Okay I lied this is actually the last strip in the comic.
This was another one of the original ideas I wrote for the comic back in the day, and I decided back then that it would be the last one.
So yes, here is some closure to this thing. See you next project!
Alternate version of the comic can be found here.
With all the talk they do in the game about “heaven is just partying 24/7” I figured HEY WHY NOT
And with this the story’s complete. It’s been a wild and crazy ride going through all of it, it was a lot of fun to draw and write, and I hope you had just as much fun reading it!
Thank you, dear reader, and I’ll see you next time!
To be totally honest I couldn’t resist the temptation to do a ZUN-style “DEFEAT EQUALS FRIENDSHIP” kind of ending to a story route. Besides, in the Magical Girl genre, you pretty much have to somewhere.
Well it’s more of a heaven-shattering-kaboom but hey
Because I didn’t know what else to call this strip.
GET READY FOR THE FINAL SHOWDOWN
The latest upload ever!
Sorry folks, I’m one of those hacks that doesn’t stick to a schedule when I come down with some kind of horrible bastard sickness, and then lose about half a work in progress during a sudden computer BSOD. But hey, at least it’s finally here and visible for the whole world to see!
Alright, now if anyone needs me I’ll be practicing some form of penance…
Sure, there’s a lot of parties up in heaven, but probably very few feature rampant violence as their main draw.
It’s a special occasion!
What if the poison stuff is the thing that powers up Reisen?
Or maybe the ‘enhancement’ is actually poison, like some kind of trick that Reisen figured out?
These are the kind of questions I think of and it bothers me sometimes.
Why is everyone in Gensokyo mad all the time gosh
Yeah they should really bury that thing a little deeper.
The next step, of course, is to switch the bottles.
This was an old, old joke I sketched out months and months ago. Definitely good enough to remember after all this time!
Also most of the conversation here is pretty much straight out of the game, which is probably the other reason why I liked it so much.
Pure Yukari in this one.
Actually I wanted to do a million-star hotel in the pattern of a danmaku style but the sign wouldn’t look quite as good from afar.
1. Reimu is already mad
2. There will not be a next time if Reimu can help it
3. Reimu is a big party pooper
guys help I think she breached the border of the fourth wall and ggadlkghadgahdlahdg
WORMS AND SMALL PLASTIC MINNOWS
Special guest appearances:
Kanako, Suwako, Sanae as themselves
Johnny Depp as the tea table
This is, by far, the most realistic way to explain what happens whenever you summon Ran in the fighters when playing Yukari.
Man if I was magical and could easily imitate the kind of stuff I read about in comic books I would do this too.
And yeah I believe Yukari reads comic books, it’s just like any other medium that she could get into to learn some kind of human culture.
While writing this a thought came to mind, which was “man that sound effect BZZT here is like in the same context as SNIKT would be”
Well at this point I guess the references are just too blatantly obvious.
Back to the drawing board once again!
And now I’m finding myself wondering how she even got in without anyone noticing in the first place.
Yuyuko and Yukari are each by themselves very devious kinds of women, but put the two of them together and you have some kind of unstoppable sinister mastermind that could probably shoot the universe through it’s own arse on a whim.
It’s almost as if Sakuya planned that…
In the game Iku came to Aya to tell her about the earthquake, in this…..well all I can say is Aya is just desperate at this point
Man even I can’t get the stink of using this old old joke in this comic off and I wish I knew why I let this one go in the first place.It’d be easier if Iku wasn’t a messenger in the first place…
Gotta hand it to the ol’ girl, even though Reimu thoroughly whooped her little butt, she still has the gall to go behind her back in some kind of defiance.
Some girls just never change.
Letting someone who’s constantly inebriated in charge of rebuilding your home just wouldn’t be a good judgment call in the first place. This little event shows that yes, Reimu’s back to her old self, and yes, she still isn’t taking any garbage from you damn youkai.
Good ol’ engrish lines from silly fighting games.
BITCHES LOOKIN’ TO POWER UP
Ah, the Melty Blood reference. It wouldn’t be a complete comic without a shoutout to my favorite fighting game series of all time.
Okay so I had to figure out how Marisa’s spellcard “Perverse Love: Easy Harvest Master Spark” had to work in a context outside of a video game, and this was probably the quickest way to do it with the format I had.
