Touhou - Wandering Souls

Touhou Wandering Souls is an action semi-platformer game with elements of RPG and fighting, set in the Touhou universe, where you initially control Reimu Hakurei a miko (a Shinto shrine maiden) to solve a problem that has came out in her world of Gensokyo, some mysterious magical barriers appeared in the world, and the only way to open them seems to be some weird purple souls, eventually more character will join in your quest to catch all the wandering souls , defeat your enemies, and end with the strange problem disturbing your world of Gensokyo.
I have to let myself clear, my only knowledge of the Touhou Universe comes from a fistful of fangames like this one, whose interpretations of the characters and their world may be heavily influenced by the game creator (s) own view, and I had almost no idea about the things officially are going on in Gensokyo.

Gameplay
Is one of the biggest selling points of the game, the creator put a great effort to make every character look and “feel” different, thanks not only to the special attacks, but even also sometimes the basic movements. With this you get characters useful for many different situations like being surrounded by enemies, against one strong enemy, or a couple of them (those may be also useful for bosses), or even characters with special techniques to reach a complicated area in several levels. The characters themselves have a large set of abilities, to mention: move, jump, run, float (keeping jump pressed in the air), basic attack, two variations of the basic attack, a collection of special attacks (that depends on the equipment) and a “spell card” attack (basically a magic spell that needs to be charged before employed).
The difficulty may seem a little high for some players, but it seems to be a constant in the touhou fangames I’ve played (and from what I heard in the main series too), it never becomes an impossible mess of hardness anyway.
On the other hand I have a small complaint, being that you get the first 3 characters almost instantly in the first levels, but you have to wait a lot to get the other 9 chars available on the game, I think that maybe the majority of them should have been scattered before the ending, with a few being left for the secret levels.





Graphics & Art
The game looks incredibly good for RPG Maker standards, even if most of the graphics are ripped from other sources (properly mentioned in the credits), they are placed in a flawless way, there’s even supposedly some RTP material there but the game looks so good you’ll have trouble trying to notice it, and the ripped material definitely blends perfectly with the scenery, in sidescroller format (why the sidescroller Rpg Maker games almost always look better than the normal ones? is the sprites? but Alter Aila Genesis had sprites with almost normal appearance, however looked also better than most Rpg Maker games). Besides, the material extracted from other sources is also integrated wonderfully, for example, after watching a couple of Touhou videos becomes clear that the enemies don’t come from the official games, but from somewhere else, and even after that, they mix flawlessly with the characters’ sprites and the effects such as the ones used by the characters (and the enemies themselves) or the ambient effects.

Music & Sound
With the game’s soundtrack ripped mostly from the main Touhou games, and the sound taken from different sources, the game obviously deliver in this point (because it just can’t fail), still, you may disapprove the lack of risk in this department (although is not something I care about). Also the music for the levels even if all the song and sounds of the game are ripped they are expertly chosen too, honestly I don’t know if this is somehow related to their placement in the original games, nevertheless, this system works, and that’s, from my point of view, the most important thing that matters.

Storyline & Characters
This is clearly not the main point, so I won’t spent too many lines on this entry, but something I do want to mention is that this feature could be seen as a weakness however at the same time the lack of a complex story manages to accomplish something really valuable, that is, you don’t need any knowledge about the Touhou universe at all to play this game.
About the characters, the game don’t use too much time to develop them ,besides they only have a few lines each but using a bit of imagination you can make a guess about their personalities based on their small amount of dialogue. So you can go to the original games to have a better idea about their story, personalities and backgrounds, or just enjoy the action, exactly like I did.

Overall
In short, Touhou Wandering Souls is, if not the best, at least one of the most complete action games made on the engine.