Danmaku Yuugi -Flowers-

Or

Why mimicry without understanding is a bad idea

I’m going to put it out there.  I like Touhou.  Not as much as some people, but I have Normal 1CCed my share of the games, I have a small but appreciable portion of my pictures folder dedicated to Touhou images, and well, let’s just say that crow’sclaw and Demetori are in good standing on my last.fm profile.  So when I say that I have an interest in a Touhou Pen & Paper RPG, this gives you an idea of where I come from.

I first encountered Flowers probably a year and a half ago on a trip to one of Pooshlmer’s sister sites.  It was in a very incomplete status then but I remember thinking “Wow, a Touhou RPG.  That could be really cool.”  Well, just recently with the release of Flowers, I grabbed it, opened it, and within ten pages wanted to die.

I am not an RPG snob.  I enjoy games with odd concepts, I had a relatively short-lived Wushu campaign with a bunch of players who managed to enjoy themselves in spite of the system.  So being around RPGs with mechanics that are a little unsound or unwieldy is nothing new.  But that’s not what Flowers is.  Flowers is mathematically obtuse.

When I say obtuse, I don’t mean dense.  There actually is not a lot of math to do.  Most of the numbers are given to you, which some people might like but which bothers me a little.  The biggest offender here is character creation, which I will get to in a little bit.  No, the math is just confusing.  The first time I looked at the skill cost chart, my eyes glazed over because of how poorly laid out it was.

What.

But let’s start at the beginning.

CHARACTER CREATION

The beginning is a jumbled mess, but it serves well enough as an introductory piece on the concept of a P&P RPG.  There’s some random untranslated Japanese but it’s ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things.  Then we get to the first warning sign.  The “Before Playing” page, which has a segment devoted specifically to refreshing your memory in regards to algebra.

Now, I’m a closet math nerd.  I got out of Engineering and into languages after my first year in college, but I still remember most of my calculus and algebra, so this math isn’t exactly hard for me.  But as someone who wants a streamlined, tight and precise game system, this does not bode well.

The character creation section is split into two parts.  The first part is dedicated to quick character creation – essentially, they have divided the characters into two parts, the Main Style/Race combination and a skill sheet, and you pick one of each and you’re ready to go.  Nice, easy, quick.

Then, in something of an odd choice, the eight main styles are thrown right in the middle of the character creation section, dividing the quick character creation process and the full character creation process.  It seems a bit strange to put them there rather than after the second half of the character creation process, but this entire book is full of strange decisions as far as the layout is concerned.  I’ll come back to the main styles momentarily.

Full character creation involves choosing one of the eight main styles, one of the five races, your skills, and – wait a second.  That’s like, maybe two more options than the quick character creation.

Yes, the full character creation takes you maybe ten seconds more than quick character creation, outside of doing your basic math.  That seems a bit odd.  And that’s really my main sticking point with this RPG.

For those of you who don’t know Touhou all that well, the universe is littered with characters, and more and more get added with every game and supplemental manga/book ZUN officiates.  I can name maybe thirty characters in the Touhou universe and I imagine I will come close to a sixth of the cast, if that.  The universe is huge, the characters are varied.

And you have forty types of character you can be, max.  You have eight main styles, five races, and some skill selection, and the mechanics for your character end there, aside from spell cards which are a whole different bag of crazy.

Main styles dictate half of the base stats you have to start off with, your inherent skill, your normal (non spell-card) attack range, and a personality type.  While this can be easily disregarded, the fact that your class (let’s just call it what it is) dictates your personality is baffling.

Next is race.  You have five options: Human (Reimu), Demon (Remilia), Youkai (half the setting), Ghost (Yuyuko), Fairy (Cirno).  These provide the other half of your base stats, as well as a special skill.

You combine the stats granted by your race and style, and from there you sum up as necessary to derive your “calculated abilities”, these being Reflex, Perception, Will, and Tact.  Presumably these are the abilities that you use for checks because god knows you don’t use skills for them.

I have called this RPG rules-light and I stand by that statement.  You have four different real abilities to put to the test.  Even in a primarily social setting that’s really light.  Is Tact supposed to take the place of skills like Intimidate, Perception, Seduction, et cetera?  Why would you group a whole sphere of skills into one single ability?

Skills are a grab bag.  In looking at them, I’m not sure what half of them are even supposed to do because unlike most RPGs they don’t explain what the skills do.  Hell, if anything they’re personality traits that you have to buy.  “Unrequited Love” is a skill.  “Talent” is a skill.  “Loyalty” is a skill.

