Pirates Of Gensokyo

Pirates of Gensokyo is a yuri visual novel choose your own adventure game by DemonChuuckle. It is based on The Touhou Project series. It is strongly recommended to have some background knowledge about the characters and setting; before you play this fan game, or you won't understand the references. The game is set on a flying pirate ship, The Palanquin. Stolen by Marisa Kirasame and her crew. They embark on short adventures to find treasure. Along the way they meet an array of characters and stop by different landmarks. We find out about the character's inner dialogue. The game is set from the perspective of the four main characters and their feelings about each other. The controls are fine as for any visual novel. There are a good amount of saves. This is a choose your own adventure game but it is still fairly linear aside from some variation on the main story sequence. There's not a whole lot of replayability but it's short and sweet. The character designs and sprites are based on the Touhou series but slightly re-imagined to fit this game. They are consistent. The music is fine, but not very much inspired by the original Touhou soundtrack. There is no voice acting. I did like some of the dialogue. Some of it was an interesting spin on the original. There's even a part that is very poetic. The yuri themes are relevant to the main story line. The story pacing is fine. The character development is good. There's a lot of character introspection. The UI designed well. The last chapter art seems rushed. For both the characters and backgrounds. The game ends with sketch drawings instead of the usual art style found throughout the game. Some of the character interactions seem slightly awkward. The way they talk to each other seems unnatural or out of character at times. You could say this is down to the fan interpretation, but it seems inconsistent with the story progression. And the character personalities seem to bleed in with each other. Sometimes it's hard to know who's talking. Sometimes the music or sound effects stopped at random. Some of the references seemed overdone too. Like constantly bringing something up. The four different endings are short and almost identical. One thing is that there's no CGs for the scenes, only the 2d sprites. I wish the game was translated to other languages. Overall, the story is nice and I enjoyed playing it. Although I played this while not having a lot of experience about the Touhou characters; I did some research about each character and it made the story way more understandable. I would recommend this free game to any Touhou fan. [b]7/10[/b]