Touhou ~ Artificial Dream in Arcadia for the benefit of demoniac dungeon crawlers

[Peklo]

Keep your eye on Touhou ~ Artificial Dream in Arcadia by developer potemki11/Bar Holographic Otaku, currently in development with a recent demo available. As clearly stated and as is evident from taking a single look at the game, this is a blobber that adapts the Touhou setting to old-style Shin Megami Tensei of the Super Famicom kind. As a work of tribute, it's exacting; as a work of syncretic framing of one series through another, it's ingenious. The aesthetic grip on the material grasps firmly immediately, from the repetitive pseudo-3D mazes and facelessly evocative, gloomy character sprites, to the sublimely authentic soundtrack that arranges storied Touhou tracks into that SMT mold of irreverently oscillating dreary menace, haunting ambience and single-minded aggression. The attention paid to detail comes as no surprise if precedent is observed, as the developer's previous series fan game in the delightful UDONGEIN X treated its Mega Man X-derived source material with the same kind of diligence extending not only to mechanics of play but the sum total experience of immersing oneself in the text in look, sound and tone.

To apply the same mentality to SMT does not strike one as a fusion accident but rather a homecoming, as despite the wide gulf in primary genres the two series have existed with compatible thematic fibre, subject matter, and with the occasional direct influence flowing between them--certainly their mutual audiences have long since picked up on this kinship, with overlap between the two being common. Feeling out that compatibility through this era-specific referentiality lands itself as an enormous treat to the sensibilities as series concepts synergize between one another in how they're adapted together here: psychic dreamer protagonist Sumireko's jaunt through Gensokyo's various locales has her grapple with by-now retired game concepts from the visitor series, such as the magnetite mechanic that used to sustain demon summoning through dungeon ventures in Megami Tensei of old; its analogue here is her dwindling phone battery, refilled upon finding a save room in which she can wake up in the real world, charge her phone, and return through sleep and dreaming to Gensokyo by inhabiting her doppelgänger residing there. Similarly, demon negotiation is off the table in literal terms but its spirit remains: Sumireko instead attempts to hijack the brainwaves of the sleepwalking clones of Gensokyo's residents, a process which is presented and played through a danmaku shower of patterns to survive--these patterns are relevant to the individual from their source games, imbuing characterization through mechanics in absence of the push-and-pull of verbal demon sparring. Those who struggle with the patterns can weaken the target first through conventional combat before attempting a hijack; the resulting bullet pattern is thus also weakened in density and complexity.

The thoughtfulness is evident from every moment of the game's (a limited but substantial demo at this stage) duration and it's not all just marveling at how well the genre-unfamiliar material is integrated, but also how clearly the love for the SMT side of the equation is displayed. There are trap floors, status effects aplenty, an emphasis on elemental weaknesses and resistances, and an honest-to-goodness teleporter maze that's audacious in its early rise to the occasion... but more than those kinds of universalities it's delightful in its gesturing and invocation of series specifics, targeted at that formative Super Famicom context. The available party members are mostly static with their full skill loadouts present from recruitment; they can accrue levels and build up basic survivability numbers but their tactical roles are firmly set in place, placing more emphasis on picking a party for the task than gradually customizing your favourites into all-purpose responsibility. Hitting elemental weaknesses is always an advantage and leads into building meter for supplementary actions, but it's not framed as the end-all approach to combat that systems like Press Turn and One More have ossified the series play into. More imperceptibly but still keenly felt, the game is also happy to be just plain rude when it wants to, a fact of enduring within it that is an integral ingredient to most dungeon crawls that stay with one as memorable experiences exactly because the element of unpredictable risk is present. I would not call it archaic at an uncritical, unexamined level, since plenty of newer-school wrinkles exist in the preliminary systems present (demon--or "sleeper"--fusion, as well as the compendium, are not yet implemented in the demo), like shuffling affinities and skills via party member sacrifice that does allow for large customization possibilities, but its feet are firmly planted in evoking a sensibility, mechanically and aesthetically, that has long since left the adapted source material.

I can't pull the wool over anyone's eyes here because in light of the subject matter of this dual series tribute, this is a game that caters extremely to my preferences and interests, so I can't conjecture how it might go over with those who are disinterested or neutral on either part of the equation. I can only recommend it from within that myopic enthusiast bubble and argue that it ends up serving both sides of the aisle more than adequately, and one can only hope the demo represents a statement of intent that can be carried to the project's finish line as confidently as the game presents itself now in this preview.

