Touhou, End of Dreams
PostPosted:Wed Oct 08, 2008 5:01 am
Warning: lots of rambling about a game you probably never heard of, and a lot of random tie in to Megaman that only Zeus and Eric might care about.
Recently I've been playing the Japanese fan games. Apparently Japanese have a culture where people make random games that gets totally pirated by everyone else, which ensures nobody ever gets paid but good ideas spread around pretty fast. Touhou Project is one of the most notable fan games. The original has a total of 14 games so far and there are at least 200 games that are derivatives of the main Touhou Project. And if way too many games on the same topic sounds like some ancient series that recently released a new game as a virtual download, yes, this game really feels a lot like Megaman.
Touhou Project is a vertical scrolling shooter that features Reimu Harukai, the shrine maiden who oversees the realm of Fantasy Land to ensure its fantastic and usually demonic inhabitants don't accidentally do stuff like blowing up the whole world. For unexplained reasons, if Reimu is ever to die, the entire world of Fantasy Land will disappear (probably because she's the only person in the world that still believes in magic). Despite its fantastical nature, the game does take place in modern era Japan, and many of the demons are actively aware of the era they live in and well aware of current technology trends.
Due to her importance in the game's universe, Reimu gets to set the rules of combat in Fantasy Land. Every dispute in Fantasy Land is settled by a game of vertical shooting with one person acting the role of the boss and one acting as the player, and the loser have to accept whatever terms were agreed ahead of time. The denizens of Fantasy Land happily agreed these rules set by Reimu because her death would mean their deaths as well, so it is never possible for any demon, no matter how powerful, to overpower Reimu in any meaningful way. Little did they know that Reimu is the best shooting game player in any world by several light years. Over the series and its derivative games, the demons' plans were always foiled by Reimu's invinicible skills at gaming. As such this series quickly gets into a power fatigue issue. In the latest game, Touhou 11, one of the demons drilled a hole while looking for a hot spring and dug too deep and opened up a portal to hell, and as Reimu consulted the local demons on what to do seeing an impending war with Hell is unavoidable, Yukari, easiest the most powerful demon in the series based on official specs, basically said she waged war against hell 1000 years ago and they're not anything to worry about for a girl who can easily beat her. Again, this sounds a lot like Megaman. What originally started out as a good game with a good story eventually gets to a point of 'which god do we have to spank today?' And indeed no character so far is more powerful than Yukari, and she constantly reminds the player how these world threatening demons are nothing compared to her, and in term she's pretty much nothing compared to Reimu. I mean, Yukari's pet is the 9 tails fox, so you're talking about a character whose pet would normally rank as the most powerful villian in normal gaming.
So what happens when you take a good series and run it into the ground? Well this is where the 200 other derivative games come in. No doubt most of them probably suck and isn't worth the time playing, but if you got so many fans making stuff up, one of them is bound to have a great idea. This is where Touhou: End of Dreams comes in, made by a relatively professional group of fans. They took the 3 best games in the Touhou Series, TH6, TH7, and TH8, which is roughly the equivalent of Megaman 2, Megaman X4, and Megaman Zero 3, and built from them instead of trying to come up with new ideas. Every game needs to have a final boss, but clearly none of the characters in the Touhou universe is a match for Reimu. Similar to how Megaman Zero originally decided that the solution would be to make Megaman X the last boss, Touhou: End of Dreams decided that Reimu should be the last boss.
Now one of the key traits of Touhou universe is that all the characters are generally represented by a 1 word trait that defines their ability. Reimu's attribute is Dream (her name means The Dream), which takes priority over any other ability unconditionally. Reimu major nemesises in TH 6-8 features these powers:
Remilia - Destiny. Abilty to alter the future.
Flandre - Destruction. Ability to destroy anything.
Yuyuko - Death. Ability to cause unconditonal death on any entity that's considered living.
