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Touhou Nekokayou #55 (4koma): Revealed the Conclusion

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Warning! Contains spoilers for Concealed the Conclusion!

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Touhou Nekokayou: Scarlet Weather Archive in Japanese Red #55

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Characters: Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, Alice Margatroid, Shanghai

Just a 4koma, cuz I got home late and feel overworked, whee.

I came up with this because I kept getting G Free ~ Final Dream stuck in my head. Awesome melody. Anyway, the plot of Concealed the Conclusion is basically as Marisa described it. Except that Gensokyo also comes back in the Extra and Phantasm stages. Well, okay, there's more to it than that, but ... Also, why the duck did they use a remix of the stage 1 theme from Mystic Square as the Phantasm boss-theme?

Meanwhile, I decided I couldn't resist using the MGS3 game-over screen like I did before.

I added Shanghai on 31 May 2009, because I'd completely forgotten she existed.

Transcript

  1. (Alice, Marisa, Reimu, and Shanghai at the Shrine, drinking tea. ... or ... Shanghai isn't drinking tea.)
    Marisa: ... I already told Alice about this, but I had a funky dream last night, ze.
    Reimu: Really? What was it about?
  2. (A sort of flashback to a semi-sepia-toned battle between Marisa and a white-clad Reimu. Superimposed over this is a Metal Gear Solid 3-style game over screen.)
    Marisa Narration: It was like, I was in a danmaku shooter where ... well, the plot was, you'd died, and I was runnin' around tryin' to figure out how to bring you back, ze.
    Text: REIMU IS DEAD
    Marisa Narration: Except it turned out that you and I were a coupla normal girls in the Outside World, and Gensokyo was just a shared dream we had in a coma, and we were wakin' up. An' that was in the *good* ending.
  3. (At the Shrine.)
    Reimu: Yikes. What was in the *bad* ending?
    Marisa: Uh, it was that I woke up and it was all just a dream.
  4. (Marisa suddenly realizes something; Reimu and Alice are not amused.)
    Marisa: ... wait a minute ...

All Touhou characters are © Team Shanghai Alice and/or ZUN; create.swf is ⑨ KirbyM with help from Thefre. "Sakura petals" brush in main/4koma logo was made by Kisara Girl. "Falling leaves" brush in 60-Years logo came with Photoshop.

31 Comments (auto-closed) (rss feed)

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Xan

*sigh* I really don't like CtC. Great music, but the story is just... Gah, DO NOT WANT!

Also, I love how it uses music from Magical Astronomy (the original source of G Free), yet completely ignore's Renko and Maribel, who kinda negate the validity of it's plot. Complete wallbanger.

I'm feeling like going and putting this under It Just Bugs Me for Touhou on Tvtropes. I'm aware CtC wasn't canon, but the creator/s ignored something he/she/they had no excuse for not knowing about.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Yeah, I never said I actually liked any of it. I'd comment that at least it does a bit better than Touhou Project Side Story, but this isn't particularly a big accomplishment ... ;)

Dang, I really need to familiarize myself with the music-CDs ...

Xan

Ghostly Field Club is probably the best out of them. Well, Retrospective in 53 minutes is nice, too, I guess. But Dolls in Psuedo-Paradise sucks, except for 3 tracks. And for whatever reason, I cannot get ANYTHING to run Changability of Strange Dream.

SP

Funny, I just actually used a DiPP song for my latest video. The CDs really are worth checking out.

CtC really does have the strangest music choices though.

universalperson

Acually, some of the Phantasm boss theme is remixed from the Reimu boss fight in Seihou.

Now a better question: How do you cheat in CtC? Sorry, I'm that bad a player. I couldn't even beat it in easy mode...I can beat the PC-98 games on easy (and Lotus Land Story on Medium) but not CtC!

Gpop

I loved CtC. This comic made my lol.