 

[Peklo]

Release day is here! Get it on Steam. This has been one of my most anticipated games ever since it was announced and I played the demo, and I'm so happy development got to the finish line. Really excited for it and I hope it does well for the developer.

 

[Peklo]

This goes down as one of the best derivative games ever made, regardless of which side of the aisle you approach it from. Beautiful and adroit resuscitation of the Megami Tensei sensibilities of old as a blobber, and a thorough, respectful and enthusiastic adaptation of the Touhou setting within that framework and perspective. The two exist apart but in my personal estimation have always had a kinship between them--or drawn my own attention for partly similar reasons--so to have this symbiosis as a sort of of proof positive that those connections are extant and within reach fulfills so many fantasy scenarios that a person or a few have now encapsulated as a syncretic work. It's particularly exhilarating because this kind of grid-based dungeon crawling does not exist within the source material anymore, and even the retained aspects (battle mechanics and so on) have often had a play balance and direction that hasn't felt very interesting after so many permutations of them. The sharp streamlining and modest integration of shooter genre heritage does a lot to refresh a familiar baseline as to how this game wants to express those commonalities, and shifts the focus so that all elements of the whole feel worthwhile instead of tracking lopsided one way or another. There's just so much done here to make everything feel novel even if you're conversant or even fluent with either series, and none of it chafes as unharmoniously executed--if anything, it's almost frighteningly tapped into the alchemic extract it conjures up. Reportedly it has sold beyond the developer's expectations, so perhaps others feel that way about it too.

 

[Fyonn]

Bought this back on release day, but only just got around to it after finishing up Soul Hackers 2. This game is very, very good. Nothing too noteworthy in the story so far, very much just an excuse to go on a Gensokyo tour. That said, it's never wasting your time or asking you to make logical leaps in the way that the SMT games it's styled after often would. I do think it's a little long, and the characters don't feel quite as varied as I would like, but part of that is my personal preference to play SMT-style RPGs with a heavy reliance on weakness sniping. This also isn't too heavy a weight because of how heavy a benefit it is to Hijack Sleepers, triggering the bullet hell mini-game. So you're not spending too long in either of what I would call it's primary combat modes.

Hijacking Sleepers is the recruitment mechanic, yes, but it has two other functions as well. You can turn a Hijacked Sleepers into money, which is the most efficient way to get it. You can also turn Hijacked Sleepers into an item, and the item you get is set. Valuable consumables and equipment can be acquired this way, so Hijacking isn't just a skill-based recruitment mechanic, it's also a skill-based steal mechanic. The versatility of Hijacking and how it effects game flow is my favorite part of the game. Once you get the Upgrade that lets you generate SP by defending, Hijacking becomes a viable option dealing with entire enemy parties (though you're not getting any EXP for the protagonist when you do this).

As a bit of a counter-point to Peklo's style of finding the right tools for the job already among the cast, I'm maintaining a fairly static group of seven characters. My crew has combat role duplicates, of course, in case someone runs out of MP or a character's weaknesses make them too unreliable in a particular dungeon. See, there are very generous mechanics for transferring any Skill you want from one Sleeper to another. It consumes the Sleeper you got the Skill from, and it can't be used to transfer Spell Cards, but those are limitations that can be worked around. Some very weak fusions are strangely difficult to make, seemingly for the express purpose of using Fusion to get high-level Spell Cards on lower level characters.

There's also Sacrifice Fusion, which consumes a Sleeper to give EXP to another Sleeper. This doesn't offer that much of a benefit initially, but as Sleepers get further from their base level, they level up slower. Sacrifice EXP seems to use the receiving Sleeper's base level as a factor in the EXP scaling though, so if you're using "out-of-date" Sleepers, Sacrifice EXP is a much faster way to level up. I also have a couple of characters who never see actual battle, instead being dedicated out-of-battle healers, and this is how I keep them leveled up for more MP and healing.