“Wonderful Clothing” is a skill?  I thought that was something all Touhous had baseline.  They have frilly dresses and awesome hats, you might as well just include it.

Pic related.

Oh, the game also offers you a list of equipment, but it’s entirely flavor.  There is no mechanical distinction between a sword and a broom.  On the one hand, it fits with the danmaku aspect, but on the other, in a game with so few elements of customization, any step towards differentiation rather than homogenization is key.  After your skills, you literally feel like a clone of any other person who made the same style/race choice you did because your stat differences are minor at best.

Combat is next, because I really want to save the defining mechanic of the game til the end.  I want to build up to the insanity by leapfrogging from craziness to more craziness.

COMBAT

Combat is, quite frankly, a mess.  They provide you a flowchart for the flow of combat which is unnecessary because there’s only like four steps in it anyways.  Oh no, the combat rules only become a true nightmare when you happen to read the glossary page where the dark, brooding purpose of skills is actually explained.

Go back up and look at that chart.  Notice how some skills are marked by addition, subtraction, so on and so forth with differing values?  Now you know what the skills are actually for.

In Flowers, your combat rolls are determined by 2d6 + Attribute (Danmaku or Dodging) + skill modifiers.

A big part of Flowers is Tension; Tension is what you use to activate spell cards.  Tension is gained throughout combat; if you roll a critical success (double 6s) you gain 10 Tension.  If you and your opponent have identical rolls after all modifiers, then you both gain 8 Tension.  If either of you wins by a margin of 3 or less, you gain 4 Tension.  If you win by higher than 3, or lose, you gain 2 Tension.

Yeah.  Combat in Flowers is about mathematically wrangling your roll to try and win by 3 or fewer.  This owes to a mechanic in the Touhou games called ‘glancing’.  It’s nice to see that they really want to try and replicate the feel of the game, but they apparently didn’t realize that the mechanics of top-down shmups translate very poorly to P&P RPGs.

Let me give an example.  Let’s say I roll a 6 on my 2d6.  My Danmaku skill is 8, so I have a 14.  I have the Unrequited Love skill at level 2, so I add +3 to my roll.  I decide that’s a bit low for my opponent, who usually has pretty large numbers by the end of her modifiers.  So I decide to use my Wonderful Clothing skill, which is at level 1, to turn my 17 into a 25.  For optimal Tension gain, my opponent needs to have a 22-24.

The way I’m reading it, the game necessarily has to function like poker where you both reveal what skills you’re using at the same time to see what numbers come out.  Even compared to most systems that involve opposed rolls for combat, this is ridiculously clunky.

Now we move on to another issue.  I want to quote Wyatt from a chat we had concerning this game, because honestly it makes a great deal of sense when it comes to these next two segments.

<WyattSalazar> A lot of [Japanese P&P RPGs] do not have a concept of these sorts of things because many of them arose from apeing D&D

What are “these sorts of things”, you ask?  Hit points and grid-based combat.

Flowers states that all characters start off with 25 HP – the game calls this two and a half lives.  This seems decent until the game also explains that every hit does 10 damage.

The game offers two mechanics for hit points, and both of them are special spell cards.  The first is the ability to trade HP for a bonus to achievement value (your total skill roll) at a ratio of 2:1.  The second costs 30 tension to restore one life (10 HP).

Depending on your reading of the rules, the first one is either utterly worthless or the most overpowered card in the game.  There is no time restriction on the card; in theory, if you spend 24 HP to gain 12 achievement value, you become completely unhittable, and you wear the enemy out by attrition.  If you choose to read it as a one-action ability, it’s completely useless, given that HP is at a premium in this game and you could spend at most 4 HP before you actually lose an effective life.

It’s an awkward mechanic that actually diverts the game away from what it was intended to be.  For all that the RPG has tried to be faithful to the style of the shmup, we’re drawn away from that model and handed some arbitrary half-assed HP system, instead of giving players three lives and saying “Hey, when you get hit you lose a life, and you have a special spell card that can restore one”.  That seems to provide more of a shmup feel to the game, and it eliminates the clunky and potentially overpowered/useless HP sacrifice mechanic from the game entirely.

Now, onto movement.

Flowers uses a grid-based combat system, and I can kind of sort of understand why, but the handling of it is poor.  It uses a grid-based system because your main style tells you “This is what your normal attack looks like” and then gives you a grid profile of where your attack hits around you.  Spell cards also hit on a grid.

