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A clear of the game with the hardest to clear shottype using no bombs of any kind. Hollow Song of Birds is the latest Touhou fangame in the long running line of fangames created by Ido en co. As always, the presentation is very nice. The music and graphics are all very good and all the patterns look very pretty. In terms of stage design I think they took a couple of steps back since Riverbed Soul Saver. Like hardly anything happens in stage 1 to 3 and stage 4 is like the same five enemies over and over. Stage 5 and 6 are alright though. As is usual with Touhou-likes, the bosses are where the game shines. They are good fun. The overall difficulty of the game is quite high at first, but there is a lot of stuff that's learnable to make it not that bad. The game has 4 shottypes and 9 subshots, meaning there's a combination of a whopping 36 different shottypes you can use. This comes in the form of 4 characters and 7 colored gems. If you press up on the gem select screen, you can also access a hidden white and black gem. Even though there are like a million of them, they all seem somewhat balanced? The black gem is the one used in this run. The polar opposite of the white gem, It offers absolutely no benefits and it's purely there for challenge runs. You're very underpowered and everything takes forever to die. Bomb and Z-Spell increase is also massively decreased, but that doesn't really matter for this run. The game is already quite long, but black makes it like a third longer. The system of this game revolves around crystals and bombs. Enemies drop white crystals when you kill them, which give you a bomb when you collect a certain amount. The more bombs you have in stock, the more powerful the bomb is. Bombing the white crystals changes them into colored crystals. Colored crystals charge your Z-Spell, which is kind of like a super bomb. Z-Spells change every crystal on screen into high-value crystals and are the main source of score in this game. You're not going to see that in this run though. Not sure how I feel about the scoring system, it sounds like a system where you bombspam in order to bomb even more. The Z-Spell system is also somewhat underwhelming. It takes like an entire stage to charge it and then it's over in like 3 seconds. Bosses have their own Z-Spells too, which function like Last Spells from IN. You face them if you beat a stage with minimum deaths. Boss Z-Spells are way harder than the normal spells but you don't lose a life if you fail them. There is one unintentional deathbomb in this run, but it doesn't matter since I never went below 3 lives, nor did the bomb damage the boss. Download: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
