More or less the same kind of game as Song of Divine Tempest, just with a supernatural border system ala Perfect Cherry Blossom, making this one a little better to me compared to the previous game.
If you're not good at Danmaku games or just want to experience the story, like SoDT you can play on Breezy mode, which gives you a life counter in lieu of lives. This makes the game feel a lot better, since you avoid a lot of the jank Classic mode had with its abrupt respawns, and the ability to tank bullets feels like a bandage over the hitbox issue the game still suffers. If you want to know more about how the game plays, check out my SoDT review, but just know, with this game, I don't know if this is an issue SoDT also had, but in BToL, bombs require both bomb stock AND power, which is really bad since if you have less than 1.00 power you literally cannot bomb even if you have bomb stock, and power gets hard to find towards the later half of the game, forcing you into a spot that makes things INCREDIBLY unfun and borderline unwinnable. The challenge of the bullet patterns themselves are fine, felt welcoming to newcomers to the genre while still feeling tricky towards the end.
The game's plot is possibly the most questionable thing about it. Nevermind the premise of the plot feeling like the writer's barely disguised fetish (oh no, a device suddenly made most of gensokyo's hair really long!), they don't really do much with it. For one, most of the bosses in the story are unaffected by the phenomenon and the only thing that really ties into the theme of the story is the designs of the heroines. The thing about ZUN's official games is that the 'gimmick' of the plot ties into every aspect of the game, including the gameplay. PCB was about spring not arriving on time, the netherworld, and the ever-important Saigyou Ayakashi tree. This is carried over into its supernatural border mechanic, that sees you collection sakura pedals to build up a momentary barrier. BToL doesn't do anything with its story premise, in fact, the border mechanic has nothing to do with anything in the story other than the fact that it takes place in spring. Maybe if the game tied some concept of 'growing' in the gameplay they could gotten some proper mileage out of the story.
The writing doesn't really do it for me either. While SoDT was bewildering and did things with a certain DDC character that didn't fit with their story, we instead get an incredibly simple plot with repetitive dialogue and no satisfying twists. At first we think that since the epicenter of the incident's start happened at [strike]Eientei[/strike] Palace of Eternity, naturally Eirin or Kaguya would be involved (after all, Kaguya is the postergirl for the Heian era's love for long-haired noblewomen), but they aren't the culprits. in fact, they aren't even present at their palace or in the game at all with little explanation. Nothing is really explained, it's just a lazy red herring. Once you get to the bottom of who the culrpit is, you don't know anything about them or their backstory (there's no Omake I can find to elaborate on what their deal is), she has a simple goal, and when you get the good end it doesn't really say much, even the Extra stage feels disappointing plot-wise.
The Dialogue left a lot to be desired, too. Like I said, it's repetitive, I played Marisa and Reimu's campaigns and with Reimu most of her exchanges are summed up as
Reimu: "change my hair back! I don't like this!"
Enemy: "I'm sorry, you can't end the incident! everyone loves their new hair"
Reimu: "Well, I don't! i'm going to find your boss and make her fix this!"
And with Marisa it's all
Marisa: "I'm the queen of gensokyo and my husband loves my long hair but now EVERYONE has long hair and only I am allowed to have the longest hair in the land!"
Enemy: "I'm sorry but you can't undo this!"
Marisa: "Screw you, my reputation as the prettiest is at stake!"
Once you listen to one exchange, you've heard them all and it doesn't really give you a reason to keep playing, and not really knowing what any character is about and what their ability is leaves you unable to be attatched to any particular character, I don't think I can remember a single character in this game other than Kagami (the rainbow haired one who's now inexplicably a mermaid). furthermore the characters feel wildly out of character. Marisa being a queen and a married woman I already went over in the SoDT review, but her obsession with having the longest hair feels out of character since Marisa was never obsessed with her looks in canon. Reimu is also mentioned to be really cruel to youkai (youkai-born?) which feels like a sharp flanderization of her character.
I gotta say, however, props to the final boss battle. Once you beat the final boss, [spoiler]all of her hair falls out and she's completely bald. this scene caught me completely off guard and I couldn't help but be reminded of those memes where Kaguya's hair explodes. Little moments like these really put a smile on my face.[/spoiler]
Overall, it's just more of the same of SoDT. mediocre gameplay marred by questionable gameplay choices, an unremarkable plot, a desire to be a simulation of an arcade port experience without much QoL, and characters that don't stick with the player. Honestly, I get it with the hair stuff, long haired women are pretty and Kaguya is one of my touhou waifus for laifu, this game just doesn't nail its premise to its fullest potential. I'd say these games are close to greatness, there's a level of competence involved that's impressive for a small team, but when there's all these little issues at play, it's like a death by a thousand cuts.
Despite it all, I can't help but look forward to this developer's next games. I see potential. There's a lot of promise to what this developer is doing, just needs to be refined and made a little more palatable and better explained. I get the gist there's a complex AU here, I just lack most of the context because the game doesn't explain anything.