Chaos42

It's one of the better fan-made shooters, though. It had great music, but some of the boss choices were odd. (Mokou and Flandre as Stage 1 midbosses? Come on.) Also, it's so hard to get the good ending (You need lots of Hakurei points to give you enough time to beat Reimu, and she has so many freakin' spellcards, and I get the feeling that it's nearly impossible to collect enough points on easy mode, and aaauuggghh)
About the Phantsam boss theme, I think it's a medley of various Reimu themes (the most notable one is her Shuusou Gyoku extra stage boss theme), but I don't remember hearing Mystic Square's stage 1 theme.

Solarn

I didn't really like CtC. I don't need mind-screws and downer endings in my Touhou. Touhou is meant to be fun!


(Warning, links lead to TV Tropes. Solarn will not be held responsible for hours lost as a result of following them.)

Jan-san

Actually, CtC's Easy Mode is easier than that of the canon Touhou games, but the higher difficulties crank it up to 11. I thought it was a very fun game, and the bosses were fun too. (Flan as Stage 1 Midboss is silly; Mima as Stage 1 boss is fun to fight.)

Story-wise, I got the feeling that the dream was more like a world created by the dream, so that Mari and Renko could still cross into it before the collapse. That's probably just from Valesta's CtC fanfic, though...

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

oh gods, I've created a DISCUSSION!

@Solarn: This. I mean, I don't mind a screw now and then, but it's just not Touhou.

@Jan-san: Including Imperishable Night?

Suikama

But the actual end is that everything goes back to normal

Suikama

So the so called "good end/bad end" is more like a temporary end lol

Jan-san

@ Muffin: I would say yes, even that... But it could just be that I was good enough to beat IN w/ Border Team before picking up CtC. Plus, the last spells in CtC, while not too hard on Easy, are still quite a challenge since failing one of them takes you right to the Normal End, while failing Kaguya's just adds to the time score.

I only beat all of them with one shot type in the Story Mode, which is still better than my success with Kaguya... So I guess it's just a difference of situation.

Suikama: Yes.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

I meant on the "easy mode" part.

Hmm ... a fangame which does take Easy Mode serio— wait, is there anything you get in Normal on up that you don't get in Easy? (I'm including "unlocks Extra/Phantasm" ...) And how do you unlock Phantasm?

Morgan

Okay, let me get this straight.

The ending in which the world you know *is* real and *isn't* destroyed is the bad ending?

o.O;;;;

thagreatcreator

i am a fan of CtC soundtrack

i might use some of the music in a game i might make, called 'otomegoroshi hen'


the main menu theme of CtC will be the main menu theme of otomegoroshi hen


the remix of sleeping terror will be the stage 1 theme


the CtC remix of missing power is the stage 1 boss theme [which is my OC,aruko]

i might use other music too,


and yuyuko's theme in PCB is the stage 2 theme

and demistify feast from IaMP is stage 2 boss music [stage 2 boss is my OC, kion] [midboss is ori]

an unknown remix of bad apple will be stage 3 music

charming domination is stage 4 music

charming domination~who done it? is stage 4 boss music [stage boss is kage, my OC]

also, for gate hidden [beyond phantsem O_o]

music is necrofantasia, and stage boss music is CtC remix of evening star [that stage boss is envy from fma, btw]

Echo

Hmm... yeah... CtC's kinda trippy like that... what with those strange endings...

Tewi Inonymous

Someone made a game with this plot? Seriously?
Ok one, if two or more people experience a shared dream, your officially not dealing with a dream your dealing with some form of super natural juju, either telepathy to connect the dreams or a separate world accessed through the dream.
Second, I FUCKING HATE IT'S ALL JUST A DREAM. Biggest cop out ever. There is never any point to it, ever. It never adds anything to the story other than a randomness.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Yeah, I know. You'd have to be a phenomenally good writer to make "None of the major events of this story actually happened" look good. I don't think I've actually seen anything in which it did work.

Though I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than "Through time travel or whatever, all of the major events of this story were made not to have happened, and optionally not even the main characters remember it either."

Solarn

@Suikama: Isn't the actual ending, as showcased by the Extra stage, that Suika somehow survives and recreates Gensokyo from her memories, but can't recreate your friends? So it's still pretty much a downer ending because everyone is dead.

Then again, I only know what I do from the Touhou wiki, because I refuse to play CtC. Once was more than enough.

