Touhou 5: Dark Square

Quick Note: Please play and/or beat the following games in order to understand some context about the story.
 * Touhou 1: Highly Responsive to Prayers
 * Touhou 5: Mystic Square

I'm a Touhou fan. More than one, actually. I've bought a Reimu, Marisa and even a Mima plush to go along with, since the PC-98 games are actually my favorite series of games. I never cared much for the windows games aside from the 6th, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, or the 7th, Perfect Cherry Blossom. I'm also an introvert, but honestly, I wouldn't call myself a Weeaboo, even though I've watched the Touhou unofficial anime. Either way, that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I decided to look around on forums to see if there actually were any ROM hacks for the first 5 Touhou games. I searched earlier with no real luck. Maybe they were hosted on other sites, or Google didn't pick them up. But as I checked later, I found a forum leading to someone saying that the ROM of Touhou 5 they took off a physical copy of the game (which are rare!) crashed their PC when trying to run it through the emulator Neko Project. Now this is in the context of a Windows PC, not the actual Japanese PC-98 itself they used to pull the ROM off. When their PC would start up, it would flash a red and then start up normally. They didn't know what to do, sooo they posted the ROM on the forum to see if anyone else could figure it out. Most people replied to them saying their computer may be too old to run it-- which didn't make sense.

So I replied on the forum that I'll give it a look and see if it works on my system. I used the newer version of Neko Project and it ran fine.. except for the fact the game was mostly in English,and it didn't have the "Official English Patch" watermark underneath the giant (in-english) "~Mystic Square". The "Normal" image below shows an edit of the normal English patch without the watermark. The questionable part of this was that-- if it were on a Japanese PC-98 disk, it couldn't've been in English.

I come back to my computer. No crash, nothing. However, the title screen did look different.



For one, Reimu's eyes were closed, and she had shed tears. There was no Quit button either. However, the change that really caught my eye at first sight was the red and black Yin Yang Orb. This however, actually made some sense, if this was actually someone's ROM hack. This could've been a reference to the game Highly Responsive to Prayers. For context, there's a boss in that game named "Shingyoku" that has the form of a black and red Yin Yang Orb. Similar, as that game had some gray stripes on it, bbut here it was a smooth recolor.

If they were referencing that game, they were either lazy, or forgot the gray stripes. But, I digress.

I ignored the graphical changes and ignored the lack of a quit button, and tried pressing Start.

So I started the game, putting myself on the Hard difficulty. (Note: I've never beaten this game.) I was on stage one as Yuuka, since she was my favorite character to play as in Mystic Square. Everything.. appeared to be normal? Legitimately, nothing seemed to be off. Until I saw this.

Sara's portrait here was supposed to be smiling with a sort of smug-ish expression, and normal pink eyes. But her line and face here was different. The normal line was "That's because I'm supposed to be!!"... not "Do you think this is a joke?".

The game was normal up until this dialogue and portrait appeared. Heck, I was in such shock that Sara's face went from calm and collected eyes and smile.. to creepy eyes and grin, along with that line.. "Do you think this is a joke?".. that I didn't even notice her hand. Sara had.. what I can only assume to be some sort of cartoon-like blood. If someone made this ROM hack to be giving goosebumps, they did it for me with this one line of text. Yuuka didn't react to this line and said the same thing she would normally, "You've certainly got guts. I'll kill you instantly." So this line and Sara's response to that one "Go ahead and try!" wasn't changed. Jesus.. Sara's face in that one dialogue box is gonna give me nightmares for sure.

Yuuka meant business. Sara died in one hit and.. Oh. What the fuck. No, I'm dead serious. I am legitimately serious.

What the fuck.

First off, I don't even know where to begin with this. Sara's entire color palette was changed. All of her was red. I didn't know what to make of this. My first sight at this, I gasped, and tried to control myself. Yuuka had said her original line, and then Sara said.. what looked to be her original line, but layered either with gibberish, or several other lines over it.

That.. That grin, though. It's.. If it wasn't the former Sara portrait that was gonna give me nightmares, it was THIS one. Sara's face was demented, almost masochistic from the looks of it. God, what the hell's going to happen in the rest of the game.. do I even want to know?..

Of course I do. And I'm going to find out.

I moved on to stage two. Again, the background and everything seemed to be normal. I was playing the game as Yuuka on Hard. That was pretty much it for stage one and two, but the boss portrait and lines in stage one were changed. Will the same be for stage two? I- I have no idea. I was hoping there would be no changes. So, shooting a bunch of enemies and stuff later.. oh.

