東方獣王園 〜 Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost. Review Summary

Highly enjoyable and content-rich: Players find the game incredibly fun, engaging, and a strong entry in the series, often praising its unique gameplay, extensive content, and high replayability. It's considered a satisfying experience for both newcomers and Touhou fans, offering a forgiving yet challenging experience across difficulties.

Diverse, engaging character roster: The game features an impressively large roster of 19 playable characters, including both new and beloved returning ones. Players appreciate the unique designs, distinct playstyles, and strong personalities of each character, contributing to replayability and overall enjoyment.

Phenomenal and varied music: The game's soundtrack receives widespread acclaim for its phenomenal quality, catchy melodies, and excellent arrangements of older themes. Players highlight the experimental nature of new tracks and how the music effectively conveys character images and enhances the overall experience.

ZUN's refined artistic vision: ZUN's creative direction is highly praised, with players noting significant improvements in the art style and character portraits. The music is also highlighted for its experimental nature and quality, demonstrating ZUN's continued skill and ambition. The story is considered one of his best.

Engaging and rich storyline: The game's story is consistently praised for being delightful, exhilarating, and deeply interesting. Players appreciate the well-crafted narrative, unexpected character interactions, and the way it explores relationships and reveals new facts within the game world.

Poor Game Balance & Polish: The game suffers from significant balance issues, including character disparities where many feel underpowered or overpowered. Many players perceive the game as unfinished, lacking polish, and missing expected features, which negatively impacts the overall experience and justifies a perceived high price. Story mode also has balance problems, often favoring defensive characters over offensive ones.

Unplayable Online Multiplayer: The online multiplayer is severely hampered by frequent desyncs, game-breaking bugs, and severe lag, leading to extremely low frame rates and connection issues. Many players find it unplayable, describing it as 'broken' or 'rotten to the core,' indicating a fundamental flaw in its implementation.

Key Features Are Missing: The game conspicuously lacks several features considered standard or essential for its genre, such as a scoring system, replay functionality, and an extra stage. This absence significantly diminishes competitive replayability and the overall sense of completeness for many players.

Uninspired Bullet Patterns: The bullet patterns are frequently described as boring, slow, and overly simplistic, often reusing old designs without innovation. This contributes to a less engaging single-player experience, with some patterns being particularly frustrating or feeling like 'mindless bullet clusters'.

Disappointing Series Entry: Many players feel this game is a significant step down, potentially the worst mainline Touhou title, repeating errors from previous installments like Touhou 18.5. It's perceived as lacking the depth, replayability, and beauty of other games in the series, leading to disappointment among long-time fans.

Competitive bullet hell successor: The game is identified as a competitive versus shooting game, specifically a bullet hell shmup that is a direct successor or spiritual continuation of the gameplay style from Touhou 3 and Touhou 9 (Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream and Phantasmagoria of Flower View). It includes Story, VS CPU, and Online VS modes, emphasizing its PvP focus.

Varied player completion experiences: Players exhibit diverse engagement with the game, ranging from dedicated 'Lunatic 1CC' clears across all characters (some reviewers spending 10+ hours on this feat) to casual play on Easy/Normal difficulties. This indicates the game caters to both hardcore fans seeking extreme challenges and newcomers exploring the story mode.

Character enhancement systems: The game features multiple systems for character progression and customization, including 'ability cards' that serve as equipment-based enhancements to make characters unique. These cards are obtained from bosses or selected in VS mode, though not in story mode. Additionally, players gather items and build an energy bar by defeating enemies and grazing bullets, which powers up characters and enables EX attacks.

Deeply integrated with Touhou lore: The game heavily references previous Touhou titles, featuring characters from most main series games and concluding an overarching storyline that began with Hidden Star in Four Seasons. It also incorporates gameplay elements like a card system similar to Touhou 18/18.5, indicating a strong connection to the broader Touhou universe and its evolving mechanics.

Revised boss battle mechanics: The game introduces significant changes to boss battles, including the removal of the boss attack counter system. Players now defeat bosses by surviving a set number of their attacks, rather than depleting their health, and CPU opponents can activate boss attacks regardless of their gauge.

Controller detection bugs: The game experiences various controller detection problems, including inexplicable failures and specific triggers like resolution changes or certain input methods. This detection process can also lead to significant frame drops, sometimes requiring workarounds like plugging in a controller or using virtual input, and also causes occasional unresponsive key presses.

Display and launch issues: Users encounter difficulties launching the game, experiencing black screens in both windowed and fullscreen modes. The game also frequently struggles with screen resolution settings, sometimes getting stuck at low resolutions or switching erratically.

Unstable network performance: Players reported initially non-functional and poorly made netcode, leading to unstable online matches. While an update reportedly stabilized online play, the initial state was a significant drawback for multiplayer experiences.

One of the weaker Touhou games: Many players consider this one of the weaker entries in the Touhou series, noting it's not a strong traditional bullet-hell game. Reviewers frequently suggest playing other Touhou titles (like Touhou 8, 9, 15-18, or PoFV) or even fan-made doujin games for a more satisfying experience.

Niche for Touhou fans: This game is overwhelmingly recommended primarily for existing Touhou Project fans and completionists, particularly those interested in its characters, story, and music. Newcomers are generally advised to play other Touhou titles first, as this game's appeal is largely rooted in established series lore.

Hopes for future improvements/games: Many players express continued support for the Touhou series, eagerly anticipating future games (e.g., Touhou 20) and hoping for improvements to current game issues, particularly online stability and overall polish in upcoming titles.

Enjoyable for story and lore: Despite its shortcomings in competitive play or traditional bullet-hell mechanics, the game is recommended by some for its story mode, lore, and character interactions. It's described as a quirky and fun experience, especially if chasing high scores or competitive replayability isn't a priority.

Community essential for game experience: Player community-made patches are crucial for addressing core game issues, including bug fixes, balance adjustments, translation, and stable netcode. These fan efforts are vital for improving the overall player experience, especially for online play and non-Japanese speakers.

Niche series, tolerant fanbase: The Touhou main series is acknowledged as a niche game with significant influence, often receiving positive reviews despite perceived flaws due to a high community tolerance. Players view its continued development as a 'miracle' and generally appreciate its consistent presence.

ZUN's evolving development approach: The game's creator, ZUN, now has assistance from other programmers and his wife, 'Kii-san,' who contributes character pixel art and ability card designs. While this expanded team has led to improved art, some players suggest it may have impacted gameplay optimization and character balance, despite ZUN's evident satisfaction with the final product.

Varied and experimental music: The game's soundtrack features a mix of new compositions and arrangements of past character themes, with some tracks noted for their experimental instrumentation. Some players found specific songs, like 'Corpse Voyage,' to be unusually distinctive or even 'scary,' contributing to a unique atmosphere.

Intentional chaotic game design: The developer explicitly aimed for a 'weird and messy' game experience, which has led to intentional imbalances and a design where traditional scoring systems are considered irrelevant. This design philosophy appears to draw inspiration from earlier Touhou titles like Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream.