Barrylocke
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Genre: Bullet Hell Vertical Shooter
Developer: Team Shanghai Alice
Publisher: Playism
Platform: PC
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 7th May 2015
Download Size: 450 MB (Full Game); 169 MB (Demo Version)
Official Website can be found here. This also includes a demo that lets you play to stage 3 with all playable types.
Please note that this game's text is almost completely Japanese!
Touhou is a series of (mostly) vertical shooting games of the bullet hell style, similar to Dodonpachi and Ikaruga. Like these games, they have you choosing one of various units (in this case a trio of young women with mystical power) to use in your goal of shooting your way to the end of the stage, dodging the countless bullets and projectiles fired at you, all culminating with a powerful boss at the end of the level. Originally made for the PC-98 computer system starting in 1995, the Touhou series has been on Windows system since 2002. Known for a huge (and ever growing) cast, a large variety of well-loved and often remixed songs, and relatively approachable gameplay compared to other bullet hells, the Touhou series has long been a significant presence in the doujin scene. An avalanche of music, games, art and animation have been created by fans of the games over the past 20 years, and it even has a sizable fanbase beyond Japan. Double Dealing Character was originally released in 2013 for Japanese markets.
"Youkai are rebelling, and tsukumogami are turning up; no one knows what's happening, clouds are gathering, and a strong wind carries the sounds of a huge building. Gensokyo is full of the sounds of dissonance. The individual weapons of the three protagonists are starting to act oddly. It's their job to either take their weapons in hand and fight the youkai, or to cast their weapons aside."
In Double Dealing Character, players get to select one of 3 different characters, and also choose whether or not the character will use her corrupted weapon, for a total of 6 different shot types.
Reimu Hakurei
Reimu Hakurei is the original protagonist of the Touhou games, having been around since the very first one. She's the shrine maiden of the Hakurei shrine, whose job is to maintain the border that separates Gensokyo and the real world.
Reimu A
Unfocused uses homing amulets. Focused uses a spinning purification rod that homes in on stage enemies. Power increases the length of the purification rod, and the number of homing amulets.
Reimu B
Unfocused uses homing amulets. Focused uses persuasion needles. Power increases the number of needles and homing amulets.
Special Ability
Reimu has a slightly smaller hitbox than the others, which makes it harder for her to get hit by enemy projectiles
Marisa Kirisame
Originally appearing as an antagonist in the 2nd Touhou game, Marisa Kirisame is now usually seen as the other main protagonist along with Reimu. She's claims to be just an Ordinary Witch who lives in the Forest of Magic.
Marisa A
Unfocused uses illusion lasers. Focused uses a flamethrower hakkero. Power increases the number of lasers and increases the power/width of the flamethrower.
Marisa B
Unfocused uses illusion lasers. Focused uses magic missiles that make enemies drop Power items. Power increases the number of missiles and lasers.
Special Ability
Marisa has a slightly lower auto-collect line, which means she doesn't have to go as high to instantly grab all of the items on the screen and get bonus bomb, lives, and points.
Sakuya Izayoi
Despite being human, Sakuya Iayoi is the Head Maid of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, serving under the vampire sisters that reside there. She originally clashed against Reimu and Marisa in Touhou 6, but has since helped to clean up a few unusual incidents of her own.
Sakuya A
Unfocused uses throwing knives. Focused uses silver blades that slow an enemy and then explode. Power increases the number of knives and blades.
Sakuya B
Unfocused uses throwing knives. Focused uses green knives that steal green score items. Power increases the number of knives.
Special Ability
When Sakuya is the player, items fall slower off the screen, making them easier to quickly collect or gather for a big auto-collect bonus.
- Your character
- Player Score
- High Score: your highest score for the current character, type, and difficulty
- Score: your current score
- The number of remaining lives (hearts) and bombs (stars) / The approximate location of the point of collection
Right numbers: fragments needed for an extra life / bomb - Player Status
- Power: your shot power level, maxing out at 4.00
- Point value: the maximum points achievable of the point items
- Graze: the number of enemy shots that have grazed your hit box during the game
- Boss Status
- Stars: the number of health bars the enemy has left
- Middle number: the amount of time left before the enemy's attack spell fails (self-destructs)
- Circular health bar surrounds the boss for current star
- Spell Card Status
- Title: the name of the spell card being used
- Bonus: the constantly-updating value of the Spell Card Bonus
- History: the number of times you have "captured" the spell card currently being used, and the number of times you have faced it.
