- Enjoyable gameplay and engaging boss battles
- Excellent music and visuals
- Excessive asset and content reuse
- Mediocre, convoluted story
- Repetitive, sluggish combat
- Unsatisfying equipment system
Emotions
Players are satisfied with the game's quality as a Touhou fan game, often highlighting its entertaining gameplay, functional story, and balanced difficulty. The extensive character roster, replayability, and overall improvements over its predecessor, including better visuals, music, and new mechanics, contribute significantly to this positive sentiment. The game successfully fulfills the desire for a Touhou action RPG, offering enjoyable boss fights and a generally fun experience.
Disappointment stems from the game not living up to its predecessor, often due to underrealized RPG elements, a mediocre story, and extensive reuse of content and assets. Players feel the game lacks innovation, is overpriced for its content and quality, and suffers from poor damage feedback, a messy equipment system, and technical performance issues. The limited skill variety, short length, and lack of significant graphical improvement also contribute to this feeling.
Frustration is primarily caused by poor controls, sluggish combat, and repetitive stages with uninteresting items. Players are annoyed by unbalanced characters, difficult late-game bosses, and flawed enemy design, alongside a problematic equipment system and new elements being locked behind DLC. Technical issues like poor optimization and low frame rates, especially during danmaku barrages, also significantly contribute to player frustration.
Players express enjoyment from the overall fun gameplay experience, often despite acknowledging some flaws. Specific elements like the story, music, engaging combat, and new parry/guard mechanics contribute to a generally positive and fun experience. The game provides an enjoyable time traversing levels and engaging with boss patterns.
Excitement is generated by the game's unique gameplay, story elements, and overall quality, with players looking forward to new scenarios and future content. The game's overall improvements, amazing soundtrack, gorgeous art, and expanded combat are significant drivers. The addition of playable characters via DLC and the addictive action gameplay also contribute to a sense of anticipation and hype.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 60% · Negative 40%. Score: 40 / 100
Positives:
- Players found the game to be very fun and entertaining, offering a substantial amount of content and replayability. The combat system is satisfying, easy to learn, and a significant improvement over its predecessor, with many appreciating the overall polished experience.
- The game is highly praised as one of the best Touhou fan games, appealing to both long-time fans and newcomers. It successfully incorporates Touhou lore, characters, music, and bullet hell elements, making it an accessible and enjoyable entry point into the series.
- Boss fights are a standout feature, described as challenging, fun, and well-designed with varied attack patterns. They offer a proper bullet hell experience and become more intense as the game progresses, making up for potential repetitiveness in regular levels.
- The soundtrack is highly praised as amazing, great, and varied, with many 'bangers' that enhance the game's atmosphere. Visually, the game boasts beautiful graphics, clearer modeling, lively cutscenes, and well-made 3D environments, marking a significant leap in quality.
- The game offers balanced difficulty that can be adjusted dynamically, making it accessible for beginners. The addition of active healing and a perfect guard/parry mechanic significantly improves combat flow and reduces stress, allowing for more mistakes.
Negatives:
- A significant portion of the game's content, including enemies, maps, music, and even boss fights, is directly reused or heavily recycled from its predecessor, 'Scarlet Curiosity.' This leads to a strong sense of déjà vu and a lack of innovation.
- The game's story is widely described as mediocre, nonsensical, and confusing, especially for players unfamiliar with the Touhou lore. It lacks excitement, character development, and often feels like a patchwork of existing plots, with inconsistent character interactions.
- Players found the combat system to be sluggish, repetitive, and lacking in variety, with many enemies and boss patterns reused from the predecessor. The parry system is poorly integrated, and overall combat feels uninspired and often passive, leading to a monotonous experience.
- The equipment system is criticized for its lack of depth and impact. Most items offer only minor statistical changes, making collection and forging feel pointless. Randomized stats on reforging are often detrimental, and there's little meaningful progression or unique features.
- The game's difficulty is inconsistent, with some finding it too easy due to free heals and others encountering instant-death mechanics or overly difficult early bosses. The initial difficulty selection is also seen as misleading.
Gameplay:
- The game offers multiple playable characters, primarily Reimu and Marisa, each with their own story routes, dialogues, and unique gameplay nuances. DLC characters further expand the roster, providing varied experiences and replayability. While routes share some bosses, their contexts differ.
- Side quests are integral to character progression, offering currency, random items, and enhancement stones to strengthen stats and upgrade skills. Completing them can significantly ease the main quest difficulty, and many are unique per character, encouraging exploration.
- The game offers multiple difficulty settings, including Normal, Hard, and newly added 'Bullet Hell' and 'Bullet Hell+' modes. The difficulty curve generally starts easy and increases steadily, providing options for different player skill levels.
- The game is a 3D action RPG set in the Touhou Project universe, featuring danmaku (bullet hell) elements, leveling, and various abilities. It builds upon the gameplay of its predecessors, offering a linear progression with semi-open world exploration and a mission-level system.
- A single character's main story and all side quests typically take around 8-12 hours to complete. Achieving 100% completion for both main characters is estimated to take approximately 22 hours, offering a substantial amount of content.
Performance:
- Many players report significant lag and low frame rates, especially when using integrated graphics or playing on Linux with Proton Hotfix. The game struggles during intense moments like large danmaku barrages, dropping to very low FPS.
- The game performs poorly on integrated graphics, often requiring players to manually switch to a dedicated GPU to resolve lag and achieve playable frame rates. This suggests a lack of proper optimization for a wider range of hardware configurations.
Recommendations:
- A significant number of players recommend purchasing the game only when it is on sale or at a discounted price. Many feel the full price is not justified, suggesting it's a better value at a lower cost.
- The game is highly recommended for existing fans of the Touhou Project, especially those who enjoy seeing their favorite characters in an action game. New players to the Touhou universe might find it a decent introduction, but some suggest other titles as better starting points.
- Overall sentiment is mixed, with some finding the game 'good' or 'acceptable' for an indie title, while others do not recommend it, especially to casual players or those expecting a similar 'exhilarating feeling' to previous games.
- Several reviewers suggest playing 'Touhou Scarlet Curiosity' or other Touhou fangames as alternatives or prerequisites. Some even recommend Scarlet Curiosity over this game, especially if buying at full price.
- There are mixed recommendations regarding which character to play first, with some suggesting Reimu for new players and others recommending Sakuya or Marisa. Players are encouraged to try multiple character routes.
Miscellaneous:
- Several new players were introduced to the Touhou series through this game, indicating its potential as an entry point for the franchise. The game's plot progression also felt like a blend of various Touhou works.
- Players suggest that health, skills, and spells should fully or partially recover before and after combat, especially if combat is a core focus. Additionally, successful 'Just Guard' executions could recover skills, spells, and healing.
- Feedback suggests making golden items rarer but significantly more powerful to enhance their value. Players also desire the ability to reroll all stats at the smith for improved character customization.
- One reviewer had low expectations for the game, which ultimately led to a more positive impression, resulting in a 7/10 score. This suggests the game exceeded their initial, perhaps conservative, hopes.
- Despite some positive aspects, the game is seen as 'almost really good,' indicating it's close to excellence but has areas needing refinement. The overall framework is considered relatively complete.
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