The dungeons are all so good. I thought an earlier-game dungeon was, like, a vertical slice of all the dungeon mechanics, but no, it keeps adding more. The dungeons show a remarkable degree of awareness on how much is too much, too. For instance, it has probably the absolute best teleporter mazes I've ever seen. I've got a fair bit of game left, but both the teleporter mazes I've encountered have had a logic to how they function, rendering them less about aimless trial-and-error guessing and more an effort to understand their rules.

All-in-all, of games in the pre-PS2 SMT style that I've played, I count this as the best one by a wide margin.

 

[Peklo]

It's definitely possible and intended to have ways to retain party members beyond their level range through the means you outlined. I just didn't have much interest in pursuing that possibility because out of all Touhou games I've played, this is the most "everyone is here" of them all--nothing else compares to the scale of its integration of the series cast, and so that was an enormous part of the appeal as part of the audience who recognizes and has various degrees of affection for all the characters in it. Aside from cutting down on painstaking customization time (the flexibility of skill inheritance is already more than sufficient on its own, I think), the most relevant mechanical argument for using fresher recruits is the usual SMT stat trajectory in that all the best elemental affinity resistances are reserved for the innately higher-level people, and those can't be adjusted through tweaks. The more old-style bent of battles in this doesn't mean rolling with open weaknesses will always result in disaster like it probably would in a Press Turn milieu, but it still eventually bites back harshly enough to want to minimize the risks.

There's a sort of metatextual delight in the compendium/bestiary trajectory in this game, too. It's never consulting some kind of dogmatic and imaginary power scale for who's-stronger-than-who in where the series characters turn up, but it nonetheless reads as very considered, with folks showing up in their relevant habitats and environments, and posing a challenge or combat risk that reads as authentic to them in the series canon. It has to "break" those conventions to stick to that repeating theming per location, leading to final bosses of games existing at the low levels of the compendium, because it's more important to group those communities and sometimes families together than accede to a "what RPG level would be appropriate for a person of this stature" kind of reading of them in line with extrapolations from the source material.

What ends up happening over time, and towards the end of it, is that the deeper into the game's most hostile territories you delve into, the more that danger ends up communicated through the roster picks in who shows up: in this case, the final dungeons' bestiary and the game's strongest Sleepers are sourced from the series's very beginnings, often from the silent and abstract cast of Highly Responsive to Prayers, the first Touhou game for PC-98. The SMT influence in the series was at its strongest in there, so it perfectly serves that symbiosis of material, and also throws off the conventions everyone associates Touhou with in that the characters are no longer limited to a "girl but as" school of character design and can represent as the odd demons, divine apparitions and plain abstractions that they were in those days. It's also "fan service" of the best kind, because the PC-98 era is not an ongoing area of development in the series; ZUN probably considers it his juvenilia and doesn't integrate things from it to his subsequent work because he already ended up rethinking and essentially revising many of the concepts in the Windows run that people know. It's all up to the fans to remember those games as they were and extrapolate elements from them for their own derivative projects, and the way Artificial Dream in Arcadia does it tracks as some of the best I've seen for how seamlessly it integrates with the game's concept and how it treats the setting at large.

 

[Fyonn]

It's definitely possible and intended to have ways to retain party members beyond their level range through the means you outlined. I just didn't have much interest in pursuing that possibility because out of all Touhou games I've played, this is the most "everyone is here" of them all--nothing else compares to the scale of its integration of the series cast, and so that was an enormous part of the appeal as part of the audience who recognizes and has various degrees of affection for all the characters in it. Aside from cutting down on painstaking customization time (the flexibility of skill inheritance is already more than sufficient on its own, I think), the most relevant mechanical argument for using fresher recruits is the usual SMT stat trajectory in that all the best elemental affinity resistances are reserved for the innately higher-level people, and those can't be adjusted through tweaks. The more old-style bent of battles in this doesn't mean rolling with open weaknesses will always result in disaster like it probably would in a Press Turn milieu, but it still eventually bites back harshly enough to want to minimize the risks.

There's a sort of metatextual delight in the compendium/bestiary trajectory in this game, too. It's never consulting some kind of dogmatic and imaginary power scale for who's-stronger-than-who in where the series characters turn up, but it nonetheless reads as very considered, with folks showing up in their relevant habitats and environments, and posing a challenge or combat risk that reads as authentic to them in the series canon. It has to "break" those conventions to stick to that repeating theming per location, leading to final bosses of games existing at the low levels of the compendium, because it's more important to group those communities and sometimes families together than accede to a "what RPG level would be appropriate for a person of this stature" kind of reading of them in line with extrapolations from the source material.