Man sometimes I think tasofro was just totally in on the whole fandom joke when they made that spellcard.
I had started to worry about the more recent strips that featured Marisa that had pretty blatant fighting game shoutouts, but stopped worrying when I realized they were just silly coincidences and weren’t going to become her little character quirk.
To think that this was one of the first strips I had planned out when I was just starting this comic idea… it’s nice that I had to change essentially little from the original and that it would have such an impact on most of the rest of Youmu’s story 😛
Entering Yukari’s gaps is probably like being exposed to everything in the universe at once. Either that or just some wild kind of alternate dimension with god knows what inside.
Aya’s comeuppance finally arrives in the form of a blatant Street Fighter reference.
I suppose it could’ve been worse.
Frankly, even canonically Momizi being Aya’s subordinate didn’t sound all that fantastic, so why make it any nicer when Aya’s a complete jerkface to begin with.
Reading through the scenarios of SWR, Komachi let on a lot more than you think she did, which was strange considering she didn’t do ANYTHING relevant unless you count getting in a few fights while describing what the opponent’s weather corresponded to her personality. If Tenshi being the one responsible wasn’t so blatantly obvious, you’d almost have thought Komachi was behind it all.
If only she could put that effort from sleeping into her work, she’d be employee of the month all months.
Poor Alice. This comic needed some kind of butt monkey to be the brunt of a lot of horrible things, and the wheel of fate chose you.
But technically, no one is supposed to get in alive to the Netherworld either.
When Youmu is faced head-on with no distractions, she’s TOP TIER, BABY
This is probably my favorite depiction of Yuyuko in this comic.
It was a difficult time trying to think of something for Marisa and Iku encountering each other in the context of the story. If this were two years ago, I would have made Marisa sexually engage Iku without a moment’s thought to gain the location of Tenshi’s whereabouts. But this time, a NEW joke had to be made…
It literally took me until I was just about finished coloring this strip that I realized I had put Alice Margatroid in chains and didn’t realize the pun potential of it all. Thankfully the joke was made and all was right with the world.
There are some doujins where you see more traditional depictions of youkai hanging around Gensokyo, as well as just some strange creatures from all cultures and weird monsters that aren’t depicted as silly-hat wearing girls. I’ve always liked those because it seemed pretty funny to me that someone like, say, Yukari would be hanging out with a big angry cyclops-looking creature and they would both be considered dangerous monsters. Not a very far-fetched idea at all that she would be familiar with this kind of thing (or perhaps even nostalgic or something) when a giant hulking moon rabbit has her in her clutches.
If you’re familiar with Street Fighter, you know where the title stems from.
Some things are just weird enough to scare even Yukari.
Personally I preferred IaMP’s system better, where the characters spit out point/bomb items when you slapped them out of their attacks. Made it feel closer to the shmups in terms of aesthetics.
Okay maybe I was half kidding when I was talking about Suika not being destructive around the Hakurei shrine.
And with this, the real calamities start. Woe to those who cross the miko’s path!
UPPERCUT is just a fun thing to yell in casual conversation when talking about fighting games with your friends or miming actions in said conversations.
Also I kinda half-assed tried to recreate that background that pops up when you super/ultra finish someone in Super Street Fighter 4 for that last panel. Lame attempt at a shoutout to a fighting game, really.
Alliteration is awesome (and sometimes awful)
Updates after the hiatus! Text got changed a little because I wanted to format it a little better, but otherwise nothing much different. Aya is extremely fun to write dialogue for like this.
When you have a creature that can grow to immense sizes like Suika living in your house, it’s amazing it stays up at all.
This point here is where I kinda stopped updating the comic for a few months. I had a lot of preparation work to do for an upcoming convention, among other things, and I kinda let it fall by the wayside. Never doing that again, no sir.
I’ve always liked the idea that Youmu looks up to Sakuya as a role model. I LOVED the old fangirl Youmu comics by Sougestu-Tei, but for this comic I didn’t want to take that kind of thing to absurd levels. Still think it worked out okay though.
It’s like one big downhill slope consisting entirely of poo for poor Alice here.
