start date: 7/18/23
normal 1cc: 7/22/23
written: 8/10/23
im starting to run out of fun things to say in these intro segments, but it feels weird to just skip directly into the main post without any lead in... complaining about a lack of intro works for this one but i have no idea what im gonna do next :P
nina's thoughts on Touhou 10 - Mountain of Faith
Mountain of Faith is technically my first touhou game, back in march of 2018 i decided to give touhou a shot and randomly picked this one, i think solely because i was able to find a download of it pre-patched into english. i didn't do very great, never made it past stage 4, and bounced off of touhou for a couple years, coming back to the series with Touhou Luna Nights in 2021. (which by the way is a great game, i might make a dedicated post about it if i need a break between the mainline games)
backstory aside, lets begin! Mountain of Faith takes us back to the basics. after the craziness of the last couple games, MoF simplifies things a lot, acting as a sort of soft reset for the gameplay. while it's more small-scale than the previous games, it still brings some unique new fun stuff to the table.
for the playable characters we're back to just Reimu and Marisa, but they each have 3 weapon options and some are pretty funky. Reimu has her typical homing bullets and needles, but her third option is the 'youkai buster', a weird shot that goes from a vertical shot with decent range when unfocused to a high-speed shotgun fan blast when focused. Marisa's weapons are even more weird, her illusion laser and magic missile come back, but the magic missile is completely reworked to be a bunch of trailing options that follow behind Marisa as an afterimage and can be locked into a position relative to her by focusing. her third option is the weirdest one, the 'cold inferno' giving Marisa powerful icy flamethrowers with a point-blank range, that can be placed in a position on the screen by focusing while Marisa herself moves away somewhere else. its potential damage feels pretty high, but its tough to make use of, especially in boss fights where you're typically positioned far outside it's effective range. i really like all of Marisa's movesets in this one, and my 1cc was done with her illusion laser set.
one disappointment in the players arsenal though is the removal of bombs. bombs no longer exist as a resource, and characters and movesets don't have unique special moves tied to them. instead a replacement for the bomb exists as a basic panic button of sorts that sacrifices a weapon option and summons a circle at your character that negates bullets for a few seconds. this lackluster replacement for bombs is not only just not very fun to use, but also makes MoF much more difficult than previous games imo. compared to previous games where a bomb clears a good chunk of the screen and deals a lot of bonus damage, instead these bomb-replacements only clear a fraction of the bullets aimed at you, and directly reduce your attack strength while not doing any damage of their own! their one saving grace is that since they're based off of your power stat, they are infinitely renewable, which cannot be said for the bombs in previous games where you only get 3 per life, plus a few more from miniboss kills. still, i have to say i really dont like these.
another system in this game that i actually do like is the Faith system. Faith is in essence a distilled version of the confusing Cherry mechanics from PCB. simply put, you pick up green Faith items and it increases your Faith meter, which increases how much point items are worth. after a couple seconds of not shooting enemies or picking up items, your Faith starts to deplete. its very simple, but it works really well, and unlike PCB the extra points gained are actually useful as MoF gives you lives based on reaching certain point values.
anyways, enough about the gameplay its funny characters time! the highlight of the game is definitely the moriya shrine trio.
The shrine maiden Sanae makes for a great rival to Reimu, and contrasts her well with a green and blue design. her character in this game is really overconfident, but after she loses she chills out, and in later games is a lot goofier. i love the fanon interpretation that because she came to Gensokyo from the outside world in 2007 she basically acts like a time capsule of early 2000s culture, it makes for really funny interactions with Reimu and Marisa.
the two gods of the shrine are pretty cool too, the snake lady Kanako and the frog lady Suwako both have pretty neat designs, and their relation and interactions with Sanae and each other in the external media are really cute. i absolutely subscribe to the headcanon that moriya shrine is just a girl and her two lesbian god moms.
Besides them MoF also introduces Nitori who is a pretty fun character, a kappa girl whos also a tech wiz inventor, creating bizarre contraptions that stick out like a sore thumb in the old-fashioned Gensokyo. her introduction in this game is hilarious, she flies in as a midboss for like half a second and then immediately panics and flies offscreen again leaving the main character confused, and when she shows up later she complains that you broke her 'optical camouflage system' that she was testing, as she assumed she was invisible and wasnt expecting to get shot at LOL.
altogether i would say MoF is a mixed bag. it cuts down a lot on features from previous games, and the new stuff it introduces doesnt always work. overall though, most of the new additions are good, and its still a fun experience even if its a much higher difficulty than average.
thanks for reading! for those who made it this far, i have a confession to make: theres actually a glitch with Marisa's illusion laser that makes it deal 10x the intended damage in specific scenarios, and i absolutely made use of that to get my 1cc. MoF is just too hard! when i found out there was a trick like this i couldn't Not use it. most of my run was still done legit, but i absolutely cheesed some boss fights with it. sorry not sorry :P