I played this game waaay back before it had an official release and was still a demo. I saw it got a release on steam so I decided to pick it up and play it today.
I did two playthroughs and 1cced easy and normal. My biggest complaint with this game is that the deathbomb window just doesn't exist. I've acquired the skill to deathbomb reliably in regular Touhou games (official and most fangames) and it was very frustrating not being able to deathbomb like. At all while playing. The invisibility time for the bombs was also /incredibly/ annoying, you basically had give or take 2-3 seconds after bombing before you were killable again. I liked the character switching mechanic but it was rarely ever actually utilizable during fights, unless I needed to switch to a character who had a longer lasting bomb.
I also feel like the difficulty balance is verrry out of wack, atleast going off normal mode which may as well be the standard mode. Stage 2 had a very strange difficulty spike, stage 4-5 had me running for my money, stage 6 was kind've whatever.. The Bosses are the worst of this though. 1-3 are fine, but 4-6 are frustrating or just disappointing. Murasa's final spellcard is 50 seconds with a very high skill level to actually capture. Some of Sanae's cards were just straight up anti-blind and not possible if you didn't know beforehand. The final boss was fairly difficult the whole way through; wiped me of my bombs and lives.. until the "revival" spellcard, where it was 80 seconds that was so easy that even with no bombs, no dragon orb life save things, no lives, I was able to clear on my first attempt. The danmaku also wasn't very varied in my opinion, it either felt too much of the same or too drastically different from everything else. Maybe that's because I didn't touch lunatic/hard mode (where the patterns tend to shine more) but It left alot to be desired personally.
Moving on from the gameplay; I was really disappointed to see that the first 5 stages are all canon characters, and there's literally only one character unique to this game. I'm not saying that a Touhou fangame /has/ to have original characters, or a full cast of unique ones, but personally I was really looking forward to stage 4-5 having original characters.
As for the music, I'll be honest and say that a majority of the boss themes are incredibly boring and stale. The only one that stood out to me was Yuuka's, otherwise they're all really mediocre arrangements of pre-existing themes, and the final boss theme was so forgettable I literally didn't realize there was actual music in the background until I beat the boss. With that being said, the stage themes were really really good, especially the first 3. 4 and 5 were pretty whatever and 6 was decent. I didn't make it to the extra stage boss so I can't really comment on that.
I will give the game one thing though; the UI is stunning. Really high quality menus, backgrounds, and stage backgrounds. The visibility was also really solid, I never had an issue of not being able to see anything until it was pixels away from killing me. The voice acting sounds good, but I can't say since I don't speak chinese. Honestly the art is okay, and the character design for the original character just felt like a generic anime girl oc so nothing really noteworthy there in my opinion.
All in all, I can't really reccomend this game. It's pretty, and the voice acting is really cool, but there are far better Touhou fangames out there, with more fun mechanics, cooler characters, cooler designs for the playable characters, much better music, and just overall a more appealing story or concept(s).
