Due to vocalist Sayuri's poor health, Silver Forest is disbanding.
Story of Eastern Wonderland
The Story of Eastern Wonderland | |
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| Developer | ZUN Soft |
| Publisher | Amusement Makers |
| Released | Full: August 15, 1997 (Comiket 52) |
| Genre | Vertical Danmaku Shooting Game |
| Gameplay | Single-Player Story Mode |
| Platforms | PC-98 (NEC PC-9800 / EPSON PC-486/586) |
| Requirements |
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東方封魔録 ～ The Story of Eastern Wonderland (Touhou Fuumaroku, "Eastern Recorded Sealing of a Demon"), known as SoEW in English speaking community, is the second game in the Touhou series. It is also the first game in the curtain-fire shooting genre, and was released for the Japanese PC-98 in 1997. The Story of Eastern Wonderland features Marisa Kirisame and Mima as enemies.
The resident shrine maiden Reimu Hakurei returns from a "training" session in the mountains only to find the Hakurei Shrine overrun by a legion of ghosts and youkai. Excited at the opportunity to test her fledgling abilities, she takes the powerful Yin-Yang Orbs and hurries off on the back of her turtle Genjii to seek out the source of the invasion.
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Gameplay
The Story of Eastern Wonderland casts the player as the Shrine Maiden Reimu Hakurei and offers three distinct attack types to choose from: a wide-range type with weak attack power, a mid-range type with moderate attack power and auto-targeting capabilities, and a narrow-range type with high attack power but lowered movement speed. The bombs also exhibit unique behavior depending on the type chosen.
As the first Danmaku shooting game in the Touhou series, the Story of Eastern Wonderland introduces many features that are now hallmarks of the series as a whole: relatively small hit boxes, boss characters who are not much larger than the player character however are highly mobile, a power-up system, variable-worth point items, an unlockable Extra Stage, and a semi-complex scoring system. The game also marks the first appearance of Marisa Kirisame, who would become a major character in the series, appearing as often as Reimu herself.
Concept
The game itself was designed to stand alongside Highly Responsive to Prayers at Comiket 52. ZUN, rather haughtily, states that it is supposed to be a danmaku game with so many bullets that not even DoDonPachi, a popular shooting game at the time, would compare - by having more bullets, but a smaller hitbox.
Before the game was released at Comiket 52, ZUN was already working on Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream.
Story
The story involves Reimu's investigation of monsters that appeared suddenly at the Hakurei Shrine. This time around, she takes two Yin-Yang Orbs, and her turtle servant Genjii in order to fly. She travels through the Dream World, which is between Gensokyo and Makai, in order to reach Reimaden, which is where she meets Marisa Kirisame and re-encounters Mima. Marisa appears to be the ghost's servant. Mima disappears after suffering a defeat by Reimu's hand, but the monsters and spirits around the shrine don't seem to have gone away.
During the extra stage, Rika attacks once more, this time with her new tank Evil Eye Sigma. After defeating the engineer, Reimu returns to the shrine to find the monsters gone.
Music
The original game included fifteen tracks, in the format most often seen by later games in the series: a theme for each stage, a theme for each boss, a title screen theme, an ending theme, and a staff roll theme.
This is the only PC-98 game to include two vastly different versions of it's soundtrack, a FM version and a MIDI version, which can be selected in the option menu. The MIDI version, not limited by the 6-voice polyphony of the built-in PC-9801-26 sound board, includes additional voices, melodies and phrases in many songs. However, it requires an external MIDI synthesizer for playback, which will also determine it's sound quality. All later appearances of the music are based on the FM version.
In the music room of Mystic Square, ZUN includes three unused songs that didn't make it into the final version. The fifteen main tracks and these three unused songs later appear in Akyu's Untouched Score vol.3.
Press
Story of Eastern Wonderland was released alongside Highly Responsive to Prayers at Comiket 52. Since the first game had been complete since sometime in 1995, it is unknown how long ZUN worked on this one for.
Akyu's Untouched Score vol.3 was released later at Comiket 71 at the end of 2006, which included all eighteen tracks.
On September 19, 2002, all the five PC-98 games have officially stopped being sold, a little after Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was released.
- An unofficial English patch was released at some time for this game, though it is now outdated.
External links
Official
- Team Shanghai Alice
- Amusement Makers (Former) Official Site
- Selection of PC98 Game Music (MP3)
- Selection of PC98 Game Music (PMD)
Unofficial
- Hoot Multisound Emulator
- Fixed music archive for hoot - Put it in hoot's pc98 folder.
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