Louise is.. warning me of Shinki?.. Alright, I'll explain a bit more context. Louise is a resident of this world known as Makai, which is a demon world run by the goddess Shinki. And Louise in the normal game, is trying to leave Makai to tour the human world and nothing else. But here... it seemed like Louise was trying to leave Makai for her own being-- even warning others. Shinki's gone mad.. and she looked untouched. Her portrait was the same, but her line.. it makes me think.

Did Shinki go insane in this ROM hack's story? Was she the reason Sara looked so.. demented? Sara was Makai's gatekeeper, so it would've made sense that she would suffer the side effects more than Louise. God.. I feel so bad for her now. Imagine someone trying to stop you from escaping a world you could be terrorized in.

Louise's bullet patterns were not the greatest for Hard. It looked like she was holding back to give Yuuka another chance to stay away. They were pretty easy to avoid and were pretty slow. She still took the same amount of damage to kill like in the normal games, but after the fight, no dialog was present. I felt really, really bad. In this ROM hack, Louise was trying to  save the other demons from Makai that weren't corrupted, and save others invading from getting terrorized... Shinki, what have you been doing?

Well, after pausing the game and wiping the tears that were about to form, I headed on to stage three. Stage three was... empty. Barren. There were no enemies present as far as I could see. The music was gone, as well. All I heard were sound effects. I kept holding down the Z button though just to purge the cold silence. Whoever made this ROM hack made it chilling. Very. Very chilling. I was scared, but also in a level of admiration for the story this ROM hacker was trying to tell.

After a long period of silence, I found Alice. But.. she wasn't in the best shape. At all. It's been a long known piece of fanon that Alice is Shinki's adopted daughter... wait... Shinki's adop- no.. no. There's no way.

Alice's eyes were bleeding, her left moreso than her right. But I doubt those were the only wounds she had. There could've been bruises under that shirt I-- and many others, didn't see because it was covered by said shirt. Cleverly done. Her text was glitched, like Sara's. Wait a minute.. did Shinki do some magic on her to force her and Sara to speak gibberish when warning people? Is that why their text is garbled? Shinki must not have found Louise, and therefore she managed to escape and warn me. I began the fight with Alice, and she stood there. Doing nothing. I moved around a bit, but I didn't use the Z button. At all. I wanted to know if she was taking her time to fight.. or.. maybe that text was half telling me that she wanted to die.

I'm... I'm sorry Alice, but I have to do this to continue. Please, forgive me in the afterlife.

I didn't go past the score screen yet. I actually shed a tear. Shinki.. one of my favorite Touhou characters, had done this to her world. Sara's bent personality, Louise's trauma, and Alice's wounds... what's going to be Yuki and Mai's case? I headed on to stage four, and hoped to god things were normal after this point. There were no enemies, like stage three. I'm betting the closer and closer I got to the final stage, the worse things got.

Boy was I right. I was correct. I was anything but wrong.

No dialog when Yuki and Mai showed up. Nothing. Instead, they fired a multi-spread pattern that took pretty much all of my lives. Even using continues, I couldn't beat this.

I game over'd, but there was one final image after the high score screen, along with a slowed down version of "End of the World" being played for at least 5 seconds while the image stayed. This was the most terrifying one of it all.

It was just Shinki. She was there, staring right at me. Whereas she would usually be looking downwards, she was staring right at the player-- me. After the high score screen, her portrait appeared. Black sclera with white rings as eyes. And that.. smile.. that wasn't a warm and motherly smile that Shinki normally had on, that was the smile of a cold-blooded murderer. A cruel goddess that instead of caring for its world, tormented it. What could have turned Shinki to do this? In-canon, she was friendly before, and warm-hearted. When Louise said she had gone mad, she was not joking. Shinki really had gone insane. I was curious who had turned her to the dark side, but.. after 5 seconds, the screen cut to black.

After said screen cut to black, Neko Project crashed. I didn't care. I'm not launching that shit up anymore. The images and what I had read were enough. Especially Shinki's demented face. I'm not playing the game again, and I'll certainly never see Mystic Square the same way. I moved the ROM to the recycle bin, and made sure it didn't come back by emptying it.

I hope none of you have to go through an experience like I did. I told the forum user that it was better their PC crashed instead of the horrors that they would've experienced if the ROM ran properly.