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Embodiment of Scarlet Devil/Gameplay

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Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

Gameplay

Controls

The game may be played using either a keyboard or a gamepad.

Keyboard controls are as follows:

  • The Arrow Keys move the character around
  • Z causes a short barrage of shots to be fired; it may be held down for rapidfire
  • X releases a bomb, also known as a Spell Card (presuming that any are left)
  • Shift slows the character's movement and focuses their shots into a tighter area
  • Esc pauses the game and brings you to the in-game menu
  • Ctrl fast-forwards through any dialogue

Basic Gameplay

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil plays like a fairly typical vertically-scrolling danmaku shooting game, in which the player's character is always facing towards the top of the screen, shooting at anything that moves, avoiding and weaving between enemy bullets, and confronting difficult bosses at the end of a stage.

There are 4 levels of difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic. Each difficulty level features differences in the number of bullets fired by each enemy, rate of fire, variations in the bullets' pattern of movement, and the number and type of enemy Spell Cards used.

The player will traverse 6 increasingly harrowing stages through the course of a regular game. The trial version ends prematurely at Stage 3, and Easy difficulty ends prematurely at Stage 5.

Once the game has been completed without continuing on Normal or higher difficulty, an Extra Stage is unlocked, available for any character that has accomplished that feat. The Extra Stage features significantly stronger and faster enemies, an extremely difficult midboss and boss battle, and no option to continue if all lives are lost.

Shot

A character's "shot" is the player's primary method of attacking enemies. While the shot's attack area and behaviour varies depending on the character type the player has chosen, the shot can be powered up by filling up the Power Level by collecting power items. The shot gradually becomes more powerful when the player reaches the Power Levels of 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, and 128 (MAX), respectively. When the player reaches MAX power, all bullets on the screen cancel out and become star items which are automatically collected. While the player has maximum shot power, the player may auto-collect all items on screen by moving their character close to the top of the screen. This ability is very important for achieving high scores.

Shot Types

Reimu A

Spirit Spell Card
Excellent against swarms of weak enemies, but less effective against bosses.
Shot: Homing Amulet (「ホーミングアミュレット」)
Bomb: Dream Seal (「夢想封印」)

Reimu B

Dream Spell Card
A good balance in damage and area covered, but the bomb is fairly weak.
Shot: Persuasion Needle (「パスウェイジョンニードル」)
Bomb: Evil-Sealing Circle (「封魔陣」)

Marisa A

Magic Spell Card
Excellent against bosses, but only covers a small area of the screen.
Shot: Magic Missile (「マジックミサイル」)
Bomb: Stardust Reverie (「スターダストレヴァリエ」)

Marisa B

Love Spell Card
A little lacking in both damage and coverage, but the bomb is very strong.
Shot: Illusion Laser (「イリュージョンレーザー」)
Bomb: Master Spark (「マスタースパーク」)

Bomb

A character's "bomb" is the player's limited-use method of getting out of difficult situations. A bomb's attack area, duration, and power varies depending on the character type the player has chosen, but it typically deals heavy damage to every enemy it touches, in addition to cancelling out any bullets in the bomb's way, as well as automatically collecting every item on screen. The player's character becomes invincible during and for a short time after the bomb's effect wears off. At the beginning of the game and any time your character respawns, you will start off with 3 bombs. Bomb items will increase your current stock by one. You can carry up to a maximum of 8 bombs at a time. If you receive a bomb when you already have the maximum, that bomb will be lost.

Lives

With default settings, you will start off with 3 lives. You can lose a life by getting "hit" by an enemy attack.

The hit box for your character is quite small in comparison to your on-screen sprite, approximately only 5 pixels by 5 pixels in size. It is not clearly marked on the sprite, but it is possible to approximate its location well by looking at the white part of Reimu's clothes just above her red skirt, or the center of Marisa's pink ribbon on her back. If the hit box of your character's sprite comes into contact with the hit box of an enemy bullet, laser, or the enemy itself, then you have been hit.

If you have bombs in stock and the Bomb key is pressed within a short time of the player's character being hit, then the hit can be negated and countered with a bomb. This deathbomb time interval only lasts for 6 frames (about 0.1 seconds), after which you will lose a life as normal. Every successful use, the interval is shortened by how many frames you took to deathbomb, down to a minimum of 1 frame (1/60th of a second); it is reset back to normal when you lose a life.

The player is awarded extra lives upon reaching certain score totals or by collecting 1up items. For the regular game, extra lives are awarded at 10, 20, 40, and 60 million points. For the Extra Stage, no extra lives are awarded for points. You can carry up to a maximum of 8 extra lives at a time. If you receive an extra life when you already have the maximum, that life will be lost.

