Alright, I'm going to go ahead and post this in here. Feel free to tell me if anything should be added or if any information is either confusing or a little off. Some of the stuff I've typed is admittedly from memory, since I had problems finding some information to reaffirm what I typed, so hopefully there aren't any egregious issues. Anyways, this should be most of the general basics you should know for playing Touhou games.
Hitbox
To give a proper definition of a hitbox, it is defined as:
an invisible shape commonly used in video games for real-time collision detection.
In other words, this is the area on your character that determines if you've been hit or not! Generally, hitboxes will encompass an entire character in some manner, but Touhou hitboxes are quite different. Your hitbox in Touhou is defined by a small circle on the characters waist. This means that even when a bullet collides with your character, it does not kill you unless it hits the small circle.
Hey, hey, you see that white circle on Reimu? Don't let anything touch that!
In EoSD (6) and the games before that, it was not possible to actually view your hitbox. Because of that, you would generally have to become intimate with your hitbox through experience. However, in PCB (7) and beyond, your hitbox will become visible when you shift focus! Speaking of shift focus:
Shift Focus
Starting with LLS (4), holding shift will make your character go into focus mode. What this means is that you will start moving much slower, allowing you to be much more precise with your movements and prevent you from careening into a bullet and dying as a result! As mentioned earlier, starting with PCB (7), focusing makes your hitbox visible. Focusing will also alter your shot type, generally making your shots more focused in the forward direction. Also, starting with MoF (10), focusing increases your range for collecting power ups and all that fun stuff!
Additional note: In the case of EoSD, you can download a
patch that will provide a visible hitbox when focusing.
Spell cards
Spell cards are essentially the source of all the pretty, colorful bullet patterns that bosses use to kill you. Starting with EoSD (6), bullet patterns that the bosses use are generally split between non spells and spell cards, with spell cards typically being the more complex and potentially gimmicky patterns. For each non spell and spell card, there will be both a health bar and a timer. In order to get past these, you must either deplete the boss’s health bar for that attack, or survive until the timer counts down to zero. When a boss is using a spell card, the name will be displayed in the top right corner along with “Bonus #” and “History #/#”, which is the number of times you have captured a spell card out of the number of times you have challenged that spell card.
The history acts as a testament to your continuing failure.
Spell cards are captured by successfully beating the spell card without dying and without using a bomb. By capturing a spell card, you will receive a number of bonus points as indicated by “Bonus #”.
Continues
Continues are a fairly basic concept to games, in general, and is simply the option to continue the game if you reached a game over by losing all your lives. There are two important things to keep in mind about continues in Touhou games.
- First, most of the games have a continue system where if you run out of lives, choosing to continue will place you back at the point where you died. However, you only have a limited number of continues. For MoF (10), SA (11), and UFO (12), the continue system was changed so that using a continue placed you back at the beginning of the stage you are currently on. In exchange, these games gave you an infinite number of continues.
- Second, in order to get a good ending, you must complete a 1 credit clear (1-cc) of the game. If you use a continue, you will no longer be on your first credit and you will receive a bad ending upon completing the game.
Bombs
Bombs are spell cards used by you, and are generally fairly powerful attacks that clear a significant number of enemy bullets off the screen while providing you with a period of invincibility. Also, if you use a bomb within a small window of time immediately after being hit, the bomb will prevent the loss of a life. Bombs have gone through a fair amount of change throughout the series. Originally, there was a counter for bombs and you would acquire more bombs at different points of the stages. This was changed starting with MoF (10), where bombs no longer had a separate counter and, instead, using a bomb depleted your power gauge. This was changed once again in UFO (12), where there was a counter for bombs, but new bombs were obtained by collecting bomb parts. Once enough bomb parts were collected, another bomb was acquired.
Point of Collection (or Auto-Collect Line, as others have called it)
The point of collection is an invisible line towards the top of the screen. If you go above this line, items will gravitate towards you at a fairly quick speed, saving you the trouble of flying around the screen to pick them all up. Starting with MoF (10), the point of collection is shown to you at the very beginning of a run.
Cross that line if you want to die get rich.
Grazing
Grazing is the concept of getting really really close to a bullet without actually touching it. If you like high scores, grazing is for you! The whole point of grazing is to reward super aggressive players who like to dance with death by giving them inflated scores. Grazing is present in the series starting with LLS (4), although it was not present for MoF (10). Oh, and I guess PoFV (9), but that game doesn’t count!
Streaming
Streaming is a fairly basic concept in bullet hell games that is extremely useful and very important to understand. It is not uncommon for enemies to fire bullets in a straight line at your location, or for spell card patterns to have certain bullets aimed at your position. As such, you can easily control these bullets being aimed at you by simply moving slightly to the side.
Here is an example of streaming (SA stage 6), where it can be seen that the player slowly moves in order to lure all the bullets into a particular spot.
Difficulty Levels
The Touhou series has four different difficulty levels, which include Easy,
EasyNormal, Hard, and
DeathLunatic. There are a few important issues to make note of with regards to difficulty levels. First, certain games will only allow you to see the good ending only if you are playing Normal difficulty or above. Second, if you wish to access the Extra stage (Note: You do), then you must 1-cc the game on Normal difficulty or higher. Third, Easy mode is for elementary children only.
But seriously, Easy mode is a very good way to get accustomed to the game and begin learning the basics if you are having issues with higher difficulties. I'm sure no one will mock you for it. Not at all.
Hopefully this is a useful overview of general game mechanics. Keep in mind, though, that most of the games have mechanics specific to that game. You can generally get by without really understanding game specific mechanics, but if you wish to gain a better understanding of individual games, the Touhou wiki provides plenty of useful information.
