How do you picture fights between Touhou characters, their spell card patterns and their general fighting styles? Walls of bullets are all well and good for a shooter, but they don't make for the most exciting material if you ever want to tell a story or draw a picture. And what if the fight comes to close-quarters, and there's no material from a fighting game to go on? Some characters have well-established fanon in this area, like Mokou fighting with flaming kicks and using attacks that hurt herself... and then that actually became canon. Others don't seem to have any real consensus.
Touhou 3D Dogfight is a good example of what I'm looking for in this thread. Some attacks are depicted fairly literally, but there's all sorts of embellishments from the large (the fistfights and Utsuho's transforming control rod) to the small (the bullets flying inwards in
Subterranean Sun are actually tiles being ripped from the wall by the sun's gravity). Basically, how would you depict a character if they appeared in a video like that?
Let's start with one of the newcomers,
Junko:
Junko's basic projectiles take the form of thin but powerful beams which can originate from any point within a certain distance and fire in any direction (think invisible
funnels). They're precise enough to shoot down enemy attacks, often so fast that it's hard to see, but she never fires more than one at once unless she's getting really desperate. She can also fire a stronger beam by pointing, Frieza-style. In melee she fights with movements similar to
Wing Chun, avoiding any unnecessary or colorful motions, and swatting attacks aside or just leaning out of the way rather than changing her stance. However, she doesn't like getting into melee range, so she mostly focuses on defence and tries to put some distance between herself and her opponent rather than following up on her attacks.
Lilies of Murderous Intent takes the form of a small energy ball from her palm that explodes when it hits something, swirling and "blooming" into a sky-piercing pillar of light. If her opponent is dodging the blasts too easily, she'll start firing them from both hands at once or detonating them prematurely.
Primordial Divine Spirit World traps her opponent in an illusory maze drawn from her memories, where doors lead to strange places and everything's trying to kill you.
Overflowing Impurity causes darkness to flow up from the ground and snare an opponent, preventing them from dodging her other attacks.
I haven't got quite as much :wikipedia: for
Hecatia, but one of her spell cards sends three moons flying around the screen. I like to interpret this as her enlarging her three "planet shackles" and using them as flails.