Upon losing all their lives, the player is given the choice to continue right where they left off. However, if you do continue, your current score will be reset back to 0 + the number of times you have continued, you will not be able to save a replay of your game, and you will reach the "Bad Ending" if you finish the game. You may continue up to 3 times.

Rank

There exists a rank system in this game. As rank increases, enemy bullets will generally become faster and more plentiful. This effect that rank has in this game is most prominent with boss attacks, where the bullet count difference between minimum and maximum rank can differ by a factor of 4 or more, and bullet movement speeds can double. Note that the game does not display the numerical value of rank at any point - under most circumstances, it can be estimated only by observing bullet pattern behaviour.

Rank ranges from 10 to 32 (from 12 to 20 on easy, and from 14 to 18 in Extra), and is set to 16 at the beginning of the game. It increases gradually with survival time (+1 every ~32 seconds), item collection (from +0 to +2 depending on the item type), grazing (+0.06) and gaining an extra life through score (+2), until it reaches the cap of 32, 20 or 18, corresponding to the highest variable difficulty. The rank value is decreased by 16 whenever the player is hit, by 2 when the player uses a bomb, and by 0.03 when an item disappears through the bottom of the screen. (Thus, deathbombing reduces rank by 16 + 2, or 18.)

Item Drops

Point Items and Power Items drop from every third enemy defeated. The drops follow this pattern in order, repeating after the end of the list:

Item Drop Pattern
Power (Small)
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Power (Small)
Point
Point
Point
Power (Small)
Power (Small)
Power (Small)
Point
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Point
Power (Small)
Power (Small)
Point
Point
Point
Power (Small)
Power (Large)

Difficulty

Easy - For people who don't like STG much.
Normal - For most people.
Hard - For arcade shooting game players.
Lunatic - For weird people.
Extra - Give up already, are you crazy?

Boss Battles

The main challenge and the main attraction. Each boss has multiple lives, which are represented by multiple health bars. Bosses normally alternate between attacking normally and attacking with Spell Cards, switching once with each life bar.

Normal attacks are incrementally stronger versions of the boss character's basic attack. Spell Card attacks bedazzle the player with combinations of complex patterns that often involve the use of projectiles and obstacles crafted especially for use with that Spell Card. If the player manages to defeat a Spell Card attack without getting hit or using any bombs, a substantial score bonus is rewarded for the feat.

Each attack is accompanied by a timer. When time runs out, the boss will switch to their next attack pattern even if their health bar isn't empty. Waiting for a boss character's attack pattern to self-destruct may be enough to beat them, but mere survival won't earn the player any score bonuses.

Character Statistics

There are two characters to choose from, each of which have two styles of attack. The player decides which character to play and which attack type to use at the start of the game.

Reimu

Basic Performance
Moving Speed: ★★★
Attack Range: ★★★★
Attack Power: ★★★

Marisa

Basic Performance
Moving Speed: ★★★★
Attack Range: ★
Attack Power: ★★★★
Reimu A - Homing amulets.
Reimu B - Persuasion needles.
Marisa A - Magic missiles.
Marisa B - Lasers.

Screen Layout

Screen layout
  1. Your character
  2. Player Score
    • 最高得点 (High Score): displays your highest score for the current character, type, and difficulty
    • 得点 (Score): Your current score
  3. The number of remaining Players and Bombs / The approximate location of the Point of collection
  4. Player Status
    • Power: displays your shot power level, maxing out at 128
    • Graze: displays how many times enemy shots have grazed your hitbox during this stage
    • 点 (Point): displays how many Point Items you collected during this stage
  5. Enemy Status
    • Left number: displays how many health bars the enemy has in reserve
    • Right number: displays how much time is left before the enemy's attack spell self-destructs
    • Middle bar: displays how much health the enemy has left in their current attack spell

Scoring

Scoring works similar to many other Touhou games in many aspects. Listed below are the details for how points are given in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.

Enemies

Any damage you deal to any enemy, whether it be caused by your shots or your bombs, will cause your score to increase very slightly. Actually destroying enemies will award you slightly more points, but the points earned from this are around the range of hundreds to thousands of points per enemy. This is not a significant amount at all. However, enemies shoot bullets for you to "graze" and release items for you to collect, and those are very important for scoring as covered below.

Grazing

"Grazing a bullet" means to have a bullet or laser come dangerously close to your hitbox. Each graze will add 500 to your score, and will increase your "Graze number" by 1, which is used to calculate the Clear bonus. You can only graze a bullet once, so you won't gain any additional points or graze by following a bullet. Lasers can be continually grazed throughout their duration, but once again, moving around will not gain you any additional points or graze.

