10/08/2022.

Koumajou Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony

Fangames - they can come in pretty much every conceivable shape and size. You’ve got rom hacks, like the billion or so fan-made Pokemon games on the internet; full-remakes a’la Black Mesa, which pretty much improved on Half-Life in every single way. But then you get something like Koumajou Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony, a game that, whilst totally fan-made by a seemingly title indie group, both evocates the tone of the title it pulls it’s wonderful characters from, but also the all-time classic series - Castlevania - that inspires the basic structure and set-up of this game. I don’t know what I expected from Scarlet Symphony - a bit of diversion, a good laugh at how mixing a game mostly known for its bullet-hell gameplay and adorably cute characters with the grim-dark-silly edge of Castlevania would… but I was surprised to see that this is genuinely something special - a crowning example of how even the smallest teams can make something that stands up as not only a tribute, but a fantastic title in its own right.

Koumajou Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony (which I will just refer to as Scarlet Symphony from now on) is a fanwork based on the long-running bullet-hell Touhou Project franchise, which is well known for having a developer so chill and relaxed about his intellectual property that pretty much anyone - and I mean anyone - can make an entire game using the characters (consisting on dozens and dozens of cute girls who evoke ideas of Japanese mystics, yokai, aliens, and more) and it’s setting, and allow them to sell them to boot. This has led to dozens upon dozens of fangames - known as doujinshi games in Japan - featuring the cast of Touhou Project to come in the years since, ranging from dungeon crawlers like Labyrinth of Touhou, Metroidvanias like Touhou Luna Nights (one of the best modern Metroidvanias, by the way) and Dinner-Dash styled affairs like Touhou’s Mystia Izakaya. Koumajou Densetsu is essentially developer Frontier Aja’s attempt to make their own spin on a classic Castlevania game - none of that backtracking, free-exploration that titles like Symphony of the Night popularized - but a classic, stage-based, kill-the-boss, genuine Castlevania experience.

Barebones would describe the story of Scarlet Symphony, but this barely crossed my radar at all - considering how Classicvania (is that a term? If not, I’m making a term) had almost no story associated with them, and even Touhou Project itself is a rather story-light experience. As a prelude, Reimu senses trouble brewing at the Scarlet Devil Mansion, and sets out to do what seems to be always her task - deal with it, which usually just involves Reimu being harassed by both friends and foes as she just tries to sort everything and everyone out. Almost all the story comes during the game’s boss fights, where Reimu, along with her allies Marisa and foe-turned-ally Cirno will usually engage in some genuinely hilarious banter that slowly teases what’s going on in the Scarlet Devil Mansion whilst usually humiliating Reimu in some way. As it should be. These little conversation sections are actually the greatest homage to Touhou outside of the characters themselves. Frontier Aja have really captured the characterisation of the characters they’re adapting whilst injecting just enough of their own personality to not feel like they’re just ripping the Touhou characters from their parent series wholesale.

Easiest the most notable aspect of Scarlet Symphony is in it’s art direction and chiefly, it’s character designs. I’ve grown familiar with these designs of the Touhou Project girls over the years, but here, Frontier Aja has breathed entire new life into each and everyone one of them featured in Scarlet Symphony. Reimu, once a tired, tired Shrine Maiden, is now a monster-hunting, Gone is the happy-go-lucky witch design of Marisa, replaced with a shit-eating grin-wearing huntress who’s as adept with her words as her weapons. Gameplay-wise, the game feels like a mix of Rondo of Blood’s environmental fidelity coupled with the fantastic character sprite work of Symphony of the Night. Reimu and her foes alike are lovingly animated, having a sense of fluidness and animated-ness that almost surparsess the franchise that inspired this in the first place. The stages themselves aren’t super distinct, but they’re never unwelcome to look at; they follow the general progression featured in the classic Castlevanias, starting out in the Scarlet Devil Mansion’s outskirts, before Reimu makes her way inside and traversing it’s libraries, clock tower, and finally the private chambers of the Scarlet Devil, Remillia, herself.

I tried doing a bit of research to see how many people actually worked at Frontier Aja at this game’s original release back at Comiket 76 back in 2009, but I couldn’t find any reliable information in English about the team’s composition. I can only assume, considering this is a fan project, that the team was little more than a handful of friends trying to make a tribute to a pair of franchises they were passionate about. I just want to applaud them on what they’ve created; I know this game came out more than a decade ago, but in a landscape where games feel more and more homogenized, playing something that is so clearly a passion project puts a smile on my face from start to finish. Beside, uh, for a few, uh, key moments, here and there.

Whilst story-wise Scarlet Symphony mostly pulls from the Touhou side of things, from start to finish this is a complete Castlevania-with-cute-girls experience, with a few bells and whistles here and there. Seriously, for large swathes of this game, you could’ve convinced me that they’ve just swapped out Richter Belmont’s model for Reimu, and the average monster from Castlevania with Touhou’s more fantastical creature design. It’s derivative, I won’t mince words, but the fact they went so hard on molding everything Touhou to fit the Castlevania aesthetic, it’s not remotely a problem. You could throw the new designs for Reimu or Marisa into something like Aria of Sorrow and they honestly wouldn’t look that out of place - Frontier Aja really put the effort in, this is nothing short of astounding how close they came to the Castlevania aesthetic.