There are definitely characters that I had to abandon because of multiple weaknesses, and that's the biggest reason I'm maintaining seven characters in a game where I can only use three at a time - I can't afford to use characters in places where their weaknesses are common. In that way, characters feeling same-y is very much a problem that I myself created. My playtime already exceeds yours because of the amount of money grinding I've done to facilitate kitting out my favorites. Like, every time I saw a new elemental spell, that had to get stapled to two or three characters. When everyone got every Strong-tier elemental spell, the MP cost was so much that I had to spend more to reverse the process.

The other part of my motivation is that I actually have very little experience with Touhou, because I'm quite bad at bullet hell. I mean, I'm more competent than someone just coming to the genre, I've gotten The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil's bad ending. On Easy. But the way I learn works better with checkpoint shmups than revive-in-place shmups. That's not a complaint - Touhou would be a nightmare if it were a checkpoint shmup - it's just a fact that makes it harder for me to learn a given Touhou than, say, a given R-Type or Gradius.

With that, my ADHD that makes practicing anything difficult, and my preference for tackling franchises in chronological order (starting from what's most easily accessible to me in Touhou's case), I'm left with basically only knowing characters from The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, early parts of Perfect Cherry Blossom, and whoever's shown up in the Fantasy Kaleidoscope episodes that people had translated and uploaded to YouTube like 10 years ago. So the roster past level 40 is almost exclusively characters I've never even seen before. Many are very cool - Mokou, Yorihime, and Saki come to mind - but I kind of need Reimu, Marisa, or Alice on screen for my brain to go "Ah yes, that's them, the Touhous."

What ends up happening over time, and towards the end of it, is that the deeper into the game's most hostile territories you delve into, the more that danger ends up communicated through the roster picks in who shows up: in this case, the final dungeons' bestiary and the game's strongest Sleepers are sourced from the series's very beginnings, often from the silent and abstract cast of Highly Responsive to Prayers, the first Touhou game for PC-98.

I just finished the part of the Dreamer's Monolith that got me the ability to fly. I was very surprised to start seeing things in the database that weren't various girls.

 

[Fyonn]

After what feels like a small eternity, I have finished Touhou Artificial Dream In Arcadia and it's very expansive post-game. Seriously, that post-game is four additional dungeons and a new town, alone totaling nearly as much dungeon content as Wizardry 1.

This is definitely, hands-down, no contest my favorite Shin Megami Tensei-style game, and by extension probably my second favorite dungeon crawler of all time? Hijacking replacing both SMT negotiation and RPG Steal commands with skill-based 30~ second Bullet Hell mini-challenges is an incredible boon. I will be thinking about that mechanic forever. Dungeons in this game are super good, too. Many of them have gimmicks, but they never get as annoying and drawn-out as actual SMT dungeons. My favorite example is that both the game's teleporter mazes have concrete rules you can determine that will allow you to sight-navigate them using the in-game map without any external notes. There are also two very powerful tools available to you for exploration - I made use of both at one point or the other. One is Grimoire: Explorer, one of the unlockable game modifiers you get by doing a sidequest. Grimoire: Explorer reduces how much SP you gain across the board, meaning you can use special actions like Hijacking enemy Sleepers and using Limit Break-esque Spell Cards less frequently. In exchange, your auto-map fills in the 3x3 grid around your character instead of just the spaces you step on. This trivialized navigating the dungeons that had pitfall traps, because the auto-map marks those for you. The other tool is the Map item. I was eating these like candy in the post-game. So there's a limited number of these in the game, I think 12 or 13 by my count. If you use a Map item, it immediately and permanently reveals the map of the entire floor you're on. Given (almost) every dungeon gimmick is labeled on your map, it gives you the option to opt-out of dealing with certain mechanics if you don't want to. There is one situation where this isn't helpful at all: there are three floors in which sections of the map just don't have map data. You can look at the map data, you can see just fine, it's not the same as a SMT dark zone, but the game just won't record those chunks of the map for you. Two of those floors are in the final dungeon of the post-game though, and I still only had to bust out graph paper for the last one, which felt appropriate for the final challenge of a dungeon crawler. Much more interesting than the kinds of "I don't know, just throw in six million teleporters?" type design SMT tends to use as final navigation challenges.