Yukari - Boundary. Ability to switch any two logically distinguishable attribute with each other. She is the only demon that can get along with Yuyuko, because if she's killed she just switch her status from dead to alive, so Yuyuko's power essentially has no effect on her even though Yukari is technically killable. She can also change between truth and lie, wave and particle, human and demon, and pretty much anything else she wants. The game's lore acknowledged she is by far the most powerful demon in the world of Touhou Project. If Reimu's Dream attribute takes precedence over everything else, then Yukari's Boundary attribute takes percedence over everything else but Dream.
Kaguya - Eternity. An ability that's not particularly suited for combat, though because she has the power of eternity, she cannot be killed by any means. Note that immortal beings can still be beaten to submission in Reimu's game.
Again you see a power fatigue issue here. After TH8, pretty much all the cool powers have been divied up to the girls of Fantasy Land. It's sort of like how at MM9 you end up with Concrete Man and Plug Man because all the cool names are already taken. TH11's final boss has the power of Fusion (of the nuclear type), and that seems like a strictly downgraded version of Destruction for combat purposes. So rather than coming up with new powers, End of Dream instead asks the question: how do you fight Dream?
And the answer to that is reality. Never in the whole series is it never explained why is Reimu's death would lead to the destruction of the entire Fantasy Land, but it is an accepted fact. End of Dreams chooses to interpret this as because Reimu is the creator of the Fantasy Land, that every being in this world exists because of her Dream powers, whic is also why her power always has priority over everything else. There are only 2 human in the world of Fantasy Land: Reimu and another girl named Marisa. On the outset of the game, Reimu's physical body is terminally ill and about to die in a matter of days. The demons are aware of this, and knowing that they cannot escape their fate, they decided that they will try to find someone who can challenge someone who is essentially their goddess. Marisa is a totally average human girl who can use some magic, and she's supposed to be Reimu's eternal rival even though no one has ever beaten Reimu in a shooting game. The fact that she has no special power makes her the closest to something that might be actually real in the world of Fantasy Land.
So in this game, you play as Marisa (who is normally a playable character, but never the main character) and the demons put together some kind of crash course in shooting game training for Marisa, who is totally unaware of what's going on. And here is where the game can leverage all the best part of its best games, since no new characters are needed, you basically get a boss list that features increasingly more powerful/popular characters as you go through the stage. There are no boss fight that just exists as generic filler, because all the characters are the ones you met before. Yuyuko and Yukari are undisputed fan favorites when you throw out the 2 main characters (and possibly still favorite even while including them), and rightfully show up as the last battles before you get to Reimu.
After defeating each of them in battle, you get to fight both at the same time, which provides a satisfactory answer to one of the biggest mysteries of the Touhou Universe. Yukari and Yuyuko are basically best friends since the dawn of Fantasy Land's history, but you never even see them working together. What purpose does such a friendship serve to two nearly invinicible beings? There are no male characters in the entire Fantasy Land, so Yuyuko and Yukari are the closest thing to a relationship in the world of Fantasy Land. Well, in End of Dream, the purpose of them working together is for the player to prove that you have the skills necessary to challenge their Goddess, Reimu.
To quote one of the review I read, the fact that you have to fight both of them at the same time is nothing but fan service. There is no sensible reason within the game lore why they'd ever have to pool their powers together (only Reimu and possibly Yuyuko even has a shot at overcoming Yukari's Boundary powers), but the fight happens because fans of the series wants to see these two best friends working together. It's like the remade version of Megaman X where you get to fight Zero and X at the same time as Vile. An awesome idea doesn't have to make a lot of sense for it to exist in this game.
Speaking of awesomeness, this is also the only game I'm aware of that an average person (like me) can actually fight Yukari. For a series where the Easy setting is about as hard as Ikaruga on hard, Yukari's difficulty setting is 5 levels above Easy. What would be a perfect clear in any other game of the series is only the minimum criteria needed to face Yukari. Her existence is kind of similar to Omega of Megaman Zero, or Shin Akuma in Street Fighter: a supremely powerful character that has no rivals (besides Reimu). The fact that she's a mega popular character when a lot of people cannot even face her says a lot about an awesome character design. But there's obviously a real serious flaw: most people cannot actually get good enough to face Yukari, which means you either never fight her or you need to resort to hacks. Her difficulty is obviously massively tuned down to be a normal boss, which totally against the series's mantra of character's power level = character's difficulty. But this, I feel, was the right idea. What is the purpose of having awesome characters if you never get to face them?
