Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity (PS4)
ZUN’s unique approach to letting fans make games starring the many characters of his bullet hell series has lead to many smaller and obscure characters taking center stage. While I love seeing minor characters get their turn in the spotlight, I must admit the residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion are some of the most appealing characters because so much about them was established in their first appearance. Each of the major characters had a role to play in the supernatural manor owned by the vampire Remilia Scarlet, making for a group that has some preexisting dynamics to draw on and a reason to interact with each other more than most other Touhou characters. Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity may not be plumbing the potential depths of this particular grouping of girls, but spending more time with such a solid set of characters is still a nice aspect of the Touhou series’s openness to outside development.
Remilia has grown bored by her nocturnal-by-necessity life in Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, but recent stories of mythical creatures in the nearby area have piqued her interest. Sending her maid Sakuya Izayoi off to investigate the tales by day, Remilia waits to look into them herself when its safe for her to go out at night. However, as the two look into these stories separately, their paths soon diverge, especially after another mysterious being attacks the Scarlet Devil Mansion in their absence. The player is able to pick to play the game’s adventure as either Remilia or Sakuya, but while the vampire and maid do have moments of the story that do play out differently, they are essentially following the same story path so it doesn’t feel like you’ve missed too much if you only want to play through the game a single time.
Most of the differences between playing as the two leading ladies comes down to how they play in this top-down hack and slash role-playing game. Remilia feels like the more versatile of the two and the one with better movement options. The game doesn’t emphasize platforming too often, but in moments like the ones where the camera switches to a side view to better embrace it, having Remilia’s glide is much better than Sakuya’s simple jumps. Remilia is also able to navigate the large labyrinthine levels much faster than Sakuya thanks to her tackle dive. The attack options are where Sakuya is meant to shine instead. Both girls have some basic attacks to help combat the many enemies they’ll face along the way, but the player can set three buttons as shortcuts for some of the wide variety of special moves they’ll unlock by leveling up. Both girls get moves that focus on range, power, or maneuverability, and while neither character is lacking in options, Remilia does lean towards physical and magical attacks while Sakuya’s skills are more situational or focus on reach. Remilia will be able to fire long range attacks on top of things like a charging tackle and killer spin though, and Sakuya does have a few close range attacks to complement her knife throwing and time stopping powers. Whatever abilities you choose to set, both girls also pack in more powerful Spell Card attacks that require much more energy than their basic abilities, these usually making the girls briefly invincible as they unleash huge blasts or sprays of bullets that match their bullet hell source material.
Remilia and Sakuya are both a good fit for the game even if Remilia makes navigation easier, but it is pretty easy to get comfortable with a set of abilities that you end up having little reason to swap away from them. Most of your success is tied to skilled movement to avoid damage and having the right equipment or a high enough level to dish out the damage you need to succeed. Having some of your capability come from proper play keeps it from being exclusively tied to your character’s strength and defense stats does allow you to punch above your weight class a little even though the opportunities aren’t abundant. At some points in the plot your path through the magical world of Gensokyo is allowed to diverge a bit, but whether your exploring the bamboo forest, the town at night, the volcanic underground, or the side of a waterfall, you’ll soon realize a small problem with Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity: the enemy variety.
You will be facing many foes as you navigate the large levels of Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, some having plenty of winding paths, alternate routes, and secret branches to follow, not every level even displaying a map to help you get through the maze-like designs. Getting through them eventually isn’t the part that holds the game back though, it’s what populates these large areas that lets the game down a tad. No matter where you are in the game, you can almost always count on fighting the same fairly common fairy enemies, and other foes like the dogs, frogs, giant mushrooms, and birds appear pretty consistently throughout as well. So much of the game is spent traversing stages filled with little clusters of these repeated enemy types, your attacks usually making quick work of them unless they’ve been given power boosts or are working with other enemies in the area. To its credit, many areas in Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity will have a few unique enemies or at least ones they only share with a few other stages, so the dogs and frogs can be seen as the filler between fights with such local threats as enormous centipedes and squirt-gun wielding kappas. While facing off with enemies will still probably be somewhat mindless even with a good mix of fresh foes and the familiar ones, the mix of regular attacks and ability usage give the game a decent rhythm to slip into, that hack and slash appeal of tearing through groups of baddies with relative ease in full effect here. The incentive for fighting them is of course the experience they give and the treasures they can drop, but very rarely does the game force you to fight a certain group of foes, so you can pick your battles if you wish but risk falling behind on the level curve if you chicken out of too many conflicts.