I had intended for this to be a brief detour after Soul Hackers 2, but I definitely didn't expect my experiences with that game (which I was also positive on) to be so completely overshadowed by this one. Obviously, my priorities are going to be different than other people's, but a consistent experience I have with nearly every single SMT game, from Strange Journey to Persona 5, is hitting the 40~ hour mark and putting the game down for sometimes several years or grinding my willpower into dust pushing through to the endgame. There have been two exceptions: Soul Hackers 1 and Artificial Dream In Arcadia. Soul Hackers 1, of course, is kind of short for a SMT, and Nemissa is very powerful, so you can ride that and a semi-competent Zoma into a fairly relaxed run of that game. My play time for Artificial Dream In Arcadia was 111 hours. Granted, probably 10~15 hours of that was the game idling in the background because of the context I played some of the game in. The only time I felt the game weighing on me was the Hijack, Sacrifice Fusion, repeat grinding I did to get my neglected healers, Eirin and Toyohime, from level 50~ to level 95~.

No small part of the game's staying power is the Hijacking mechanics breaking up the monotony of turn-based RPG combat and adding an extra dimension of strategy. I was sure to Hijack an enemy at the start of every battle I had the SP for. Sure, that means their patterns were always the second-hardest version since they had full HP, but to me, that was kind of the point. Hijacking is much easier than "real" Touhou bullet patterns, but it does ramp up in difficulty and complexity as the game goes on. It took five or six tries to survive some end-game patterns, and I'm still not 100% consistent on getting through Yumemi and Shinki's patterns unscathed. Given I probably spent 10~ hours just doing bullet hell patterns for Hijacking, I'm curious how well Artifical Dream In Arcadia would function as a sort of bullet hell training camp.


Prompted by what Peklo said earlier about the late-game cast, I actually watched full translated runs of the 5 PC-98 Touhou games, which leads to the weird situation where I mostly just recognize the dubiously canon characters now. My final team ended up being Reimu, Marisa, Toyohime, Eirin, Yumemi, and Meira. I ended up getting all of them above level 95. Sumireko and Marisa ended up at level 99. Had to change up everyone's movelists for the post-game superboss. It was particularly important to have several characters with Resourceful, a passive skill that gives using Items a higher priority, ensuring they happen before anything else other than Quick Thrust, I think. Special shout-out to Toyohime, the only character in the game that has no weaknesses (or resistances). I kitted her out as a healer due to how reliabile this makes her, but her stats also make her very suited to being a magical powerhouse. I extremely recommend keeping a Toyohime in your crew into the endgame, even if you're replacing every single other member of your party with newer Sleepers.

Marisa was pretty critical to my strategy. She has All Guns Blazing, a 100 SP Spell Card that also consumes all of her MP to deal three times as much Lightning damage to a single target. Between having Grimoire: Sting turned on for increased weakness damage and reduced non-weakness damage (both ways), a full three stacks of defense debuffs, a full three stacks of attack buffs, getting Marisa a bigger MP pool via the MP Spring passive, and having her use Focus the turn before, I managed to deal nearly 8,000 damage in one hit. That's almost as much HP as the final boss, but only like a third of the superboss's. Either way, it's pretty absurd considering the highest damage I had ever seen outside of All Guns Blazing was the superboss dealing like 821 damage under similar circumstances. There's another Spell Card that would have come in handy against the superboss, but it didn't occur to me, and only found out about the strat later. Seija's Social Distortion would have improved my action economy in a big way for reasons that will become clear if you do the post-game yourself.

Plot-wise, I enjoyed a lot of the vignettes that compose most of the game. And I was kind of on the main plot's wavelength given I had several times reflected on how sad Sumireko's room felt, and how she was spending so much time in Gensokyo. I do think the conclusion feels a little weird given it's followed up by a huge chunk of content, but it's not a big deal. This isn't so much Sumireko's story as it is the story of Sumireko's story. More than most RPGs, the journey is point.

