Yesterday I felt really good about something that happened (touhou-related), so I think I should be writing about it here.
I've learned about the Touhou Project series around 2012, but I've only tried to play it in 2013. Back then, the first game I tried playing was EoSD. I never had tried a danmaku game before, so everything was pretty much new to me.
But there was something that got me caught in the game. It wasn't the story back then, neither the characters. It was the music, and the difficulty of the game itself. It was so difficult for me to get past the first stage, and I since I don't understand japanese, I also didn't know that I could slow my speed with shift and bomb away the bullets with X. It was frustrating to lose lives after lives, and it was even more frustrating to know I was failing to finish the first stage out of six (normal difficulty).
But what made me keep going was the music. I loved how the tune was timing with the stage advancing, and when I discovered the music room in the menu, listening to Meiling, Patchouli and Sakuya's theme songs made me feel really excited and got me even more motivated to play.
Yesterday, for the first time in a few months, I opened EoSD again. I haven't played it because I had already cleared the extra stage, but then I felt like playing it again, for no real reason. I just felt like doing it. I was looking at my replays folder, and the first replay I had was from a run I had played in 2013.
Man, the memories knocked me out, haha. It was a pretty bad run: After many attempts of trying a no-focus/bomb run of the first stage, I finally was able to do it without dying. Good thing, for sure. Then, in stage 2, I also managed to pass all the stage without dying again. Then I died to Cirno's shotgun, and lost all my three lives there. I remember that when I did that, I laughed myself out, in a mix of frustration and excitement. "Ha, I finally got to listen to this character theme while playing the game!" I thought.
Three years after that, I can clear the game on hard without dying until Patchouli, and I've also finished the extra stage; But what makes me feel happy is that back then, the frustration of a lot of failures didn't make me stop playing, and pretty much I feel the same thing today; That excitement of a boss battle where I would have to play seriously, or else I would fail, is still here, even after thousands of failure. Those memories also made me realize that despite being terribly bad at the beginning, not giving up really helped me get to where I am now. Not only in the games, but in a lot of other areas of my live; going through hell in a bullet hell game helped me to stay more calm in stressful moments of my life, and today I'm also able to do things I wasn't able to do a few years ago, and I believe that touhou surely helped me with that.
Well, that's it, I guess
Talking about the series, I'm now trying to beat Koishi, whose stage and spell cards (and non-spell cards too) are giving me a really hard time. Then, after that (or while I'm trying to do that), I'll start playing UFO. I really want to play Byakuren, for no reason at all. (Maybe it's her boss battle theme. It surely is that.)
