Touhou Project doujin – Oyasumi mae… (Doors)

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And have a mini-release that is actually part of the bigger MeiSaku anthology called Koginmu, of which I’m not really planning to translate any other stories. This one, by the author of Hidamari no Yume and half of Under the Rose, I found too adorable to let it pass by, though!

This little story involves Meiling, Sakuya, a bit of booze, and a lot of silliness and cuteness.

In other news. Comiket 79 has yielded a demo of 妖々剣戟夢想 (Youyou Kengeki Musou), a Youmu-centric action platformer game. (You might need to change the encoding in your browser to Shift JIS to display the Japanese text on the page properly.) Now while I must admit to not having played the demo yet – due to its somewhat surprising demand for Pixel Shader 3 that proved beyond the capabilities of the awesome integrated card of my netbook – the videos shown on the home page do make the gameplay seem legitimately badass…

At which point you’d likely expect me to be crazy about it, and I was indeed at first – but sadly, reading into the premise has cooled my enthusiasm considerably. To summarize, Yuyuko wants Youmu to – quote – ‘render Reimu speechless’; after which Youmu supposedly assumes her skills are insufficient for facing Reimu in combat, and thus sets off to discover another way of achieving her goal. Now that in itself would be jarring enough as another example of the trend of dumbing down Youmu that appears to be quite prevalent on the doujin scene, but perhaps somehow explainable according to the flawed logic of a certain, miko-worshiping part of the fandom. However, in one of the trailer videos Youmu is seen fighting (and defeating) Aya of all people, a character several times shown in official materials to be at least as strong as Reimu – rendering the implication of Youmu’s lack of confidence about confronting Reimu rather absurd in my opinion…

Either way. While I suppose some less twisted souls might call all of the above nitpicking, I’m still hoping the actual game will manage to build upon the less-than-encouraging premise in a way that will do justice to Youmu’s potential as a character. Besides, one might argue that the ghostly gardener’s hacking, slashing and shooting of things might be a merit enough to redeem the shortcomings of the story – and the appeal of getting a chance to kick Aya’s tengu arse as Youmu in 3D is indisputable! The demo is oddly missing from the game’s web page, but you might try to find it by other means using the title.

Yet more news. The Youmu doujin series by the circle Bitter&Better has attracted my attention some time before c79… The latest Comiket has brought about already the second installment of a trilogy, and in some sort of an unforgivable oversight, neither it nor the first chapter seem to have made it so far onto the face of the Internet in general, or the auctioning or shopping sites (including Toranoana, Melonbooks and Yahoo) in particular. I had hopes for a contact on c79, but sadly, the day two (or the day when everything Touhou seems to have happened) turned out to be out of reach…

…so as you might have guessed already, any sort of assistance with getting this potential hidden gem scanlated would be met with my everlasting gratitude!