 

[muteKi]

This is definitely, hands-down, no contest my favorite Shin Megami Tensei-style game, and by extension probably my second favorite dungeon crawler of all time? Hijacking replacing both SMT negotiation and RPG Steal commands with skill-based 30~ second Bullet Hell mini-challenges is an incredible boon.

I was always a little confused/disappointed over how undertale wasn't more like SMT negotiations, but with a Touhou game I would have it no other way.

 

[Fyonn]

I was always a little confused/disappointed over how undertale wasn't more like SMT negotiations, but with a Touhou game I would have it no other way.

Using this as an excuse to talk about the mechanic more, there are some differences between this and Undertale's bullet hell stuff. Sumireko is actually attacking during Hijacking, and you eventually can get an upgrade for her firepower. This is important because Sumireko's shots can't hit the enemy if you let yourself be pushed to the top or bottom edges of the screen. You need to intentionally engage the pattern head-on if you want to win the mini-game as quickly as possible. There's no time limit, though, so technically you could just dodge bullets forever if you wanted.

 

[Peklo]

Glad you enjoyed it so much, Fyonn. It's somewhere at the top of the heap for me too, for blobbers, Megami Tensei games and Touhou fan works, all at once--that it manages to satisfy all those angles at once tells a lot about just what a considered project it is.

Hijacking is a very good mechanic and sets the game apart in ways nothing else I've ever played can really replicate for how it's utilized, and liking the feature and leaning on it so much actually makes me a little hesitant to return to the game. On release, it functioned as such that any successful Hijack immediately ended the battle; this meant that you essentially never needed to fight more than you wanted if you were good at it, so long as you had SP in stock (and with the "defend builds a little bit of SP" upgrade, you would). Many late-game dungeons weren't about me fighting through them, but doing a bit of danmaku as a breather between navigation--it became the game's signature character and relaxation state in my mind. Using Grimoires like preventing Sleepers from leveling in exchange for them not draining phone battery (MAG for you old Megaheads) made actually fighting battles traditionally even more of an optional excursion than the backbone of the play experience.

All of this was my experience in having completed my playthrough by October 5th, because a late November patch changed the game fundamentally in that Hijacking now only removes the targeted enemy from the battle, and doesn't instantly end it anymore. I guess it was done for some reassessed balance reasons but at least in a vacuum, I would not have implemented or at least forced the change, because the heavy emphasis on Hijacking being able to affect so much of the game flow was one of the best parts about the whole experience, and I did not crave it altered. Since it is such a massive change, at least a future playthrough will be substantially different, even if I end up liking it less. The patches made to the game after release have added things too, of course: the mentioned Resourceful passive for example didn't exist during my playthrough.

There are also two very powerful tools available to you for exploration - I made use of both at one point or the other. One is Grimoire: Explorer, one of the unlockable game modifiers you get by doing a sidequest. Grimoire: Explorer reduces how much SP you gain across the board, meaning you can use special actions like Hijacking enemy Sleepers and using Limit Break-esque Spell Cards less frequently. In exchange, your auto-map fills in the 3x3 grid around your character instead of just the spaces you step on. This trivialized navigating the dungeons that had pitfall traps, because the auto-map marks those for you. The other tool is the Map item. I was eating these like candy in the post-game. So there's a limited number of these in the game, I think 12 or 13 by my count. If you use a Map item, it immediately and permanently reveals the map of the entire floor you're on. Given (almost) every dungeon gimmick is labeled on your map, it gives you the option to opt-out of dealing with certain mechanics if you don't want to.

I never used either, haha. I generally don't want explorational shortcuts in games like these, because covering and "painting" every tile through a player's own movement is the draw for me, and it helps me to know where I've been and where I've yet to go. If I explore everything, I don't need to particularly think about staying abreast of the level and resources curve since battles on the way will take care of it, and I couldn't really in good conscience not walk manually in every space; even if the game marks most things, I'm not going to make assumptions that there couldn't possibly be some event or NPC or something around. Walking everywhere is my joy, and systemically jumping into every pitfall is my pleasure. There's also one of my favourite little RPG carrots motivating the practice of mapping things out fully, as you get rewarded for every fully-mapped floor in the game--this is something I've liked ever since first encountering the practice in Final Fantasy IV's DS remake.

