Mountain of Faith

Mountain of Faith was a sort of "resurrection" of the Touhou series. ZUN meant to retire after Shoot the Bullet, but the fandom in Japan was huge, and they really wanted more of their Touhou. Despite all this, it's clear that ZUN had not lost any of his creative spark, you could say he was still at the height of his power as a game creator. Having created 5 incredible games over the course of only 4 years previously (Touhou 6-Touhou 9.5) he had already achieved the status of legendary game creator, but he just wouldn't stop there. Mountain of Faith, Subterranean Animism, Undefined Fantastic Object, and his best works yet Double Spoiler and Great Fairy Wars were all waiting to be created. ZUN generally did everything by himself, even the shoddy artwork, but I for one don't really care about artwork so much in STGs, so I don't really mind that part. Everything else about the games tend to be spot on.

Mountain of Faith is one of the more upbeat Touhou games. It has a frantic pace and a solid drive to it, a beautiful catchy soundtrack with no duds in it, and it takes a different direction with its mechanics from the grazing focused 6-8. These new mechanics is the reason why the game can be a bit divisive, as many Touhou players really love their grazing, of which Mountain of Faith has none. On the other hand, there are no other games that play quite like Mountain of Faith, and that has won over many of its players. It's kind of hard to explain the gameplay, it's not quite enemy chaining and not quite item chaining, more like a mixture of both? The game still uses the PoC line, but there are is another line just under it where you still catch point items at max value. The game has a faith meter and faith items, the meter is most similar to the Donpachi series chain meter I would guess, but still quite different from those, as those games don't rely as much on the collection of items. In Mountain of Faith, an equal amount of strategy is distributed to collecting items as they are to shooting enemies. As a higher faith results in better point items and better spellcard bonuses, you can figure out all kinds of wacky strategies to slightly improve your score, and at a high level, that "slightly" is the keyword, as it's all about very very tiny optimizations that make all the difference in the end. Indeed, Mountain of Faith is for better or worse one of the games in the series with the lowest skill ceiling. That doesn't make it easy to play at a high level - there are some seriously silly strategies you can use for stage portions, and you have to No-miss the whole game, often taking some big risks during boss fights to end the pattern as fast as possible. The high end gameplay seems rather frustratingly luck dependant, but I can't deny that it is graceful and fast paced.

Mountain of Faith was never really one of my big favourites, but I've always found it to be a solid game. There's really not much wrong with it, so unless you just don't like the scoring system, I would expect that almost every potential danmaku player would enjoy it. I guess what I'm missing in this game is better boss gameplay, as that is one of the big draws of Touhou. The patterns are aesthetically pleasing and generally of sound design resulting in fun engaging gameplay, but I do wish the game had a bit more depth during boss fights. Still, if you love CAVE's Donpachi series, chances are this might be one of your favourite Touhou games. An excellent game on its own, even if i wouldn't call it one of the best in the series.