Anyway, so you finally get to the final boss, and being the Goddess of the series, Reimu pretty much necessiates as being the hardest boss ever, ala even harder than Yukari. Reading ahead on FAQs will quickly reveal that Reimu has a staggering 10 lifebars on any difficulty as opposed to the usual 5 for the last boss. Here you could easily get a situation of a nearly unwinnable final boss, which is the case with Yuyuko (there's no guaranteed you can beat the game at all because she's so insanely tough, let alone getting the good ending, on any difficulty level). I have mentioned before that I find it insulting a game that kicks you while you're down, which happens a lot in the Touhou Project. If Yuyuko isn't such an incredibly awesome person, I think most average player will give up trying to beat her on one credit because she's just insanely difficult. But here is where a clever usage of ending solves the problem.
First, if you get to Reimu at all, you only have a limited time to defeat her, since her body is physically dying as the battle takes place. The time you have to fight her is based on how well you did in all the previous fights, so if you totally sucked in the last few stagse like I did, you could end up with 10 seconds to defeat her (which is not even possible). But losing to Reimu still gets you an ending, similar to how losing to Lavos in Chrono Trigger still gets you an ending. And, unlike what the normal Touhou games would have done, it's not really a bad ending. It turns out Reimu was able to die in peace after defending her position as the unbeatable shooting game champ. Marisa miraculously survived the destruction of Fantasy Land (probably because she is pretty close to real as opposed to being a figment of Reimu's imagination), and decided it must all be a dream. It's obviously not what you're intended to do, but it doesn't scream out 'haha loser' compared to say, failing to get all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic and have Dr. Robotnik laugh at you.
Now as you get better at the game, you'll eventually get to Reimu with enough time to actually beat her (4 minutes is sufficient). And here is where the game takes the best elements from TH7, which I think is the best game in the series by far, where the fight itself is the story. Reimu's first 4 lifebars always have her assume the form of a last boss from the previous games in the series. As you work through the patterns, you realize this is the game saying, 'Remember this game? Wasn't that great?' The patterns she pick from the previous games are surprisingly tame, well within beatable range for an average player.
Then after you beat her first 4 morphs, she uses her Girls of Fantasy pattern, where all the forms of the girl she assumes comes at once. Through the Touhou Universe, you will constantly hear Reimu says how a pretty pattern is the most important part of combat, and her 5th lifebar pretty much has the prettiest pattern ever made, with herself and her 4 forms firing in perfect unison. It is also surprisingly easy to dodge, because Reimu values beauty over firepowerl. If you read the pattern notes after beating it, it's her way of saying 'this is the most beautiful pattern I can create in this universe, watch it and don't forget about it'. Getting through Reimu's 5th lifebar is good enough for the goodish ending, where Marisa survives the destruction of the Fantasy Land, and vows to carry on the memories of Reimu and everyone else that once lived in Fantasy Land.
And after that, Reimu is apparently defeated and dead, and Marisa is gloating on her victory over the Goddess of their universe. Then Reimu returns, saying that she was holding back because she wanted to show Marisa how beautiful a shooting game can be even if it means losing, but since she didn't appreciate it, she's not going to hold back anymore. At this point she gets her Dream power back, and all her attack pattern have their obvious holes filled up because she's no longer playing nice. And, to demonstrate her Godlike powers, you as the player lose all your remaining lives and bombs. At this point I died about 3 seconds after her 6th lifebar started, and from looking at FAQ sites it seems like if you're somehow able to get through her 5 additional lifebars, you get an ending where Reimu miraculously wills herself alive, presumably because she cannot stand being beaten even once in a shooting game.