 

[Fyonn]

Hijacking is a very good mechanic and sets the game apart in ways nothing else I've ever played can really replicate for how it's utilized, and liking the feature and leaning on it so much actually makes me a little hesitant to return to the game. On release, it functioned as such that any successful Hijack immediately ended the battle; this meant that you essentially never needed to fight more than you wanted if you were good at it, so long as you had SP in stock (and with the "defend builds a little bit of SP" upgrade, you would). Many late-game dungeons weren't about me fighting through them, but doing a bit of danmaku as a breather between navigation--it became the game's signature character and relaxation state in my mind.

For what it's worth, this strategy combined with having everyone repeatedly Defend was the way I got through one of the late-game dungeons. So this is still viable, if a bit slower. It also benefited me when I needed money or Sacrifice materials - in just two battles I could stock up on the entirety of the final floor's Sleeper roster. Having it work this way also made Hijacking a part of my battle strategy, instead of an alternative to battle. Against Sleepers with skills that are hard to work around, like the reflection skills, I could Hijack them instead and proceed with the rest of the battle as normal. There's also a somewhat common pattern of three~four enemy groups where only two enemies share a weakness. Using Hijack to remove the odd one out felt like a rewarding way to leverage game knowledge.

Knowing it used to work that way does make me a little disappointed that one of the two modes of Hijack wasn't made into a Grimoire so you could have it the way you preferred. There's definitely strategic merit to both styles.

As for the Maps, I only started using them in the very last two dungeons I visited. Usually I also want to step on every single tile (what if there's treasure???), but I have a tendency for my brain to switch over into "okay, let's wrap this up" mode when I hit a sufficiently climactic endgame location. This wasn't an issue in ADIA's final dungeon partially thanks to using a Map on each floor. That said, I did end up having to walk straight into most of those pitfalls anyway. I only used Grimoire: Explorer in TORIFUNE, and that's because I got tired of having to navigate around / fight that dungeon's FOEs. Otherwise I like having SP too much to use it. On the note of that dungeon, do you know what's up with the chimeras in TORIFUNE? I assume it must be something I missed, but I don't recall an analogue for them from the PC-98 games, and I can't imagine they're from one of the Windows games...

 

[Peklo]

On the note of that dungeon, do you know what's up with the chimeras in TORIFUNE? I assume it must be something I missed, but I don't recall an analogue for them from the PC-98 games, and I can't imagine they're from one of the Windows games...

It's from the Secret Sealing Club string of music albums and related short stories. The short of it is that near-future university students Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn (perhaps you'll recognize the name Usami--Sumireko's surname as well, who runs her own one-person version of the club in the present day, as a high schooler) explore the boundaries between worlds and realities through their paranormal escapades and dream projection, and Satellite TORIFUNE is the primary subject of the 2012 album Trojan Green Asteroid. It was a terraforming satellite housing many different flora and fauna, but malfunctioned and was abandoned in orbit. Maribel and Renko visit it in their dreams, encounter one of the chimeras that the inhabitants had mutated into, and even discover a shrine to Ame-no-Torifune within--you get all of this reflected in the game's depiction. As for why it's crashed on Gensokyo's surface... well, the easy no-prize is that as with all things forgotten, it naturally ended up there as part of the place's nature.

Renko and Maribel were added to the game as Sleepers in those later patches, which I kind of love--they're still external to most of Touhou that it took a while for them to pop into Gensokyo, even here. I talked some about them and their relationship through reflecting on an album that's all about that.

 

[Peklo]

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Marsh is a video maker I don't really watch but I'm aware of their reputation in the Megami Tensei community and on that basis this (comprehensive, spoiler-filled) narrated recap video of their time with the game is an interesting watch. It's the "sell" that often has to be made for games like this that straddle disparate source material: can I have a good time if I don't know anything about one half or the other? Players like Fyonn here and Marsh over there represent a somewhat common angle in that the Megami Tensei interest and experience is there, but Touhou stands as an unknown or much less interacted with avenue, and anecdotally at least Artificial Dream in Arcadia passes muster in that pretty much every single person I've seen who has come to this game with that working context has ended up greatly enjoying it. Despite my own POV being--since it can't be anything but--excitement about this game so effectively melding together two series that I like a lot, there's just as much value coming in a half-cocked neophyte, gawking at everything strange, unfamiliar and thrilling.