What’s that time…? It’s Touhou time!
Today, we venture into the fan-made Touhou games of Tasogare Frontier and find ourselves in the land of New Super Marisa Land. Also known as Marisa and the 6 Mushrooms, I’ve debated which among the Tasofro fan-games I wanted to review first. A coin flip landed on the edge, go figure, so I just went screw it and picked this one instead.
If the name of the game didn’t clue you in yet, this is a Super Mario-like platformer using the settings of the Touhou universe. So while it looks like Touhou, it plays like Mario, get it? So we’ve got our playable character, serial book thief and sometimes ordinary magician Marisa Kirisame, as she tries to take back the six magic mushrooms stolen from her by fairies. That’s pretty much what the story is, leaving us a lot of room to delve into the game itself.
On the Mario side of things, playing the game should remind you of the original games themselves. You pick a stage, you jump under blocks, you pick up the power-up from said block… you accidentally run into that Goomba-type enemy, and you’re back to square one. You fall off a pit, you lose a life, and you’re back at the start of the stage. Wow, you suck.
Basically speaking, the game is simple. On your keyboard, aside from the directional control, you only have three buttons you need to press, and that’s it. You go through the levels from the start to the end, and maybe find a secret exit somewhere. Along the way, you have to deal with everything the stage will throw at you, and in turn you can deal with them via head stomping action or the manly tactic of avoiding them and running away.
As for the power ups themselves, they function more or less like the stuff you’d see on the Mario franchise. For example, the Reimu suit functions more or less like the fire flower. Throw a yin-yang orb that’ll hit the ground and bounce off to hit who knows what. Handy against the most of the usual stage fodder, but does nothing against bosses.
On the Touhou side of things, you got the titular Marisa playing the role of Mario. Without power ups she’s teeny and cute, but with a big mushroom she grows Luigi-tall and breaks blocks over her head. Other power-ups are suits that gives the power to make Marisa cospla… I mean, transform into other Touhou characters. As explained before, the Reimu suit gives her fire floweresque powers, while the Reisen suit gives her bunny ears to give you a slight bunny-eared helicopter jump. There’s a handful of other power ups aside from that, and you’ll be needing them to get everything in this game. One other feature of this game is a shop where you can buy power ups when you need them, extra lives and the most important thing of all, the power to save the game.
Difficulty-wise, I’d say the game is around average. Most of the difficulty is found in the stages rather than the bosses themselves, the majority of which are fairly simple enough to beat. You got several worlds to traverse through, and many, many stages on each place. A lot of replay value is found via collecting red stars; 10 of them on each stage, and you gotta catch them all to unlock some hidden stages. And trust me when I say that finding them can be very frustrating due to one reason or another, especially later on when the difficulty starts to rise.
All in all, New Super Marisa Land is a fun game for both Super Mario and Touhou fans. The numerous levels and all the platforming in game will give you a lot of time to enjoy the look and feel of two series put together until you get everything done on this fun little series.
And that’s about it. Tune in next time where we’ll be getting our mega busters ready for another installment of Touhou time!
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For more information on the game and the ones who made them, take a peek at http://tasofro.net for more info~