Touhou: New World Review Summary

Enjoyable Gameplay & Content: 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.

Excellent Touhou Fan Game: 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.

Engaging Boss Battles: 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.

Excellent Music & Visuals: 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.

User-Friendly Difficulty & Healing: 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.

Excessive Asset & Content Reuse: 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.

Mediocre & Convoluted Story: 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.

Repetitive & Sluggish Combat: 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.

Unsatisfying Equipment System: 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.

Inconsistent Difficulty Scaling: 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.

Multiple Playable Characters & Routes: 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.

Meaningful Side Quests: 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.

Varied Difficulty Options: 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.

Touhou-Inspired 3D Action RPG: 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.

Moderate Playthrough Length: 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.

Poor optimization and 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.

Integrated graphics issues: 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.

Wait for a Sale: 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.

Primarily for Touhou Fans: 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.

Mixed Reception: 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.

Consider Previous Titles: 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.

Character Playthrough Order: 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.

New Player Experience: 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.

Combat Recovery Mechanics: 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.

Itemization and Rerolling: 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.

Positive Impression from Low Expectations: 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.

Potential for Improvement: 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.