Uploaded August 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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(Touhou Project, Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom et al. are the intellectual property of ZUN and Team Shanghai Alice, and I don't own the rights to any character, the art, or the music from this video. This is made for entertainment purposes only.)

Warning, there are some spoilers in the text following!

(Note added a few days later: turns out you can't judge a character if there's still some translation pending. Many impressions from the following text are inaccurate/wrong).

So we've come to this. "Pristine Danmaku for Killing a Person". And so, the most serious incident in Gensokyo unravels...

Then again, Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom is probably the most frustrating Touhou game I've ever played. Yeah, that includes fangames, even those with terrible controls and absurd hitboxes. (I'm looking at you, Mythical Mirror). Add that to the fact that I'm a terrible player and you'll get me throwing my laptop at the wall after the 200th retry against Clownpiece's "Hell Eclipse".

Then again... Okay, the game is obviously rushed. ZUN didn't apply image effects properly to his textures and you can see the edge of the images he used at some points (Stage 5 sky being the most obvious, but that might have to do with me playing at 960x720), there are still some nasty bugs (hint: don't let demo plays actually play; they erase your Pointdevice saves) and some danmaku is freaking ridiculous in... not a good way. But still, I think it's a pretty nice game after all. I liked the story (a bit more complex than the usual "Girls are now causing an incident for selfish reasons" standard plot), the new characters are neat (I love/hate Clownpiece so much... she indeed drove me to madness with her Majora-style spellcards ._.) and, no matter the unbalancedness and such, I think the danmaku and the music really convey the characters' personalities. The atmosphere in the game is amazing.

Junko in particular is noteworthy. I've seen thousands of posts everywhere saying "I hate her spellcards because they're bland, uninteresting and absurdly hard". They're bland, sure. And they were a nightmare (although Clownpiece was worse). They almost don't feel Touhou-ish. But that's the whole point. She's the most alien character ZUN has created until now, purified to the point that she's only the embodiment of her own hatred against Chang'e nowadays; she even sustains herself in her own grudge, going beyond the need of faith... is she a divine spirit anymore? ZUN even reinforces this by not giving her a title nor a surname; she's the only named character in forever who lacks a proper title, i.e. a proper "identification". And thus, her danmaku is also purified; its only purpose now is to kill the player, there's no beauty pretense in it anymore. The effort put in creating the atmosphere for the fight is incredible.

Randomly, Junko reminds me of Zeromus. Both are embodiments of pure hatred and former Lunarians willing to accept genocide as a tool for their ends and thus deemed "the enemy" by the Moon people (even though most Lunarians aren't aware of Junko's existence). However, Junko managed to retain a personality. She's even capable of having a real friendship with Hecatia. Thus, ZUN managed to take the same idea of FFIV and create a more complex antagonist in a couple of stages in a shooting game than Final Fantasy managed to do in two games (IV and TAY)... then again, that's because the focus on both games is more on Cecil and Golbez than anything else.

Oh well, Junko being the Touhou analogue of Zeromus would fit well with the rather more obvious parallels of Sagume being Sephiroth and Clownpiece being Kefka. Heck, maybe that's even intentional, given that ZUN is apparently quite fond of the Final Fantasy series. (By the way, Dancing Mad's Japanese name has something to do with dancing fairies, wouldn't that be a part of the inspiration of Clownpiece as a fairy clown?)

Well, wall of text as usual. Thanks for watching!

P.S.: I'm alive and my danmakufu projects aren't dead, I just haven't been able to record anything interesting lately.