Fairy Wars


Fairy Wars is a shoot 'em up game, and is the 12.8th official game in the Touhou Project by the dōjin circle Team Shanghai Alice. The game was released on August 14, 2010 at Comiket 78. The game is the sequel to the Touhou Sangetsusei manga series as the illustrations were done by Makoto Hirasaka, the manga artist of the series itself instead of ZUN. The game is sometimes called FW or GFW for short.

Gameplay

The game plays somewhat like a fusion of the Shoot the Bullet and Phantasmagoria of Flower View, combined with "standard" Touhou gameplay. The player controls Cirno, who is able to shoot regularly, but also possesses a new "freezing" technique that adds a new twist to the game. Similar to Aya's camera in Shoot the Bullet, Cirno has a counter that fills up during gameplay, which determines the strength of her freeze attack, which is triggered by holding and then releasing the shot button not unlike the charged shots in Phantasmagoria. When activated, Cirno's freeze attack will freeze the immediate area directly in front of her, and freeze any bullets it comes in contact with for a duration proportionate to the level of charge % before vanishing afterward. When other bullets come into contact with frozen bullets, they too will freeze, allowing for large chains of bullets to be frozen in this way. Points and bombs are awarded for freezing large numbers of bullets.
Like the main-series games, Fairy Wars contains full stages each home to their own specific midboss and boss. However, Cirno is the only playable character, and there are only three stages during a playthrough instead of the usual six. On the other hand, there are four different "paths" the player may choose to take, which influence the stages they play. Three of the paths are playable upon starting, while the 4th path is unlockable. The three paths that are playable from the beginning also offers two different routes in which the story will progress.

Characters

Fairy Wars does not introduce any new characters, but three characters from the Touhou official manga Eastern and Little Nature Deity and Strange and Bright Nature Deity make their game debuts as stage bosses.