seki108

Since I was tired to trying to play Fantasy Maiden Wars and read the translations right after completing a stage (to see what changes to the base story were made), I went ahead and read the mostly complete translations of the second and third games (though I still haven't looked hard for a translation of the newest one).

I really like how much mixing and rearranging they did, especially setting up the situations where the Main Character doesn't just solo it and resolve the Incident in a few hours (like in the canon games).  Even though some of the silly, nonsensical reasoning for Incedents is still there, there actually feels like there is a level of stakes now.   Not knocking the main series stories, but their canon setup doesn't work so well for a RPG format.......though you can solo most stages with Reimu (outside of Lunatic mode) if you invest some resources in her and settle for timing out spellcards instead of properly capturing them (assuming the RNG doesn't bullshit you too much throughout the stage).  

It really does feel like Banpresto*-level crossover writing, all things considered.  Even their original in-between scenarios (or entire sub-plots) made reading this enjoyable, since I didn't know how they would implement something.  They do have to delve a little into fan interpretations for some of the characters who really haven't been fleshed out..........though really that could apply to at least 3/4's of Touhou's cast.      It was definitely interesting to see Rabbit indirectly cause all three major plots covered in the third game, where she did nothing substantial in the side-story manga she came from (and completely disappeared into irrelevance about 1/3 of the way in).

Also, have to applaud them for actually using a combination of attack animations as a unique cutsene.  I've never seen Banpresto do this in any Super Robot Wars game thus far;  usually, the only unique thing about an attack animation for a cutsence is just unique dialogue since many times that's an important moment from the source material (usually an antagonist's death or a moment of near defeat for one of your members).    This was quite unexpected, so the FMW team definitely earned all my respect for this one and I hope Banpresto does something similar in the future----turn on annotations to see the subtitles---:

Now to get back to actually playing the second game.

*Banpresto is the studio that creates the Super Robot Wars   and Another Century Ace   mecha-crossover series.