Now, given that Touhou is a game where mobility is key in threading through a wall of giant angry red orbs with peculiar hitboxes, you’re thinking “Well, surely there’s opportunities for tactical movement.”  Nope.

A character’s movement speed is two squares, and unless specifically noted, a character cannot move diagonally.  If two characters start on opposite corners from each other, it takes you until round three before any combat actually begins.  There is a special spell card that can give you an extra movement of however many squares provided you spend however much tension, but aside from that your movement is extremely restricted, and given your normal attack profiles, you spend your turns moving one square, if that, while building tension for spell cards.  Hardly representative of danmaku, unless you’re doing Cirno’s Icicle Fall –Easy-.

The closest you get to tactical movement and any kind of control is a special spell card that can trap any enemy that passes across a certain square, stopping their movement for one turn.  Given there is no way of directing an enemy’s movement, it’s a waste of 20 tension except under very specific situations.

There are also sustainable spell cards which I will get to later.

It’s kind of a catch-22.  With the way movement and normal attacks and tension gain are implemented, mobility is essentially pointless unless you’re trying to run away (and you can’t even do that very well), and combined with the lack of control and manipulation of the grid, it ultimately renders the grid pointless.  Except that since normal attacks and spell cards have no difference in damage, and the only difference between them is in the area that they hit, the grids are necessary.

Hence, mimicking mechanics without understanding the mechanics.  If the combat is horribly boring in a game where the only rules are for combat, there is an inherent problem in the system, and by limiting mobility and control in a grid-based system, you’re removing most of the reason for a grid-based system period.

TENSION

I also want to take a moment to discuss Tension.  I’ve already explained the purpose of Tension and how you gain it, but now I want to address the mechanic specifically, because I currently cannot explain how it makes any sense whatsoever.

Spell cards have variable costs dependent on a number of functions which I will explain in the appropriate section.  You automatically begin combat with 15 Tension, and gain anywhere from 2 to 10 per turn based on your luck.  This means you are potentially locked out of doing anything for a number of turns depending on your spell card cost, but more importantly, it also renders the game kind of pointless.  If you don’t have access to your spell cards right off the bat, then normal attacks become overvalued, especially since both do identical damage.

There are very real advantages to spell cards.  They have much larger areas of effect, they can target a variable number of enemies and some can last a number of turns.  But when you’re locked out of them because you don’t have enough of a necessary mechanic at the start of any fight, it feels pointless.  You’re relegated to grinding a resource in-combat so you can use your cool special ability, except then you have to start from scratch and grind even more to use it again.

Imagine, if you will, that you are playing a Wizard in 4E.  You have a number of very cool encounter, utility, or daily powers that can seriously alter how the fight will play out through control mechanics.  But in order to use them, you have to spend three rounds casting only your at-wills.  Then you can use one.  Then you have to spend five rounds casting only your at-wills.  Then you can use another one.

That’s the Tension mechanic, and it’s quite bad.  I honestly don’t know how to fix this one.  Everything, from how it’s gained to how it’s used, is poorly designed.  If I had my druthers, I’d take the entire system out and throw in the recharge mechanic that monsters use in 4E, because that at removes the aspect of grinding Tension.

And now we come to the pièce de résistance of this lunacy.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:

SPELL CARDS

I’ve talked around them for long enough, made reference to them plenty of times, and now it’s time to unveil the true madness of the Touhou RPG.

For those unaware of Touhou’s game mechanics, spell cards are specific attack patterns used by bosses.  I made reference to Cirno’s Icicle Fall above, which is one example of a spell card.  Here’s a more involved example of a spell card, and what the RPG should be trying to recreate. Bosses in Touhou have a number of various spell cards, and players always have two – one that is an unfocused spell card (meaning that it’s a bomb used when the player is not holding shift), and one that is a focused spell card (a bomb used when the player is holding shift).

Spell cards are strange, magical things in the Touhou RPG.  This is, theoretically, where your distinction from other players comes in, because these things have a crazy amount of customizability.  But you pay for it out the ass.

Allow me to show you the cost of a spell card.

The total Tension cost of a spell card in Flowers is: (n-1)*4+2 + (o-1)*2 + p*2 + q + 1, 3, or 6, where n is the number of turns the spell is sustained, o is the number of targets you can hit with the spell card, p is the modifier for your achievement value, q is the number of dice added to a roll, and an extra 1, 3, or 6 depending on the range of your spell card (the book offers different patterns with gradient ranges).

