東方覚醒珠 ～ Fan-made Virtual Autography || Extra Stage 3 Miss No Bomb Clear

Описание: It is time for an Extra Stage! It introduces a continuous Party Battle mode (from Stage 6 final spell) while in stage, so getting hit hurts even more. Who is the real culprit behind the whole Map Orb Game? Let's find this out!

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[ STORY ]
Map Orb Game, a game that gained immense popularity in Gensokyo at the end of the year. It's a game where players capture fairies with dichromate balls name "Map Orb" and use them to fight over territories for their factions.
Map Orbs can be obtained from marked spots all over the Gensokyo. Because of their wide distribution and rising popularity, humans are starting to step in the depths of the mountains, and youkai are intruding villages non-stop just to get the orbs.
As the situation escalated, three humans have readied themselves to deal with it:
A shrine maiden whose responsibility is to maintain the order of Gensokyo.
A magician who simply wants to study unknown games.
And... a high school girl who knows better than anyone about starting incidents that spread balls.

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[ OVERVIEW ]
東方覚醒珠（※二次創作） ～ Fan-made Virtual Autography is a recent Touhou fangame, released 20 March 2021. It combines bullet hell genre with JRPG as you see above. All the details I'm gonna describe below.

The game consists of six stages across four difficulties, along with an Extra stage.
What should be noted is that each of the stages can be played separately (in contrast to usual STG), and you will reach the ending sequence as well, thus completing the game.
I guess this is the intended way to play it.

Of course, you are able to play all six stages at once too - this is the harder way since the difficulty in FMVA is a bit higher than in typical Touhou.
This is how I made this run, fairly speaking.

Apart from Reimu and Marisa, we can choose Sumireko as the player, which to be fair is quite strong if you can sustain an unfocused shot.

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[ MECHANICS ]
Besides usual bullet hell, there's also the "JRPG" side of the game. Instead of normal lives, you have HP bar. Your character is equipped with orb containing fairies that play a major role here.

Before a run you can select fairies to your team. Each of them has a special ability which will affect either the player or fairies themselves. Rated from 1 to 5 stars, they will vary by added HP, damage dealt, health effect from heart items and better/worse extra effect, like smaller hitbox, faster speed, bigger grazing radius and so on.

Once in a while you'll encounter a few mobile-game-like automatic "Party Battle" on each stage. Then, the fairies will attack the ones you encountered, attacking first. Depending on their performance, you'll take more or less damage. Once HP reaches 0, it's a Game Over.
HP can be recovered by heart items dropped by enemies and grazing bullets, which replenish a bit of it.

You can charge fairies by collecting white and red orbs. Collecting enough of them gives them power for the next encounter. Additionally, every X levels you'll be able to use a bomb, depending on a fairy unit chosen. Each of them can hold a bomb at a time.
Bombing effect can be stacked. If you hold Bomb button while having more than one fairy ready, the power of bomb will be much greater.

Unfortunately enough, if you like scoring, then the game probably isn't for you. There isn't any score counter nor graze indicator. Yet, this wasn't the goal of FMVA - it had to be a mix of two different worlds, which is genuinely awesome.

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[ FINAL THOUGHTS ]
Fairly speaking (pun not intended.), it is a really brilliant game. For certain, a unique take on danmaku genre and how well one can mix some other genre into it.
Despite the fact one can easily beat the game with countless hits but with OP fairies (which isn't quite balanced...), I can definitely recommend this game to anyone wanting something different that usual bullet hell dodging :)

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Download the fangame right here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/11...

For more fan-made goodies - check out Touhou Fangames List! http://bit.ly/FangamesList
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Enjoy! And I hope you'll stay for longer!