8 / 10. A well-made Touhou clone
For the most part, Jigoku Kisetsukan just feels like a well-made Touhou Project clone, but with some minor differences. It tries to emulate the feeling of the first PC releases of the Touhou Project games and it does so with flying colors.
From what I can see and remember, the big differences in Jigoku Kisetsukan are the graphics. This is both for the good and the bad. If I look some gameplay footage up, I can see a lot of differences and Jigoku Kisetsukan has it's own visual style. While not inherently bad, by any means, I find that animation is pretty low-res, and thus kind of blurry. Since this is a bullet hell game, visually identifying the elements on screen and the objects' hit-boxes is quite quintessential. With the low-res graphics quality, doing bullet grazing is quite hard until you pretty much get used on how the game behaves.
Bullet grazing is probably one core mechanic that is not quite there in this game. Or rather, it is there but it is differently implemented. In Touhou, the grazing is done while your focused hit-box is touching a certain percentage of the bullet's exterior. In JK the character sweats when being too close co a bullet, but dies if hit. There's no grazing in the proper form.
The other mechanic that JK implements is a grace time before dying. Basically, you have a very short delay in which you can activate your aura attack and retain your life. This sound good in theory, but in practice you'll notice this too late and end up dying. There's not enough indication to quickly react to this kind of events, especially at the last boss where the bullet patterns are hard to do.
Other than that, the game is solid and is also free. If you haven't played other bullet hell games or the original Touhou games (which are hard to find outside Japan) then this is an easy recommendation.
Other recommendations:
- The Touhou Project series' main games, starting from the 6th (which is the first for the PC). Most people recommend the 7th, Perfect Cherry Blossom. These may be hard to find. Alternatively, there's an free and open source project called Taisei Project which plays very similar.
- Gun Wings
- The eXceed series (now delisted on Steam)
- Touhou 9.5 - Shoot the Bullet - This is an atypical bullet hell game that doesn't feature any Shoot'Em Up elements. Instead you must avoid bullets and takes photos of the boss and the different bullet patterns.
- If you don't have an issue with erotic games, there's a sub-genre called "Strip'Em Up". Here you can find the Deep Space Waifu series (now delisted from Steam), Sentimental Shooting (a old fan-made game for Windows 98) and Waifu Uncovered.