Even glancing over that should tell you that this was poorly thought out.

But it gets even better.  See, the game asks you to list whether the spell is an Attack spell card, a Defense spell card, a Support spell card, or a Special spell card…and that’s the only difference between them.  There is no mechanical difference to any of these different types of spell cards except for the name.

There are also specific Special spell cards.  They have fixed effects with variable values, IE sacrifice HP at a 2:1 ratio for X achievement bonus, or move X squares based on the amount of Tension you spend.

There are two varieties of spell card, but damn if the manual explains the difference.  There are Action spell cards and Counter spell cards.  Action spell cards are played on your turn, and Counter spell cards are ostensibly played as a reaction to someone else’s action, but the game does not elaborate on when your counter takes place, nor what effect it has on the gameplay.  If I’m hit and activate a Counter card, do I still lose a life?  Do they cancel each other out?  I don’t know, nobody knows, because the game doesn’t tell you.  Following the “RPG is a reflection of the game” concept, you cancel out the hit at the cost of Tension, but it would be lovely if the game itself clarified itself – not to mention, it seems kind of unbalanced because you could create a very low-cost Spell Card that would allow you to constantly counter hits with little lost.

Pictured: an understandable reaction to poor rules enabling unending fights.

Flowers states that characters may have a maximum of five spell cards; if they want any more, they pay a tax of two experience for each spellcard.  I’m not sure why you would need more than five, because chances are you won’t even use the five you have.

Spell cards are the ultimate disappointment in this game.  As I’ve explained, due to the way the tension system actually works, you don’t have access to your spell cards unless you’re hording the stuff (the game makes mention of saving tension used outside of combat, but I can’t for the life of me understand how judgment would be used in any fashion outside of combat, since there’s no way to make a social encounter that relies on the rules at all), and then you use one spell card and it’s all gone anyways.  And it’s a damn shame because the spell cards are the only actual way to make the game remotely interesting.  Laying down a large-area sustained spell card as battlefield control is a neat idea for tactical purposes, but you can’t follow it up with anything but chugging along at your two-square pace and smacking them with your basic danmaku.

Add to that a lack of any real excitement in the combat due to an overall lack of variability and what you end up with is a Touhou-themed luckfest/grindfest.

Again, I understand that the point of the RPG is to mimic the feel of the game, but it’s very hard to care much at all about using a spell card, which is exactly the opposite of the way you feel in the shmup.

IN CLOSING

There’s some other stuff in here that I want to cover before I close this up.  The first is the map and geography.  You have a nice one-page map of Gensokyo, and then you have one page of descriptions of the designated places on the map.

Think about that.

One page.  For an entire world that you’re supposed to explore.  I realize that Touhou fans generally have an idea of the popular places in Gensokyo, but they couldn’t fill up more than one page on descriptions?  I can’t help but wonder if it’s because Touhou is already so niche that they just figured they didn’t need to outline any more than that.  You practically have to build a world out of Gensokyo because what you’re actually given is nonexistent.

The GM Section is also one page long.  Helpful.

Give detention to players that don't bring their report card back signed.

I’m going to get into fuzzy territory here, but this area is more my stride than the rest of this has been.

So here’s the deal.

Flowers is a translated RPG, and the people in charge of editing, whether it be visual editing of the PDF or whoever was in charge of editing the translation, did not do a great job.  I’m sorry, but it’s true.  However, leaving that issue aside, we come to the fact that as I’ve detailed, there are rulings, terms, et cetera that are mentioned once in the text and never again.

It is the nature of the beast of translation that we are required to fault the original and not the translator for this.  Without having a look at the PDF in Japanese, I can’t make a claim that the translators missed anything like this, which means that as far as I know, the original was shipped in this format.

And keep this in mind too.  This RPG has received errata, which is included in the translated PDF, and there are still this many issues with it.

I would love to actually get in touch with the people who did this, because I’m really curious about some of these enormous holes in the ruling.  A special spell card counter that specifically mentions “revitalization value”, a term that doesn’t appear anywhere else.  The counter system itself, which is not explained at any point in the book.  An explanation of how this RPG is supposed to apply to anything outside of combat except through four very vague skills.

But even finding information on these missing rules doesn’t save Flowers from itself.  It’s a math-heavy, incredibly homogenous, poorly-designed RPG that relies on mechanics that the flavor and system itself don’t support.

Maybe the next time someone tries to do a Touhou RPG they’ll base it off one of the fighting games.  Something tells me that it would be a lot more playable and involved than this one.