The lucrative yet simplistic battles with regular baddies are meant to pay off when you start encountering the boss characters. While things start deceptively easy with bosses who barely put up a fight, the game soon picks up the slack and starts sending characters at you who have the durability and power to make for decent challenges. Many of the boss characters in Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity are recognizable faces from the franchise. While some characters relevant to the plot are fairly obvious picks like the Scarlet Devil Mansion’s librarian Patchouli and its guard Meiling, the characters you actually fight come from different corners of the series to tie into the main conflict in unexpected ways. You’ll face off with the likes of the bug girl Wriggle, the size-shifting oni Suika, the doll-controlling magician Alice Margatroid, and the phoenix girl Mokou. While most of the bosses do fit into the young girl mold that Touhou characters typically follow, there are some more monstrous bosses like a giant snake to mix things up, but even the girls bring different tricks to the fights. On top of copying the light bullet spray the series is known for in their attacks, the girls all have unique attacks to add unique wrinkles to their fight like Wriggle calling in a stampede of giant insects as one attack or Suika becoming gigantic to try and squash you. These battles still draw on your damage and dodge tactics honed through the crowd control fights featured elsewhere, but they still aren’t quite the elevation of play needed to pull you completely out of the mostly repetitious gameplay of Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity. The boss fights are the highlights of the combat portion of the game in the same way the side-view platforming segments are the highlights of the movement challenges, but the game is still fairly plain despite these brief segments of more involved play.
THE VERDICT: The characters and world of Touhou are transposed into a hack and slash RPG well enough with Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, but is too dependent on the mildly satisfying rhythm of repetitive combat to carry the experience. It dishes out the abilities and treasure rewards often enough to keep you moving along and the level designs, bosses, and platforming segments break things up before the action can ever truly settle into the player’s mind as too basic to enjoy, but unless you’re coming to the game just to see your favorite Touhou girls facing off against each other in a different context, Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is going to feel like just a decent way to waste some time rather than a deep or overly challenging RPG.
And so, I give Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. There seems to be something in the human mind that makes the robotic execution of certain tasks satisfying, and that’s the primal urge that Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity targets. Most of the game is spent facing off with the same enemy types, but the sense of strength and your abilities means things progress fairly quickly and you don’t really have the time to get bored by the familiarity of the battle situations. When things do slow down its because you’ve encountered one of the game’s boss battles where things are bit more creative or the platforming segments where you need to focus on a different skill set then your ability set. Neither divergence is substantial enough to pave over a game mostly spent whaling on every fairy and frog you encounter, but the reward system drip feeds progress enough that this game does work as the kind of mindless amusement you can indulge in when you don’t want to commit to something too involved or difficult. It’s an odd mix of variation in the right places but not enough variety in others, the game settling into the shape of a decent pastime even though it could have been much more if it was willing to expand the scope of its imagination outside of the few highlight moments.
With no real conditions for what the Touhou coat of paint can be applied to, there’s no guarantee what a Touhou fan creation might turn out to be. In the case of Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity though, it at least makes decent use of the recognizable faces even if they aren’t explored to a much greater degree than the source material. In a similar vein, the hack and slash RPG mechanics are use to decent effect even though they aren’t being experimented with much save for the small intersection with bullet hell attacks. It’s pretty much a game that is what it promises and nothing more: a Touhou hack and slash starring the girls of the Scarlet Devil Mansion.