I don’t really know how to explain the monologue in this other than ridiculous amounts of sensationalism that even your average journalist understands from a certain standpoint.
Yeah, I intentionally made a reference to what is probably the most well-known line out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
IT WAS INEVITABLE OKAY
Shanghai used Hyper Beam!
It’s not very effective…
This portrayal of Remilia I thought was pretty close to how she would normally act in the games, but Sakuya…… I blame those other doujin writers/fanartists.
And now you know why Meiling was not included in SWR until the expansion.
Someone somewhere told me that there was a doujin where Patchouli placed a spell on the books so that they wouldn’t get ruined by water or anything.
BUT THAT WON’T GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOKES, NO SIR
“Another Blond Witch” could possibly be a nod to a different kind of character from a different doujin game, couldn’t it?
Or maybe not.
In the game, if you fought inside the Scarlet Devil Mansion, the weather wouldn’t show up at all. And early in the game, there was no translation, so if you couldn’t read the moonrunes, you basically had a disadvantage unless the weather was something totally obvious like typhoon (or, you know, you actually bothered to memorize what popped up on screen). So at the time imagining what would happen if the weather was allowed to roam freely in the mansion was a great idea to play with.
Beating up your man on the street and berating your assistants is a great way to get an article rolling, isn’t it.
“slobbering miko” is probably my favorite line out of this entire comic period.
You know I always wondered why Reisen’s status buffing spellcard and her poison-everything-in-the-area spellcard had nearly the same graphic.
This is also probably the only time I’m going to put Eirin in the comic at all.
Reimu’s sleeves are a defining part of her character, like it or not. But for them to be a PERMANENT part of her, well that is just something completely outrageous. Though I imagine Marisa swooping in and inadvertently ruining the day was probably a better joke overall for this strip.
Implied violence is sometimes the greatest form of comedy. You don’t know how exactly Tenshi ended up in the ground there, or how long she struggled before she ended up in that position. Letting the mind ponder these kinds of possiblities is kinda fun, I think.
Suika takes a lot of pride in Gensokyo and its residents, like some kind of nationalist or something…
For some reason that I totally can’t remember at all, probably because I couldn’t think of anything else interesting that nobody had done before, I decided to make Iku’s character quirk as “the girl who makes inadvertent Hendrix references in her dialogue”. I think it was a result of a late-night coffee-slam discussion.
Alright so if you were shocked/surprised at all by this sudden personality shift of Aya’s, let me explain here.
Her whole basis for her character quirk in this comic was pretty much inspired by the GONZO style of journalism made famous by Hunter S. Thompson and also the comic series Transmetropolitan. Both of these feature journalistic styles that are pretty much abrupt and spontaneous, and they both feature reporters that are paranoid as all hell and tend to get whacked out of their heads more often than not. Since Aya was pretty much known for writing articles that tended to annoy the other characters on a regular basis, I figured the connection was pretty much perfect. This is an Aya and Momizi for a more dumb, modern kind of age.
I think I liked Yuyuko’s pun more than the actual punchline of the strip here. It’s a rare moment when that happens, lemme tell ya.
There’s always at least one day in the summer where you wish you’d be rather off having a snowball fight. Touhous live the dream, man.
Arguably my favorite scenario in the entire story mode was Yuyuko’s, storywise, since she was being pretty goofy just spreading the snow around and messing with everyone.
Yes Tenshi tried to play a PS3, don’t think I had any kind of console fanboy bias in this though. I was just too lazy to try and draw other systems, even though it would make sense, her being spoiled and everything.
This was also the only time thus far that I’ve even bothered to branch out of the standard 4-panel format. Even though I was going to commit to just 4 panels, since this was essentially introducing the character that jump starts the entire mess to begin with, I felt I could break my rule just this one time to get some exposition out of the way. More panels mean more work though, so trying that out any other time in the future never really sat well with me as I was going along.
And so we begin.
Yes, the date for this comic is correct in a sense. I started this wayyyyy back in November 2009 as part of a challenge to see if I could keep up a regular schedule like your average webcomic, except for me I was lacking in the web departments, so I was basically throwing this up on Photobucket and linking it to friends that were interested. Also back then the schedule I gave myself was so ridiculously insane that I was pretty much destined to burn out on it. Live and learn I guess.