Point Items

As the name implies, point items are the major source of points in the game. The higher up on the screen you collect them, the more points they are worth, up to a defined maximum. You can easily tell when you are collecting point items for their maximum value, since they show the value in yellow text. The auto-item-collect line is the same height as the height where point items reach their maximum value, so take advantage of this fact wherever you can for massive points. The maximum value for point items are based on difficulty:

 Easy:    100,000
 Normal:  100,000
 Hard:    150,000
 Lunatic: 200,000
 Extra:   300,000

An important thing to keep in mind is that point items collected even a pixel below the maximum value threshold are worth 75% of their maximum score. This is a non-trivial difference, so do your best to collect items without prematurely retreating down to the lower parts of the screen. Also, point items collected at the bottom of the screen are worth around 25% of their maximum value. The number of point items collected per stage is used to calculate the Clear bonus, to be discussed later.

Power Items

While your shot is not fully powered up, power items are worth only 10 points. However, once maximum shot power has been reached, each additional power item collected will be worth more than the previous one collected, up to a maximum of 51,200 points per power item. Unlike point items, power items will award you the same number of points anywhere on the screen. However, if you lose a life and your power level to less than maximum, power items will be worth only 10 points just like the beginning, and you will have to start this process over again. The progression is as follows: 10, 20, 30... 100, 200, 300... 1000, 2000, 3000... 12000, 51200. In other words, it takes 32 power items to get from a value of 10 to 51200. The opportunity cost of dying and having to rebuild the value of the power items is 1,554,350 points.

Large power items act the same as normal power items, except that when you are at maximum shot power, they increase the current value of power items as if you had collected 8 normal point items.

Star Items

These items appear any time an enemy bullet is cancelled out. This can happen when you defeat an attack pattern of a boss (by depleting their current healthbar), at the moment you gain maximum shot power, when you destroy a certain enemy, or when you erase enemy bullets with a bomb. Each star item is worth 500 points + 10 points for every 3 grazes you have that stage. So for example, if you currently have 304 graze and you collect a star item, it will be worth 500 + (10 * (304 / 3)) = 1510 points. The only exception is when star items are created by a bomb, in which case each star item generated is worth exactly 100 points. However, bullets cancelled near the end of a bomb's duration will be worth the same value as a regular star item. The maximum number of items on the screen is 512 and therefore any bullet count higher than in a cancel will only contribute to the Enemy Bullet Bonus. If an attack would drop power or point items, those items can be omitted if the total item count would exceed 512.

Enemy Bullet Bonus

When you finish off one of the boss's lives (caused by completely depleting the visible healthbar) or defeat a Spell Card of a boss, all enemy bullets on screen are tallied up to calculate the Enemy Bullet Bonus. The value of each bullet starts at 2000 and increases by 10 for each successive bullet, giving a total equal to N * (1995 + 5 * N), where N is the number of bullets. The maximum value of this bonus is 3324800 (at the bullet cap of 640). This bonus is independent of any star items collected from finishing off a boss's attack pattern. Finding the correct time in a boss's attack to finish them off can mean the difference between an Enemy Bullet bonus of 100,000 and one of 3,000,000.

Spell Card Bonus

Occasionally, a boss will attack using a Spell Card. You will know this is happening when the background changes and the Spell Card's name appears in the upper-right corner of the screen. If the boss's healthbar is depleted within the time limit and without getting hit or using a bomb, a spell card bonus will be added to your score.

Unlike later games in the series, the spell card bonus is calculated directly from the number of seconds remaining; the spell card's starting timer does not affect this calculation. The bonus is calculated as follows:

stage 1-2:       20,000 * (timer + 10)
stage 3:         25,000 * (timer + 10)
stage 4:         30,000 * (timer + 10)
stage 5:         40,000 * (timer + 10)
stage 6 Sakuya:  50,000 * (timer + 10)
stage 6 Remilia: 60,000 * (timer + 10)
Extra:           70,000 * (timer + 10)

For Remilia's and Flandre's final cards, the calculation uses the actual (hidden) number of seconds remaining, even if the displayed timer is 99.

The formula is unchanged for survival cards. As such, capturing Secret Barrage "And Then Will There Be None?" will always award only 700,000 points.

Clear Bonus

At the end of each stage, the player is awarded a point bonus based on their performance throughout the stage. The bonus is calculated as follows:

 Stage x  1000 (stage number, Extra = 7)
 Power x  100 (power level)
 Graze x  10 (graze count)

This combined total is then multiplied by the number of point items collected in that stage.

In addition, if you are not playing on Easy and the stage happened to be the last stage, the following is added:

 Player x 3,000,000 (lives in stock, not including your current one)
 Bomb   x 1,000,000 (bombs in stock)

Finally, depending on the conditions you played under, the result is multiplied by these modifiers, rounded down to the nearest 10:

 4 Initial Lives:    x 0.5
 5 Initial Lives:    x 0.2
 Easy Difficulty:    x 0.5
 Normal Difficulty:  x 1.0
 Hard Difficulty:    x 1.2
 Lunatic Difficulty: x 1.5
 Extra Difficulty:   x 2.0

The end result is then added on to your score.

