Part 30: Source Material

The moral of the story is that switching between two different translations makes for a lot of dumb mistakes.

With the first half of the game over, now's a pretty good time to look at the source material. I didn't do this for FMW1 since the differences between that game and Embodiment of Scarlet Devil can be summed up as "there are more people, also everything is more dramatic", but FMW2 does make some pretty noticeable changes with Mountain of Faith and Immaterial and Missing Power.

MoF Prologue

Did you know that every game comes with a prologue? It's inside that omake.txt thing barely anybody ever reads. Anyway, MoF starts off with Sanae (fresh from the outside world) coming to the Hakurei Shrine to demand Reimu close up. Reimu obviously refuses, and Sanae presumably just leaves. Marisa swings by later and the two protagonists chat about it.

And thus Reimu decides to ascend Youkai Mountain. Notably, it's Reimu who decides to do this. You can play as Marisa in MoF, but it's basically just for the sake of it since the whole game only really concerns Reimu.



FMW's change is obvious: Moriya shrine crosses over much sooner. The fact that Reimu is busy dealing with the Scarlet Mist incident also means the Moriyas have time to come to accords with Youkai Mountain.

Instead of charging right over to Reimu, Sanae spends some time scoping out the situation. She's mentioned as helping protect some villagers from the effects of the mist, and grows decidedly unimpressed with Reimu's handling of the situation. Hence the duel in EoSD Stage 2 she wins due to her bullshit power.



The prologue proper happens during 13R, and is a bit expanded on. Reimu and Sanae come to blows, and since the latter used up most of her faith dodging Fantasy Seal (I love that it took a literal miracle to do that) she gets wrecked. Suwako has to bail her out.

Then EoSD's Extra stage starts up, so Reimu has no time to ponder things. Since she decisively beat Sanae she has no reason to care either.

MoF Stage 1-3







The first three stages of MoF are the protagonist advancing up the mountain, being warned by everyone she runs into that what she's doing is both stupid and dangerous. She doesn't care, and beats the crap out of all of the prospective good samaritans. Touhou characters are kind of assholes like that.



In FMW2, they get stopped after stage 1 by the full force of Youkai Mountain. As previously mentioned, Moriya shrine and the mountain have already formed an alliance, so Sanae uses them to try and scare Reimu into submission. All it does is just force the team to go back and expand their roster. Oh, and I guess it's what causes Reimu to start doubting if she's really doing all that good of a job but that was silly.




The invasion proper has them smash through stage 1 again, then split up. Reimu heads to stage 2, while Marisa heads for stage 3. This is kind of weird since the way the geography works is that stage 1 was the foothills of the mountain, stage 2 was a dense forest covering the bottom portion, while stage 3 was a river valley past that, but eh.

MoF Stage 4



Stage 4 is where the prior three bosses' warnings come to fruition; having heard that the protagonist is invading (for seemingly no reason), the heads of Youkai Mountain panic and send a quick force out to meet her. They also call for Aya, since she met with Reimu and Marisa back in Phantasmagoria of Flower View, to fly over and ask why the hell the protagonist is attacking. Part of the reason they're so jumpy is because at the moment they're still dealing with Moriya Shrine's sudden appearance; Aya mentions in her pre-boss convo that the tengu are considering ousting Kanako themselves. Aya doesn't really want to fight the protagonist, but it'd look really bad if she just let them through so she fights her. And she is a bitch.

After losing (on purpose), Aya points the way to Moriya shrine.



Meanwhile in this game, Youkai Mountain was expecting the team so they set up a pincer attack. The heroes forge through anyway, and Aya decides to use them to force Moriya shrine into showing their hand.

MoF Stage 5





At this point the two games align. The protagonist storms Moriya shrine and takes Sanae down while the rest of Youkai Mountain is presumably observing the situation from afar.

MoF Stage 6





And in Stage 6 Kanako is encountered, challenged, and subsequently defeated.

Endings

MoF has eight endings, two Bad and six Good. The bad endings are obviously thrown out, but only three of the good endings make it in: Reimu A (Kanako's new belief that faith is the same as sitting and drinking with people), C (Reimu builds a branch shrine at her place), and kind of Marisa A (Kanako's been throwing parties).

Extra Stage



The Extra Stage prologue mentions that the Moriya shrine and Youkai Mountain have hammered out a peaceful coexistence, and now the mountain is prospering. Rumors of another god reach the protagonists' ears though, so one of them checks it out. She beats up Kanako again on the way, and find Suwako. Suwako elaborates on her situation, then challenges the protagonist to a match for fun. Naturally she gets her ass kicked, but she's satisfied anyway. In fact, the battle is what causes her to decide she really will stay in Gensokyo.



FMW2, on the other hand, has Suwako show up early to help out Sanae. She even forces her way into the Stage 6 fight, and subsequently helps convince Kanako to lighten up. The idea she wasn't too sure about staying in Gensokyo is dropped too.

Immaterial and Missing Power

IaMP's plot is kind of convoluted. It starts off simple at least: for some reason there have been a ton of parties at the Hakurei shrine. At each one, a strange mist appears. An odd aura is building up too. Three days before the next party is set to start, the character of your choice decides to investigate the aura.



Where it gets complicated is the fact that there's a sliding timescale of sorts. Each character, if they decided to investigate, sets off at a different time. Yukari, for instance, figures out what's going on almost immediately while Reimu takes until the very end to do something. And in Suika's own story, six different people (Sakuya, Alice, Youmu, Patchouli, Marisa, Reimu) noticed!

As far as a "canon" route goes, though, it's either Reimu's or Suika's. And I guess Yukari's could have happened too since it's so early but meh. Suika's requires literally everyone she fights to randomly decide not to mention her to anyone else to make sense, and while admittedly I could see that happening with this cast it's still kind of a stretch. So it's probably Reimu. Unlike almost everybody else, who focus on the strange energy, Reimu feels there's something off about the mist. She runs around beating people up looking for clues, but ends up with nothing. On the day of the feast she runs into Yukari, who hints she knows what's going on. So Reimu beats the crap out of her.




Then she sends Reimu to... wherever Suika is when she's dispersed as mist, I dunno. The two chat, and Reimu is relieved to hear that her intuition wasn't wrong when it suspected the mist. They have a pretty rad pre-fight convo I wish FMW2 kept.


Things get weird again with the endings. They all happen. See, after getting defeated, Suika reveals herself and joins the party in progress. So even the people who didn't decide to investigate run into Suika. The main ending is Reimu and Suika's, though, which has the latter decide to crash at the Hakurei shrine for a while.



FMW2 keeps some general ideas (Suika uses her power to make the already-in-progress party grow bigger, Yukari reveals Suika, Reimu impresses Suika, Suika joins the party after being defeated) but tosses everything else to make it all fit in one chapter. Oh, and it has it take place before PCB, which actually stops the original events of IaMP from happening; part of the reason Suika did what she did was she was annoyed that the longer-than-usual winter made spring flower viewing impossible.