Actually, all the really cool things about End of Dreams, I think I have suggested that for the Megaman series. I think you can have an awesome Megaman game that's part fan service and part genuine. If some fans can kill off Reimu, it is possible to answer things like whatever happened to Megaman as well. You can have a game that's supremely hard, maybe even unbeatable for an average player, as long as you don't kick the player for not being able to do. You could have a fight against say the true God of Destruction (Zero in his original body), and this fight could make anything that's ever happend in Megaman universe look tame, and that's fine as long as it's not needed for some *good* ending. I don't mean it like Final Fantasy where you get a medal for beating Omega. There should be some reward for doing this, like maybe Iris comes back to life for no reason whatsoever or better yet take a poll amongst players for a list of nonsensical things they'd like to see in a Megaman game. It should be enough that the completist/crazies can do it and feel like it meant something, but if you're just an average guy you can live with the fact that you can never do it.
Every Megaman game should feature a battle againts Omega, because he's just that cool. Zero and X should always fight against each other, because that's pretty much the only cool thing in the X series. Zero 2, for example, is not well received, and why? Because Elpis is not a cool character. It has a very solid story, system, and everything else, but the cool factor is missing.
Now a very big difference is that nobody makes any (meaningful) money on the Touhou games so it's not like Megaman where having X being a bad guy was scrapped because it might hurt the ability to crank out new X games. But ultimately I think the fans will appreciate a good game. If you make a good game that features X dying and Zero fighting 3 Guardians at once, I believe the fans will accept it assuming it makes any sense at all. MMZ is the only series that actually ended and it's not like this stopped people from supportng the Megaman franchise. Heck, with ZX being as bad as it is, they should be thankful people bought it at all on the good faith that it'd be a worthy successor to Zero (it's not).
If 5 guys can conclude a 14 game series in a satisfactory way that has enough derivatives to make Megaman look tame, shouldn't Capcom be able to do the same? Heck, I bet if they just renounced the rights to Megaman, some fan somewhere will probably be able to come up with a better Megaman game than anything we've had so far. I'm not saying they should, but someone should be able to improve the game in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a ton of money. Cool ideas don't need a big budget, and there's plenty of cool ideas out there in the fanbase.
Recently I've been playing the Japanese fan games. Apparently Japanese have a culture where people make random games that gets totally pirated by everyone else, which ensures nobody ever gets paid but good ideas spread around pretty fast. Touhou Project is one of the most notable fan games. The original has a total of 14 games so far and there are at least 200 games that are derivatives of the main Touhou Project. And if way too many games on the same topic sounds like some ancient series that recently released a new game as a virtual download, yes, this game really feels a lot like Megaman.
Touhou Project is a vertical scrolling shooter that features Reimu Harukai, the shrine maiden who oversees the realm of Fantasy Land to ensure its fantastic and usually demonic inhabitants don't accidentally do stuff like blowing up the whole world. For unexplained reasons, if Reimu is ever to die, the entire world of Fantasy Land will disappear (probably because she's the only person in the world that still believes in magic). Despite its fantastical nature, the game does take place in modern era Japan, and many of the demons are actively aware of the era they live in and well aware of current technology trends.
Due to her importance in the game's universe, Reimu gets to set the rules of combat in Fantasy Land. Every dispute in Fantasy Land is settled by a game of vertical shooting with one person acting the role of the boss and one acting as the player, and the loser have to accept whatever terms were agreed ahead of time. The denizens of Fantasy Land happily agreed these rules set by Reimu because her death would mean their deaths as well, so it is never possible for any demon, no matter how powerful, to overpower Reimu in any meaningful way. Little did they know that Reimu is the best shooting game player in any world by several light years. Over the series and its derivative games, the demons' plans were always foiled by Reimu's invinicible skills at gaming. As such this series quickly gets into a power fatigue issue. In the latest game, Touhou 11, one of the demons drilled a hole while looking for a hot spring and dug too deep and opened up a portal to hell, and as Reimu consulted the local demons on what to do seeing an impending war with Hell is unavoidable, Yukari, easiest the most powerful demon in the series based on official specs, basically said she waged war against hell 1000 years ago and they're not anything to worry about for a girl who can easily beat her. Again, this sounds a lot like Megaman. What originally started out as a good game with a good story eventually gets to a point of 'which god do we have to spank today?' And indeed no character so far is more powerful than Yukari, and she constantly reminds the player how these world threatening demons are nothing compared to her, and in term she's pretty much nothing compared to Reimu. I mean, Yukari's pet is the 9 tails fox, so you're talking about a character whose pet would normally rank as the most powerful villian in normal gaming.