Unlockables

Endings

To view the bad endings, either finish the game on Easy or finish the game with one or more continues.

  • To get Bad Ending 1, use Reimu, any type.
  • To get Bad Ending 2, use Marisa, any type.

To view the normal(good) endings, finish the game on Normal, Hard, or Lunatic difficulty without continuing once.

  • To get Ending 3, use Reimu-A.
  • To get Ending 4, use Reimu-B.
  • To get Ending 5, use Marisa-A.
  • To get Ending 6, use Marisa-B.

Practice Mode

To unlock a stage to practice in "Practice Start" at a specific difficulty level and for a specific character and type, you must complete that stage in the standard "Start" game mode at that same difficulty, using the same character and type. The stage will be unlocked even if you have used continues.

Extra Stage

To unlock the Extra stage for a specific character and type, you must reach the "Good Ending" (beat the entire game without continuing on Normal or higher difficulties) with that same character and type.

Full Unlock Code

To unlock all unlockable content at once, navigate to the Extra Stage records screen and hold either Shift or Ctrl, then press Home five times, Q two times and S three times. If done correctly, the 1up sound effect will play and the practice mode stages as well as the Extra Stage will be unlocked for all shottypes. For version 1.02f and earlier, replace Home with F12.

Replays

If you rename replay files to "th6_ud*.rpy", where * is any string of characters, you will be able to view them in the "Replay" menu, and they won't take up any of your precious 15 slots for saving replays. However, the first 4 characters of the * in "th6_ud*.rpy" must be unique from any other * in the replay folder, or else that replay won't be recognized by the game.

Glitches

This is a list of known glitches, bugs or other unusual capabilities that aren't supposed to be part of the original gameplay.

Glitches reported in the full version:

  • Bomb enemy spawn glitch: During the period of violent shaking caused by MarisaB's bomb, "Master Spark" or ReimuB's bomb, "Evil-Sealing Circle", enemies that are scheduled to appear from the right side of the screen will consistently fail to show up. Enemies that disappear in this fashion do not produce any points or items.
  • Night Bird on Easy: On Easy mode, if Rumia's first nonspell is timed out, her Spell Card "Night Bird" will start, which is normally not available on Easy. The healthbar from the nonspell also carries over to it, making it impossible to defeat if she has full health.
  • ReimuA audio bug: Between 16 and 31 power, ReimuA's shot does not produce any sound.
  • Persistent bat form: If you time out the final Spell Card of Remilia or Flandre and use a bomb right before the spell ends, to turn either of them into a bat, the Spell Card will finish, but the boss will remain in bat form. In this case, you have to wait a minute or so before the final score (for Remilia) or the final dialog (for Flandre) appears.
  • Item cap bug: If there are too many bullets or star items on the screen, this can cause the game not to drop any point items. This can happen if you die at the same time as, for example, the green books section in Stage 4 ends; they will not drop any point items due to the screen being full of star items. Two Spell Cards are also affected: Meiling's "Wind Chime of Colorful Rainbow" on Lunatic and Patchouli's "Silent Selene" in Extra. They do not drop any items if the bullet count is 511 or higher (yellow bonus of at least 2,325,050) and only partially drop the intended point or power items if the bullet count is 510 (yellow bonus of 2,317,950).
  • Flandre nonspell bug: For currently unknown reasons, Flandre sometimes stops shooting for one wave during her 6th nonspell.
  • Spell skip glitch: If you finish a nonspell when the timer of the boss is at the end of 00 seconds (a frame away from timing out), the Spell Card that comes afterward is skipped. You get all of the items you would normally get from finishing off the spell, but you do not get the Spell Card Bonus. This can be done for most nonspells that have Spell Cards after them, but not all of them; it does not work on Flandre's last nonspell and Remilia's last nonspell.
  • Character select glitch: In the character selection screen, if the player presses Z in a small time window, exactly while changing characters, both characters will be shown at the same time. This is purely visual and has no gameplay effect. Screenshot of this glitch.

The following apply to multiple games, including Embodiment of Scarlet Devil:

  • Pause menu storage: Pausing the game exactly when the statistics screen is about to open up causes the game to show both the statistics menu and the pause menu at once, giving you control of both simultaneously. This allows you to go back to the main screen and even start a run while the other menu is still open, causing weird effects, as seen in this video.
  • Dialogue pause desync: If the game is paused during dialogue, and then unpaused by pressing Z to continue playing, any replay made of such a run will desync on the stage the dialogue unpause was performed on. This can be prevented by unpausing with the Esc key.
  • Low boss i-frame bug: Due to the boss having nearly no invincibility frames during the pause between the previous and the next spell card, Flandre's and Remilia's final spell card take heavy damage at the start if you shoot during this period and didn't bomb before the spell card starts.