Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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DANMAKAI: Red Forbidden Fruit is a shmup that is VERY similar to Touhou in many ways. I found out about this game when watching a stream from @Duskia_VTuber before work, and I knew I wanted to try it out at some point! It's a solid Touhou clone, admittedly - it's got some cute character designs, lots of creative bullet patterns, a decent difficulty curve, and a good variety of unique enemy designs!

The game does pull a Mountain of Faith where your bombs are tied to your shot's power level, but it goes a step further by using up ALL your power when bombing (with the power affecting how long the bomb is active for). At first I thought this was pretty mean, but you get a lot of power just by grazing enemy bullets so in practice it's not actually that big of a deal. It also helps that you don't actually LOSE any power on dying! The difficulty does spike on the final boss, with the patterns being significantly harder than anything else prior, and I've heard it's even more noticeable on Hard or Lunatic. I don't mind this because I kind of expect final bosses to be their own level of frustrating, but I'll keep this in mind if I ever try the harder difficulties.

Just about the only thing I don't particularly care for is the music. I can't decide whether it's because the melodies aren't that interesting or because the instrumentation makes them too mellow to really stand out. They're not BAD songs necessarily, just not as interesting as I'd like for a Touhou-style shmup. Stage 5's stage and boss themes are at least pretty good, though, so it's not a total loss.

All in all, I had a fun time playing this!
-Trojan

You can get the game here: store.steampowered.com/app/1388230/DANMAKAI_Red_Forbidden_Fruit

DANMAKAI (C) 2020-2026 Inatsuka Haru / Morinonake no Nekonokoya