So what happens when you take a good series and run it into the ground? Well this is where the 200 other derivative games come in. No doubt most of them probably suck and isn't worth the time playing, but if you got so many fans making stuff up, one of them is bound to have a great idea. This is where Touhou: End of Dreams comes in, made by a relatively professional group of fans. They took the 3 best games in the Touhou Series, TH6, TH7, and TH8, which is roughly the equivalent of Megaman 2, Megaman X4, and Megaman Zero 3, and built from them instead of trying to come up with new ideas. Every game needs to have a final boss, but clearly none of the characters in the Touhou universe is a match for Reimu. Similar to how Megaman Zero originally decided that the solution would be to make Megaman X the last boss, Touhou: End of Dreams decided that Reimu should be the last boss.
Now one of the key traits of Touhou universe is that all the characters are generally represented by a 1 word trait that defines their ability. Reimu's attribute is Dream (her name means The Dream), which takes priority over any other ability unconditionally. Reimu major nemesises in TH 6-8 features these powers:
Remilia - Destiny. Abilty to alter the future.
Flandre - Destruction. Ability to destroy anything.
Yuyuko - Death. Ability to cause unconditonal death on any entity that's considered living.
Yukari - Boundary. Ability to switch any two logically distinguishable attribute with each other. She is the only demon that can get along with Yuyuko, because if she's killed she just switch her status from dead to alive, so Yuyuko's power essentially has no effect on her even though Yukari is technically killable. She can also change between truth and lie, wave and particle, human and demon, and pretty much anything else she wants. The game's lore acknowledged she is by far the most powerful demon in the world of Touhou Project. If Reimu's Dream attribute takes precedence over everything else, then Yukari's Boundary attribute takes percedence over everything else but Dream.
Kaguya - Eternity. An ability that's not particularly suited for combat, though because she has the power of eternity, she cannot be killed by any means. Note that immortal beings can still be beaten to submission in Reimu's game.
Again you see a power fatigue issue here. After TH8, pretty much all the cool powers have been divied up to the girls of Fantasy Land. It's sort of like how at MM9 you end up with Concrete Man and Plug Man because all the cool names are already taken. TH11's final boss has the power of Fusion (of the nuclear type), and that seems like a strictly downgraded version of Destruction for combat purposes. So rather than coming up with new powers, End of Dream instead asks the question: how do you fight Dream?
And the answer to that is reality. Never in the whole series is it never explained why is Reimu's death would lead to the destruction of the entire Fantasy Land, but it is an accepted fact. End of Dreams chooses to interpret this as because Reimu is the creator of the Fantasy Land, that every being in this world exists because of her Dream powers, whic is also why her power always has priority over everything else. There are only 2 human in the world of Fantasy Land: Reimu and another girl named Marisa. On the outset of the game, Reimu's physical body is terminally ill and about to die in a matter of days. The demons are aware of this, and knowing that they cannot escape their fate, they decided that they will try to find someone who can challenge someone who is essentially their goddess. Marisa is a totally average human girl who can use some magic, and she's supposed to be Reimu's eternal rival even though no one has ever beaten Reimu in a shooting game. The fact that she has no special power makes her the closest to something that might be actually real in the world of Fantasy Land.
