Immaterial and Missing Power

Gameplay

IaMP is unique within the Touhou Project series in that it is a fighting game instead of the usual bullet hell. The game is also unique among fighting games for its heavy slant towards projectiles, tracing the series' shoot 'em up roots.

IaMP has a "graze" function, unique among the versus fighting genre, that allows the player to dash through projectiles unharmed provided the character has enough energy to do so. Not all projectiles can be grazed, however.

Spell cards, in this game, are special moves that have to be announced before they can be used. Each character can choose 1 out of 3 normal spell cards and 1 out of 3 overdrive spell cards to use before a match starts. The overdrive spell card replaces the normal spell card when the player's character has been defeated once. Also, when a spell card is announced, the player's HP replenishes for a certain amount.

In the story mode, there are spell cards that are available only to the enemy characters. A spell card can be "collected" when the player defeats the enemy character in a limited amount of time when the enemy's spell card is in effect, and that collected spell card would appear in a gallery in true Touhou fashion.

Plot

In the beginning of summer in Gensokyo, a reclusive realm in the far east, there occurred an incident called the Night Parade of Ten Thousand Demons Every Four Days (三日置きの百鬼夜行). In this incident, the cherry trees have since shed their blossoms, but the hanami kept on going, with feasts being hosted day after day with no end in sight. Adding onto that, every time the feast is held, an unknown restless spiritual aura in Gensokyo also increases; however, nothing happens even while the spiritual aura rises, but when the spiritual aura rises, not a single person attempts to stop the feasts. As such, everyone who goes to the feast, be it human or yōkai, appear to be very suspicious. Three days before the next feast, the heroines set out, each on their own, and attempt to investigate.

Characters

Eleven characters are available for play; all but one are returning characters from previous games.

Production

Unabara Iruka (海原海豚) of the Twilight Frontier team had wanted to make a fighting game with aerial battles similar to Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness (1995) and Astra Super Stars (1998), but felt that creating a whole set of characters and the setting just for the game would be too overwhelming. Unabara felt that such a game would not feel out of place in the setting of Touhou, and so he sought out ZUN, the sole member of Team Shanghai Alice, to collaborate on a Touhou fighting game.

Unlike the main line of Touhou games where the character artwork is drawn by ZUN, the dialogs, character sprites, and ending artwork in Immaterial and Missing Power are drawn by alphes from the Twilight Frontier team. Team Shanghai Alice was responsible for character design, the plot, stage design, system graphics, spellcard naming, and a portion of the soundtrack while Twilight Frontier took care of the rest.

On April 1, 2004, Twilight Frontier announced they would make a Touhou fighting game named Exciting Touhou 2. In its introduction page [1](now defunct), the group provided a trailer and screenshots of that game, which appeared to be a version of WWE SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain with Touhou characters. (The WWE Smackdown! series is named Exciting Pro Wrestling in Japan.) A day after the April Fool's Day, Twilight Frontier announced the production of IaMP with Team Shanghai Alice.

The soundtrack of the game was compiled into an album named Gensōkyoku Bassui (幻想曲抜萃) which was sold on August 14, 2005. A significant portion of the soundtrack were remixes of existing Touhou songs.