Parallaxal

@ Muffin:
Well, normal mode and up gives you access to each of the stage boss's last spells, but triggering them is a pain. You need maxed hakurei guage to trigger the last spell, which means you have to more or less capture all of the boss's spellcards.

I've actually been posting up videos of CtC normal mode stages complete with last spells, since I realized youtube doesn't have most of the CtC stages. Which is a shame, because there's a ton of bosses thanks to the different scenarios. I have all stages 2 and 3 posted here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Parallaxal

@ Solarn:
That's only the Extra stage ending. In the Phantasm stage ending, Reimu returns to Gensokyo and it's implied that she has the power to restore everyone.

************
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to give this game some recognition. Sure, the story is rather a downer for the Touhou series, but the game itself is pretty fun and worthy of any Touhou fan, as it's built like a homage to the series (especially Reimu final boss fight, when each of her spellcards is based on a different Touhou game).

Although, I have to say that some of the music choices were odd. Why does Kaguya have Mokou's theme for her boss fight?

Cat Megex

@Parallaxal (in response to your last sentence): Irony, perhaps?

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

I prefer to think of that kind of thing as being Just Plain Weird ...

Derlunia

Should've used a continue...

Prime 2.0

*sigh*

I read this comic as just one big "fuck you". You spoil the entire plot of the game for a joke that has no comedic merit, and then you use spoiler tags for what happens in Extra, as if that somehow deserves the ability for a viewer NOT to look at it, and the main plot of the game doesn't.

And then you have people here who claim that it was a cop-out, which really isn't true, unless all you read was the wiki's summary of the bad ending. This game didn't go and tell you that it was all a dream after your biggest achievement, you find out near the end of the game that EVERYTHING is a dream, INCLUDING YOURSELF. The player DOES NOT KNOW that Marisa is also part of the dream, and neither does she. She believes that, in short order, she won't simply die, but cease to exist, and in these last few hours, she rushes to find Reimu, and spend her last moments in battle with her rival. How is that a cop-out?

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

Hmm. Good point about the spoiler tags; I'm sorry if I spoiled the game for you. I spoiler'd the Extra Stage text because rather than just being Another Character With More Danmaku Patterns Which Are Even Tougher, it's more plot which adds more to it.

-Anonymous- (the only person who called it a cop-out) was referring to the "all just a dream" trope in and of itself. The point of that was, "Whoops, sorry, none of this actually happened. All the percieved struggles, difficulties, triumphs, tragedies, and all that stuff — they weren't really real, they were all just figments of your imagination, and they weren't even ones you consciously generated either. Sound and fury signifying nothing, and all that." Or, to put it more briefly: "You know the entire plot that just happened? Never mind."

While it is true that it isn't reveled "after your biggest accomplishment" in Concealed the Conclusion, it's still the same thing since it's putting this into an established and fairly long series: none of Marisa and Reimu's accomplishments and adventures ever happened in this story.

That said, I suppose it was slightly more interesting to show things from the point of view of one of the figments of the dreamer's imagination (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but, y'know, it works as a halfway-decent conceit for a story's setup), as they discover that they didn't actually exist. However, they sort of copped out of that by then revealing that no, Marisa was actually another dreamer, sharing the dream with Reimu.

Duran

There's a reason why I call this game "Gainax does Touhou" since this would be something they'd do with it, down to the slap in the face endings.

Dyne

If I remember correctly, there's something in some conversations about how powerful characters like Flandre and Mokou have been losing their power the fastest and that's why they're relegated to stage 1 mid-bosses.

PMiller1

I may not play this game (nor anyother Touhou), I can tell is before MoF, What make you think (of that games was canon).

I did like all the Spell Card (also like it how Mima is using Marisa's Star-like Danmaku)

But Ending is off alright.

Dizzy H. Slightly Voided

I can tell is before MoF, What make you think (of that games was canon).

I have no idea what you just said. :O

PMiller1

"I can tell is before MoF, Which make you think about (of that games was canon)." I ment.

This Fan Game is set before Mountain of Faith, right? If this was Canon, that would mean Sanae Kotiya is the NEW Dreamer and the old and new are now as One.

Just Think about.

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