So in this game, you play as Marisa (who is normally a playable character, but never the main character) and the demons put together some kind of crash course in shooting game training for Marisa, who is totally unaware of what's going on. And here is where the game can leverage all the best part of its best games, since no new characters are needed, you basically get a boss list that features increasingly more powerful/popular characters as you go through the stage. There are no boss fight that just exists as generic filler, because all the characters are the ones you met before. Yuyuko and Yukari are undisputed fan favorites when you throw out the 2 main characters (and possibly still favorite even while including them), and rightfully show up as the last battles before you get to Reimu.
After defeating each of them in battle, you get to fight both at the same time, which provides a satisfactory answer to one of the biggest mysteries of the Touhou Universe. Yukari and Yuyuko are basically best friends since the dawn of Fantasy Land's history, but you never even see them working together. What purpose does such a friendship serve to two nearly invinicible beings? There are no male characters in the entire Fantasy Land, so Yuyuko and Yukari are the closest thing to a relationship in the world of Fantasy Land. Well, in End of Dream, the purpose of them working together is for the player to prove that you have the skills necessary to challenge their Goddess, Reimu.
To quote one of the review I read, the fact that you have to fight both of them at the same time is nothing but fan service. There is no sensible reason within the game lore why they'd ever have to pool their powers together (only Reimu and possibly Yuyuko even has a shot at overcoming Yukari's Boundary powers), but the fight happens because fans of the series wants to see these two best friends working together. It's like the remade version of Megaman X where you get to fight Zero and X at the same time as Vile. An awesome idea doesn't have to make a lot of sense for it to exist in this game.
Speaking of awesomeness, this is also the only game I'm aware of that an average person (like me) can actually fight Yukari. For a series where the Easy setting is about as hard as Ikaruga on hard, Yukari's difficulty setting is 5 levels above Easy. What would be a perfect clear in any other game of the series is only the minimum criteria needed to face Yukari. Her existence is kind of similar to Omega of Megaman Zero, or Shin Akuma in Street Fighter: a supremely powerful character that has no rivals (besides Reimu). The fact that she's a mega popular character when a lot of people cannot even face her says a lot about an awesome character design. But there's obviously a real serious flaw: most people cannot actually get good enough to face Yukari, which means you either never fight her or you need to resort to hacks. Her difficulty is obviously massively tuned down to be a normal boss, which totally against the series's mantra of character's power level = character's difficulty. But this, I feel, was the right idea. What is the purpose of having awesome characters if you never get to face them?
Anyway, so you finally get to the final boss, and being the Goddess of the series, Reimu pretty much necessiates as being the hardest boss ever, ala even harder than Yukari. Reading ahead on FAQs will quickly reveal that Reimu has a staggering 10 lifebars on any difficulty as opposed to the usual 5 for the last boss. Here you could easily get a situation of a nearly unwinnable final boss, which is the case with Yuyuko (there's no guaranteed you can beat the game at all because she's so insanely tough, let alone getting the good ending, on any difficulty level). I have mentioned before that I find it insulting a game that kicks you while you're down, which happens a lot in the Touhou Project. If Yuyuko isn't such an incredibly awesome person, I think most average player will give up trying to beat her on one credit because she's just insanely difficult. But here is where a clever usage of ending solves the problem.
First, if you get to Reimu at all, you only have a limited time to defeat her, since her body is physically dying as the battle takes place. The time you have to fight her is based on how well you did in all the previous fights, so if you totally sucked in the last few stagse like I did, you could end up with 10 seconds to defeat her (which is not even possible). But losing to Reimu still gets you an ending, similar to how losing to Lavos in Chrono Trigger still gets you an ending. And, unlike what the normal Touhou games would have done, it's not really a bad ending. It turns out Reimu was able to die in peace after defending her position as the unbeatable shooting game champ. Marisa miraculously survived the destruction of Fantasy Land (probably because she is pretty close to real as opposed to being a figment of Reimu's imagination), and decided it must all be a dream. It's obviously not what you're intended to do, but it doesn't scream out 'haha loser' compared to say, failing to get all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic and have Dr. Robotnik laugh at you.
