with youkai harshly.
However, she herself treats both humans and youkai equally without prejudice. Her tendency to treat everyone that same way means that means strong youkai generally like her.
Her daily activities normally consist of sweeping, drinking tea, and taking afternoon naps, repeatedly. Her lifestyle is extremely carefree.
That means that she seldom trains herself, leading to Akyu calling her the shrine maiden most lacking in a sense of danger amongst all the generations.
However, once she senses the hint of an incident, she becomes more proactive and heads to resolve it. Her main means of resolving incidents is her intuition. She really has no special basis to the actions she takes.
Although in reality, when she is in the middle of resolving incidents, she often grumbles about it being too dark to see properly, and not know where to go. She has even questioned her own sense of direction before.
With all of that taken into account, perhaps her intuition is all she has to direct her to where she wants to go.
Although it has been mentioned that she is normally carefree and free of prejudice, when it comes to her duties, she is merciless. Every single person, human or youkai that she meets while resolving an incident will be defeated.
Thus, her unwavering nature as the "Hakurei shrine maiden" cannot be called into question. She exists as the true balancer of Gensokyo.
Her power is being able to fly. This includes the standard meaning of flying through the sky, but it also allows her to float past physical and mental bonds to do as she pleases.
There is an impression that Reimu is poor as her shrine has few worshipers, and thus few donations. But she has been rewarded for resolving incidents, appears to have a source of income outside donations, and though it's not entirely related to money, she does go to the human village to shop.
Rather than showing the shrine in a state of extreme poverty, it would be more fitting to think of her lifestyle as simple and frugal, which fits her character as well.
As the real-type main character, her story was planned from the start.
We aimed to show a view of the charming world of Gensokyo with her conversations with Keine and Akyu.
Reimu's route goes through lectures and uses intuition to unravel the mystery of the scarlet mist. We hope you enjoy it.

"My job is simple. All I have to do is take you down!"

Reimu is basically the "main character" in the touhou franchise, being the only one to be in all of the main games (Marisa, the other protagonist, was not playable until the third installment). Fanon mainly focuses on her being poor, as well as having a creepy fixation on her armpits. Still, she's the best character so who cares what creepy fans do. Btw, pumping all your points into reimu is pretty much the best strategy.

Keine

quote:

This makes her a werewolf-type hakutaku, thus "were-hakutaku".
Her main occupation is to compile history, but she was unhappy with the shallow knowledge of history amongst humans, and opened an elemetary school.
She is intelligent and serious, often nitpicky about etiquette and proper manners, such as how to greet someone properly. She often talks at length about such subjects, fully encompassing the personality of a "teacher".
Although she is a therianthrope, she holds humans dear to her. Her character profile in "Imperishable Night" states that "Her power is used only for humans".
This is practiced in an actual situation as well; in "Imperishable Night", she opposes the player characters in order to pretect the human village.
A character who lives in the human village and considers herself an ally of humans is a rare sight in Touhou Project.
Furthermore, she is not blindly hostile towards youkai. In the book "Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red", she criticizes a group of humans attempting to exile youkai from Gensokyo, stating that "Gensokyo needs the current balance between humans and youkai to be preserved".
Thus, she is said to be a person of good sense, understanding everything about Gensokyo while remaining an ally of humans.
Her ability to "consume history" allows her to make the history of anything disappear. She uses this power in "Imperishable Night" to make the human village disappear.
However, Reimu and the rest were doubtful of whether the human village really disappeared, which shows that Keine is unable remove its existence from reality or from or from people's memories. Her power does not work powerful youkai like Yukari either, who were able to see the human village without any problems.
It would be simpler to think of it as a magic trick of sorts.
Keine also has the power to "create history", but as this was never used in the original games, the details are left unclear. However, "Perfect Memento in Strict Sense" states that "History is reality, seen from a single point of view". So it can be guessed that it probably still can't alter reality or people's memories...
As of June 2010, there is still only one character recognized as a therianthrope,
By the way, her existence as a were-hakutaku was aquired. The questions of how, why or when have not been answered.
Morever, hakutaku are considered animals (holy beasts) beyond imagination such as the Chinese unicorn or the phoenix, and appears in Chinese folklore as well. In the era of virtuous statesmen, seeing a hakutaku was meant to be a good omen.
It is also said to be wise of all things in the universe, with its figure used as a protective charm against disease and so on.
In Japan today, hakutaku are very minor holy beasts, but they were common knowledge in the Edo period, and they were given a two-line entry in Ryoan Terajima's "Illustrated Sino-Japanese Ecyclopedia".
Also, the kanji used for Keine's surnmame "Kamishirasawa" can be alternatively pronounced "Uwahakutaku", which is very similar to her species name "were-hakutaku". Of course, given that her were-hakutaku species was acquuired, there was surely some intentional wordplay going on.
In FMW, she appears in stage 1 of Reimu's route.
Her natural diligence and seriousness gives her the role of moving the story along. Since neither Reimu nor Marisa exhibit any leadership qualities, she essentially becomes the leader of the group.
"I won't let you touch the humans or the history of this village!"
Keine has a dumb hat. Keine in fanon mostly revolves around her being a teacher and the "caved" meme, which is her headbutting the shit out of someone (THIS IS THE ONLY CAVED MEME!!!). This is an attack in FMW. Keine is pretty boring really. I usually use someone else Nitori to perform Keine's role, which Blitzblast and Ryza assure me is a really fucking dumb way to play.

Fairy (Blue]

quote:

They mainly appear as a fodder enemy, but since fairies like to gather together to play, they end up having a fair amount of appearances in the conversations as well.
As a unit, they are basically standard fodder characters, with their "Player-Aimed Bullets" post-movement attack their specialty.
They're actually the first characters in FMW whose dodging animation was prepared, and because of that (or not), they audaciously reveal their own drawers while they dodge.
Unfortunately, they don't dodge very well. But if you perservere as you play...
My favourite of the fairy types, because blue is a stylish yet elegant colour.

Fairy (Red)

quote:

They mainly appear as a fodder enemy, but since fairies like to gather together to play, they end up having a fair amount of appearances in the conversations as well.
They attack from distances that you wouldn't expect a fairy to with their main attack, "Scattered Bullets".
They were called "Elite Fairy" in the trial version, but after some thought, their statistics didn't seem very elite, so we went for the safer choice.
The true elites who will call you naive for rushing your attacks will surely appear sometime in the future.
Their exaggerated posing while dodging is explained in the entry for "Fairy (Blue)".
A less awesome fairy type.