On the gameplay side of things, Reimu feels like a slightly more mobile mix of Richter Belmont and Alucard; she’s got her whip-like attacks, a backstep, a slide, and the ability to hover (it’s soooo much fun to float around enemies, rather then taking them head on). Taking a page from Castlevania III, early on Reimu teams up with Marisa and Cirno, but whilst you’ll still be physically playing as Reimu, the latter two members of the team exist as essentially a special attack - Marisa launches a mighty laser that hits hard, but has a smaller hitbox, whilst Cirno’s is the opposite - larger, but weaker. Typically I found Marisa’s special attack more useful for average enemy fodder, but Cirno’s was fantastic to burst down smaller enemies who just looooved to move around far too much. Looking at you, Sakuya. All around, this just felt like a more mobile equivalent to Rondo of Blood - not to belabor the point about how close this to Castlevania. And as someone who thinks Rondo of Blood was just… fine, I guess, this absolutely works for me.

The big elephant in the room is Scarlet Symphony’s difficulty. Obviously pulling from both Castlevania and Touhou Project’s penchant for extreme-difficulty, Scarlet Symphony is not an easy game. It starts tepid enough - the first two stages are relatively simple, with weak enemies, and bosses that are less major roadblocks along your way, and more just designed to teach how to fight and react to the game itself. Beyond that, though… Enemies will chomp your health in a handful of moves, forcing you to either fight on the defensive or, if you’re brave/crazy like me, use Reimu’s unlimited flight ability to weave a path through them to conserve your health and special attack charges. Honestly, I was surprised how many of the enemies in this game could be avoided by just a smart bit of flying; it wasn’t necessarily an easier way to play the game, but it actually became quite fun trying to identify if I could avoid a certain enemy, and what kind of jukes I’d have to pull out to land the dodge. Bosses, on the other hand, aren’t quite as easy to dance around. Starting from Stage 3’s boss, Sakuya, the game rapidly amps up the difficulty, throwing a near ungodly amount of projectiles at you whilst expecting near perfect performance to keep up with your foe. The bosses, personally, are the crowning achievement of the game at their highest moments - fights like Alice Marigold requiring you to handle both her and her puppets, or Patchouli - my winner for one of the most adorable character designs pretty much ever - forcing you to play hyper offensively, using invincibility frames to bring her down before she overwhelms you with her potent magics. For the most part, every boss expects something from you, and you’ll feel a better player as a result of it. As loathe as I’m to pull out this meme, this very much has that kind of Dark Souls-esque feeling of satisfaction when you finally bring down a boss.

This hyper difficulty, however, perhaps grows too far in the second third of the game. The fights against Suika and Sakuya’s second bout are hair-pulling frustrating; the latter is just a souped up version of your initial battle, but the deck is stacked so far against you, with a single misstep pushing you on the back foot and probably to defeat. At the very least, I did feel a sense of satisfaction after this exchange. Suika, however, is just simply a terrible fight. Armed with not only a gigantic attack that makes her invincible, Suika’s projectiles split into -more projectiles- that will kill you in two or three hits, along with giving you almost no real way to evade them… I’m sorry, but this fight was the greatest single misstep of the entire game, almost making me drop it there and then.

Thankfully, the game is not stingy with it’s lives, with the game giving you twenty of them from the start, and even if you run out - which I did, a lot, in the aforementioned fights - you’ll only be thrown back to the start of the stage, not the whole game, which I was really, really grateful for.

Besides, once you actually complete the game, you’ll unlock the Extra stage, a sort of epilogue traditional to the Touhou series - you’ll refight a couple of bosses, and tackle some unique bosses who are without a doubt the hardest in the game. I’ll be honest, this is where I tapped out; I certainly appreciate the game’s commitment to old-school difficulty, but the final boss encounter was genuinely too much for me to handle, at least without dedicating hours upon hours to navigate the fight. I’ll leave that to the real gamers, methinks.

Koumajou Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony is a loving, fantastic tribute to all things classic Castlevania with a Touhou coat of paint. Whilst it doesn’t stride too far from its motivations, this is a fantastic, arcadey title that’s worth your time and money if you’re a fan of either franchise. With solid gameplay and gorgeous art direction, the extreme difficulty, especially in the later boss fights, doesn’t sully the experience too much. Short and sweet, yet ever so satisfying, Scarlet Symphony is a triumph for super-indie doujin studio Frontier Aja. And good news, the game has received a remaster on Nintendo Switch! With higher res graphics, and voice acting! So go! Buy it! Buy it now!

Koumajou Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony is available on PC and Nintendo Switch.