Video Game / Mega Mari

Marisa and Alice have a tough fight ahead.

Mega Mari is a sidescrolling Platformer/Bullet Hell game by Twilight Frontier, created in the vein of Mega Man and Touhou Project. Uses many elements from both series, including having eight "robot masters" as most Mega Man games do, and then the final castle stages where Wily Patchouli awaits, as well as the gameplay being quite similar to Mega Man games. The enemies focus largely on bullet patterns, with single enemies shooting anywhere from a single bullet to 12+ bullets at a time. The results when many enemies are on the screen can be quite overwhelming.

The plot doesn't quite involve world domination here, it's pretty much Patchouli getting annoyed with Marisa and Alice "borrowing" books out of her library and not bringing them back, so she transforms her library into a castle and has multiple characters who have something against Marisa try to stop her and Alice from breaking into it.

The main characters handle relatively the same as far as jumping and running speed go, but the pair both use different weapons. Marisa's standard shot behaves the same as Mega Man's Mega Buster prior to it receiving the ability to charge in Mega Man 4, while Alice uses a laser beam that pierces shields, such as the Prismriver's instruments, and hits more rapidly the closer to the enemy you are. On the down side, it's only about half as strong as Marisa's weapon.

Like in Mega Man Xtreme 2's Extreme Mode, here you have to decide which of the two characters gets the weapon the boss drops, while the other character gets nothing. Both characters also have an extra weapon/item, Marisa's broom, which behaves similarly to Item 2 from Mega Man 2, being given after earning four boss weapons, and Alice's Shanghai Doll which is given if she receives four boss weapons and behaves similar to Beat from Mega Man 5 and 6, following onscreen enemies and rapid fire shooting at them.

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This game provides examples of:

• Asteroids Monster: The large falling fuzzballs split into four small ones when shot or landing.
• Blackout Basement: When Rumia is onscreen, she turns the entire screen dark.
• Blow You Away: Aya acts as this game's Fan Fiend. She doesn't attack, but uses wind to push you backwards instead... usually into a cluster of fairies.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Tewi's hopper mech is a stand-in for Big Eyes, the hoppers with high hit points and collision damage.
• Boss Rush: This is a Mega Man clone, after all.
• Bullet Hell: All of the boss fights dip into this at one point or another. Not to say that the stages don't sip into this at times either.
• Charged Attack: Instead of the game having a chargeable default Buster Shot, Alice gets the chargeable White Rose Cluster from Cirno.
• Company Cross References: Marisa's third castle stage is a big reference to Super Marisa Land, another game by Twilight Frontier. It even comes with an arrangement of that game's overworld stage theme.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Small enemies die in white explosions which then shrink.
• Desperation Attack: Lots of bosses have one of these when they reach varying amounts of health.
  • Youmu's ghost half flies above the fight and shoots down large bullets in a circle until the fight ends.
  • Reimu releases a Yin Yang Orb twice during the fight, and at low health she goes nuts and spams them.
  • Reisen starts shooting 3 Psycho Missiles instead of one.
  • Cirno makes icicles continually rain from the ceiling.
  • Sakuya jumps high into the air and sends a lot of knives flying everywhere.
  • Yuyuko hovers in the middle of the room and shoots two lasers and drops cherry petals.
  • Remilia jumps up and shoots a lot of assorted bullets at you.
  • Eirin starts firing off large meteors, usually enough to pose a threat at once.
  • When Clone Marisa is at half health she transforms into Super Marisa and gains a charging attack and the Master Spark.
  • Mecha Patchouli charges up and then shoots a hologram of itself at you which is almost an instant kill if you don't jump it (read: 75% of your health bar!).
• Detachment Combat: As the Yellow Devil stand-in, Suika splits into many smaller versions of herself between her other attacks.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Hong Meiling returns in Patchouli Castle alongside a clone of herself that's equal in strength.
• Dual Boss: Yukari fights you alongside Ran and Chen, her two Shikigami.
• Evil Twin: Clone Marisa, following in Copy Mega Man's steps... until she transforms into Super Marisa. Unlike Copy Mega Man, she doesn't use any of your acquired weapons.
• Excuse Plot: Marisa and Alice decide to break into the Scarlet Devil Mansion to steal some books from Patchouli. Patchouli takes a page from Dr. Wily. Go.
• Face–Heel Turn: In Youmu's stage, Komachi helps you cross the river near the beginning. Later, during Alice's boss fight against Eiki, Komachi will attack you on occasion by charging across the screen on her boat.
• Flunky Boss: Alice's boss fight for the fourth Patchouli stage is Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu, whose court will take potshots at you and jump at you to attack. Komachi also charges in from the sides of the screen on her boat to attack from time to time.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Youmu takes extra damage from the standard weapons but is about as fast as Quickman.
  • For that matter, all of the rabbits in general. They typically jump all over the place and charge at you in varying patterns. One rabbit generally isn't that hard to take care of, but you're often dealing with several at once.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: In a game where all the bosses are established Touhou characters, the final boss is a huge robot modeled after Patchouli. How did she even get a giant robot in the first place?
• The Goomba: The weakest and most basic enemy is a fuzzball that moves back and forth and dies in one shot from Marisa's default weapon.
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: You have a perfectly good (half) photo of Marisa and Alice in normal proportions on the side, but everything in the game is tiny. Super Marisa breaks this.
• Guide Dang It!: After beating a boss, you have to choose which character gets the weapon, while the other character gets nothing. The two versions of the weapon work very differently and, unless you have either played the game before or read a guide, there's no way to know how each of these versions works before you pick it up, which ends the stage. If you discover you don't fancy this weapon, tough luck, time to do the stage over again. Even more egregiously, while the normal bosses work as you'd expect (they're weak to both versions of a given character's weapon), in the Castle stages, there are two stages a character needs to do alone, as well as bosses who are immune to one version of a weapon but not the other. This means that unless you know exactly what you are doing, it is possible to screw yourself out of several bosses' weaknesses entirely, just in case mixing Mega Man with bullet hell was not hard enough for you to begin with.
• Hitbox Dissonance: If Alice or Marisa are shot through the head, nothing happens to them. Bullets have to hit dead center in their bodies to do real damage, like in the actual games.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Reimu's Yin Yang Orbs can be destroyed in one hit once you get them as well.
• Humongous Mecha: The final boss, Mecha Patchouli.
• Interface Screw: Rumia covers the stage with darkness as long as she's on screen, forcing you to either remove her or make the jumps blind.
• Kaizo Trap: Reimu's Yin-Yang Orbs do not disappear immediately after her defeat, and will remain on screen for a brief moment before finally disappearing. If enough of them are on the screen (see Spam Attack below), it's entirely possible to beat Reimu and then get killed by the Yin-Yang Orbs before you can even reach her weapon!
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Marisa and Alice split up and take on their own path versions of the third castle stage.
• Lightning Bruiser: Hong Meiling and Youmu Konpaku could both give Quick Man a run for his money, and neither of them slouch in the damage area, either.
• Logical Weakness: As any good Mega Man clone, the game has a weakness system. Some of the weaknesses are easy to understand the source of, though a lot of others are rather esoteric.
  • Sakuya is weak to Remilia's weapons. Remilia is Sakuya's master and it's widely speculated, including in-universe, that this is because she has defeated Sakuya at some point in the past.
  • Cirno is weak to Reisen's weapon. The main application of Reisen's power is manipulating the brain waves of enemies. Cirno's brain is... pretty easy to manipulate.
  • Youmu is weak to Sakuya's weapon. Youmu's main ace in combat is her incredible speed. Sakuya's power is stopping time, rendering Youmu's speed useless.
  • Eirin's weakness to Cirno's weapon is probably taking the old adage "fools don't catch colds" to the opposite extreme - one of the most intelligent character in the entire series is badly affected by the cold.
  • Remilia's weakness is Reimu's weapon. As a vampire, she is particularly vulnerable to the shrine maiden's holy weaponry designed for exorcising evil. It might also be a nod to the fact that Remilia was the final boss of the very first Touhou game for Windows.
  • Reimu is weak to Yuyuko's weapon. Although she is a powerful miko, Reimu is ultimately only human and therefore mortal. Yuyuko's ability to induce death is particularly effective against her for this reason.
  • In the Fortress stages, Yukari is weak to Eirin's weapon (Alice version at least). This reflects her altercations with the Lunarians, and how she came out on the losing end the first time around.
• Nintendo Hard: Take what was hard about the Mega Man series. You following? Good. Now, take Touhou, add tons of bullets, and you get this game. This game is the equivalent of Mega Man if it had Lunatic Mode.
• One-Hit Polykill: Alice's laser pierces through enemies.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Upon defeat, all bosses in the final stages go up in a sequence of explosion rings and fire particles while the screen fades to white. Large enemies also die in a chain of small explosions.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Of a sort. The remains of Patchouli's saucer end up demolishing Marisa's house at the end of the credits.
• Sequential Boss: The final fight with Patchouli starts by herself, then she hitches up into in a large ship which looks like a teapot once the front is demolished (a parody of the Wily Machine), her saucer, and finally Mecha Patchouli. All of them are insanely tough.
  • The player gets a break between the "teapot ship" and the saucer, thankfully.
• Shout-Out: All of Marisa's third Castle stage, to Super Marisa Land, one of Twilight Frontier's previous works.
• Skippable Boss: Two fights with Patchouli (one by herself, the other in her saucer), thanks to a a glitch involving Thousand Knives.
• Spam Attack: Eirin's attack strategy is to fill the screen with as many attacks as possible.
  • Reimu's desperation attack involves spamming Yin Yang Orbs continuously. They also don't disappear from the screen. If you don't kill her quickly after she starts shooting them, you soon won't have room to stand.
  • Sakuya's desperation attack as well. Knives everywhere.
• Stationary Boss: Yukari Yakumo and Eiki Shiki, Yamaxanadu never move.
• Stealth Pun: Suika, the Oni, is the stand-in boss for the Yellow Devil, also called "Yellow Demon".
• Teleport Spam: Yuyuko.
• Time Stands Still: Thousand Knives, Sakuya's weapon if collected by Marisa, stops time for about 5 seconds while filling the screen with knives, which deal heavy damage to anything they hit once time starts moving again.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: After every boss you'll get some new toy to inflict hell in your enemies.
  • As you pick one trick for one of your two characters to learn, and the enemy charactes use multiple powers, this also displays the Unskilled, but Strong and Weak, but Skilled contrast in the protagonists. Marisa will usually learn something flashy and/or damaging. Alice will pick something lower-key which usually gives her new angles to attack from. For example, Marisa will grab Reimu's Yin-Yang orbs (huge, heavy bouncing balls which wreck armored mooks) while Alice goes for the paper homing amulets.
    • And of course, Marisa and Alice are the two characters which subvert those tropes: Marisa is a Badass Normal who intensely studies to produce bigger and bigger explosions and blasts, while Alice is Willfully Weak, pursuing precision and finesse rather than tapping into the tremendous raw power she possesses.
• Warm-Up Boss: Cirno's attacks are nearly always easy to dodge, and Alice's weapon deals 2x damage to her. Not to say her stage is as forgiving, however.

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