Now as you get better at the game, you'll eventually get to Reimu with enough time to actually beat her (4 minutes is sufficient). And here is where the game takes the best elements from TH7, which I think is the best game in the series by far, where the fight itself is the story. Reimu's first 4 lifebars always have her assume the form of a last boss from the previous games in the series. As you work through the patterns, you realize this is the game saying, 'Remember this game? Wasn't that great?' The patterns she pick from the previous games are surprisingly tame, well within beatable range for an average player.
Then after you beat her first 4 morphs, she uses her Girls of Fantasy pattern, where all the forms of the girl she assumes comes at once. Through the Touhou Universe, you will constantly hear Reimu says how a pretty pattern is the most important part of combat, and her 5th lifebar pretty much has the prettiest pattern ever made, with herself and her 4 forms firing in perfect unison. It is also surprisingly easy to dodge, because Reimu values beauty over firepowerl. If you read the pattern notes after beating it, it's her way of saying 'this is the most beautiful pattern I can create in this universe, watch it and don't forget about it'. Getting through Reimu's 5th lifebar is good enough for the goodish ending, where Marisa survives the destruction of the Fantasy Land, and vows to carry on the memories of Reimu and everyone else that once lived in Fantasy Land.
And after that, Reimu is apparently defeated and dead, and Marisa is gloating on her victory over the Goddess of their universe. Then Reimu returns, saying that she was holding back because she wanted to show Marisa how beautiful a shooting game can be even if it means losing, but since she didn't appreciate it, she's not going to hold back anymore. At this point she gets her Dream power back, and all her attack pattern have their obvious holes filled up because she's no longer playing nice. And, to demonstrate her Godlike powers, you as the player lose all your remaining lives and bombs. At this point I died about 3 seconds after her 6th lifebar started, and from looking at FAQ sites it seems like if you're somehow able to get through her 5 additional lifebars, you get an ending where Reimu miraculously wills herself alive, presumably because she cannot stand being beaten even once in a shooting game.
Actually, all the really cool things about End of Dreams, I think I have suggested that for the Megaman series. I think you can have an awesome Megaman game that's part fan service and part genuine. If some fans can kill off Reimu, it is possible to answer things like whatever happened to Megaman as well. You can have a game that's supremely hard, maybe even unbeatable for an average player, as long as you don't kick the player for not being able to do. You could have a fight against say the true God of Destruction (Zero in his original body), and this fight could make anything that's ever happend in Megaman universe look tame, and that's fine as long as it's not needed for some *good* ending. I don't mean it like Final Fantasy where you get a medal for beating Omega. There should be some reward for doing this, like maybe Iris comes back to life for no reason whatsoever or better yet take a poll amongst players for a list of nonsensical things they'd like to see in a Megaman game. It should be enough that the completist/crazies can do it and feel like it meant something, but if you're just an average guy you can live with the fact that you can never do it.
Every Megaman game should feature a battle againts Omega, because he's just that cool. Zero and X should always fight against each other, because that's pretty much the only cool thing in the X series. Zero 2, for example, is not well received, and why? Because Elpis is not a cool character. It has a very solid story, system, and everything else, but the cool factor is missing.
Now a very big difference is that nobody makes any (meaningful) money on the Touhou games so it's not like Megaman where having X being a bad guy was scrapped because it might hurt the ability to crank out new X games. But ultimately I think the fans will appreciate a good game. If you make a good game that features X dying and Zero fighting 3 Guardians at once, I believe the fans will accept it assuming it makes any sense at all. MMZ is the only series that actually ended and it's not like this stopped people from supportng the Megaman franchise. Heck, with ZX being as bad as it is, they should be thankful people bought it at all on the good faith that it'd be a worthy successor to Zero (it's not).
If 5 guys can conclude a 14 game series in a satisfactory way that has enough derivatives to make Megaman look tame, shouldn't Capcom be able to do the same? Heck, I bet if they just renounced the rights to Megaman, some fan somewhere will probably be able to come up with a better Megaman game than anything we've had so far. I'm not saying they should, but someone should be able to improve the game in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a ton of money. Cool ideas don't need a big budget, and there's plenty of cool ideas out there in the fanbase.