- The boss enemy
Keyboard Controls
Arrow keys: Directional movement
Left Shift: Focus
Z: Fire (confirm in menus)
X: Bomb (decline in menus)
Ctrl: Skip text
Escape: Pause Menu
Items to collect
Red Squares: Power tokens. Collecting these will make your character shoot more shots
Blue Squares: Point tokens. These are a must to collect if you want a high score. Their current max value is listed on the right hand side of the screen and decreases the lower it is when collected.
Green Stars: Bomb tokens. Collect 5 of these to add a bomb to your stock.
Pink Hearts: Life tokens. Collect 3 of these to add a life to your stock.
Hitbox
To give a proper definition of a hitbox, it is defined as:
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 Double Dealing Character, your hitbox will become visible when you shift focus! Speaking of shift focus:
Shift Focus
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, focusing makes your hitbox visible. Focusing will also alter your shot type, generally making your shots more focused in the forward direction. And finally, focusing increases your range for collecting power ups and all that fun stuff!
Spell cards
Spell cards are essentially the source of all the pretty, colorful bullet patterns that bosses use to kill you. 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 bosss 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, the game has 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.
- 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. In Double Dealing Character bombs are collected in parts. A few parts are given at various points of the stage and during boss fights, but your primary method of collecting bomb parts is through the DDC's unique take on the Point of Collection. When enough bomb parts have been collected, you'll earn a bomb to use in the game.
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. At the beginning of your run, the point of collection line is shown to you. You can also approximate it's location as being located on the middle of the live gauge on the right hand side of the screen (slightly lower for Marisa).
Cross that line if you want todieget rich.
Unique to Double Dealing Character is a special system involving the Point of Collection. Whenever you go above the point of collection and there's at least 20 point or power items to collect, you'll receive a bomb piece. If you manage to collect 60 or more point or power items, you'll instead get a life piece! Life pieces also replace every 5th bomb piece earned in this way. In addition, you'll gain points based on the total value of items collected, with a multiplier that rises based on the amount (up to a x2.0 if you manage 60 or more point or power items)
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. In Double Dealing Character, increases the amount of points your given from collecting blue point items.
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,
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.
This is a general overview of the games mechanics, but if you want to get in-depth specifics, or you want to learn more about the mechanics of other Touhou games, be sure to visit the touhouwiki.
Playism Trailer
Why was the 14th game chosen to be the first one to be released to Western markets?
The easiest answer is that this was the most recent mainline game released in the series so far.
In addition, Double Dealing Character has a relatively basic gameplay system compared to some of the other modern games in the series, making it a smart choice for introducing a new audience to the series.
What about the previous Touhou games? Future ones? Other media?In addition, Double Dealing Character has a relatively basic gameplay system compared to some of the other modern games in the series, making it a smart choice for introducing a new audience to the series.
As of this writing, Playism says they currently have no official plans to release other games in the main series. However, they did also release a doujin Touhou fangame, Takkoman. This suggests that if things go well they have plans to release more fangames, and perhaps more mainline game as well.
Ok, so are Westerners up the creek? Will we miss out on important stuff by having not played the earlier ones?Most of the story within the Touhou games is light. In addition, DDC is the first game of a new story arc, so there's very little background knowledge needed to get into DDC.
But WAIT A SECOND! You just said at the top of the page that this game is almost entirely in Japanese!R-r-right, this is true. The only significant portion of the game that is in English is the config program, and none of the English patching programs currently seem to work for the Playism release of the game. The best option for getting the story while sticking to this version of the game is probably the script available on the touhouwiki.
When I load the game, I get an error box from Windows saying it's not responding.Try changing the folder name of the downloaded game to a name with Latin Letters (such as an English name).
When I load the game, I get an errorbox in Japanese/gibberish, mentioning DirectInput and Direct3d.
Your monitor may not support 1280x960. Try changing the game to windowed mode, or try a resolution option besides 1280x960
I try to use the keyboard controls, but I'm unable to do but so many actions at once and it's ruining my game!Some keyboards (such as on many laptops) can only allow a certain amount of keystrokes in at once. In a game like Touhou where you may be moving, focusing, shooting, and then suddenly trying to use a bomb, all at once, it can be frustrating, especially since there's no native option to change keyboard keys. The best two options I've found for this is to either switch to a controller (the game oddly DOES lets you change controller settings) or use AutoHotKey to set up a short script that can let you use keyboard keys frequently. Here's the script I use for AHK to play Touhou games on my laptop:
Code:
#NoEnv
SendMode Input
a::LShift
s::z
d::x
f::c
z::LCtrlAnd don't forget that if you want more Touhou fun, to be sure to check out NeoGAFs own Touhou Community Thread!
