Category: Gameplay

Marisa is a magician of many talents. In addition to her combat skills and charming personality, she’s a decent thief, and has a vast knowledge of spells (if nowhere near Patchouli’s level).  Of course such skills need constant maintaining.  Otherwise the madhouse that is Gensoukyo will leave you behind.

Thus throughout the story Marisa will have a chance to work on minor projects that boost her abilities.  We’ve loosely categorized them as “Danmaku,” “Kleptomania,” “Knowledge,” and “LOVE.”

Danmaku is of course Marisa’s ability to spark people in the face.  While our heroine’s not going to suffer the indignity of being killed by fairies on the way home, Marisa’s Danmaku stat will likely determine the outcome of many of her fights against the other residents of Gensoukyo.  And considering that in Gensoukyo “Who cooks lunch?” is a decided by dueling there may be a few fights of note.

Kleptomania is a disease.  In Marisa’s mind,  a very fun and entertaining disease.  With it you’ll find important objects appearing in your pockets, useful implements falling into your hands, and you’ll be better at cheating at Mahjong.  Being good at stealing also helps delicate manipulation in general, just in case you needed to help with a puppet show or something.

Knowledge is a girl in the Scarlet Devil Mansion a great aid in figuring out where useful things might be or picking up great ideas.  For a Magician, Knowledge is also power.  While Danmaku may determine if you can hit with a spell, Knowledge will allow you to perform useful magic tricks on a day to day basis.

LOVE (caps lock required) is Marisa’s ability to get people who would otherwise beat her to a pulp to actually enjoy the time they spend with her.  Whether charming your friends and enemies, or just fast talking your way past people who really should know better, LOVE is a great thing to have.  And remember, cooking is about heart.  (BTW: That’s a game hint).

We’re still tweaking the actual numbers right now, and there’s of course an early period at the beginning where we aren’t so mean as to toss stat challenges at Marisa.  But as things progress your skills will start to tweak how effective Marisa is in the story.

It was probably mentioned before that the game started out purely as a Person type social game.  You went to people and completed their social links sorta at random.  And while that was an awesome idea, it didn’t really make for a grand story.  Still some ideas were born when we were still plotting things out there, and they managed to survive to the current game incarnation.

The first big thing (that we’ve already mentioned) is that there’s a decent chunk of story before anything pathlocks.  Marisa has a lot to do with each character.  Patchouli, Marisa and Reimu all play a big role in Marisa’s own story, and they aren’t going to disappear after Marisa makes her romantic decisions either.  Flandre’s story on the other hand is a little more contained (and lethal) so those players with faint hearts can avoid that.  Still she’ll make the occasional appearance even then.

The second thing that came out of the early planning stages is Stats.  Events early in the story tie Marisa up for some time, so her skills are a little rusty at game start.  Thus in addition to everything else, Marisa will have chances to work on her personal abilities.  These will influence things from how well the inevitable danmaku fights go, to how fast she can loot Eientei.

Thirdly we have a hint service.  Everyone’s favorite (or second favorite at least) satori, Koishi Komeiji, will happily give Marisa hints on how to improve her romantic standings (or survive the next day…).  Of course she eats up time, but sometimes that’s a small price to pay.  Koishi finds this whole situation hilarious and thus is glad to lend a hand.

Lastly we have the side stories.  While they were initially designed as time sinks, they managed to intertwine themselves into the main plot enough so that they survived the shift to a more traditional style.  Well most of them were twined into the main plot.  One was just too funny  to cut.

Anyway we’ll give a few more details about those as we go on.  Hopefully you’ll be able to see some of them in action soon.  We’ve got another musician and programmer working with us, and things are going smoothly (if always slower then we’d all like I’m sure 🙂 )