Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Apr 12, 2022

  The music is good, but the game is broken beyond belief. It's almost hysterical. The best way to beat a level is not with skill, but just repeatedly getting yourself killed while getting as many power items as possible. I never beat a stage whenever I actually try to clear spells. Even if you go all the way without dying. It's all about if the team you set up is the right colour and if you managed to gather enough items. This game is way too expensive for something that mechanically fails in so many ways. It's barely worth half of the price they ask for. It's a Touhou experiment gone to shits.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 21, 2021

  Editing this after the fact that I found out you can die multiple times to the final boss and still live, which goes against what I know about Touhou games. I hope the devs see this. The game is of course still great, and if you're a very skilled player then it'll be a cakewalk for you, but I will not recommend it for anyone wanting a casual play experience, like I did. The worst part is, very little of the new characters, themes or even stage backgrounds, beautiful as they may be, are interesting enough to maintain my interest in retrying the stages. They all seem flat and uninspired. When I had more fun playing The Shattered Sky than this because these elements feel more sincere in their presentations, then you know this game is just not for you. tldr: Quirky mechanics, with uninspired BGM, characters and stage designs. High skill of play needed. Beautiful game and very well-made otherwise, just that it lacks something.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 23, 2021

  This game exceeded my expectations. When I read the description of the game mechanics, I expected an absolute crustfest, but it turned out to actually be really fun and creative. The gacha system, while present, never gets in the way or forces you to grind any more than comes naturally from resetting in shmups, and the actually important part - the shmup - is well designed and consistently fun. There are, however, a few gripes with the game that need to be addressed as well beside all the praise. 1.: The way resource management works here is that every time you get hit, all enemy RPG units get an extra attack on you. If your own units wipe the enemy party before they attack, you're out of trouble - otherwise you may Game Over instantly just from taking two hits against a boss. That's quite frustrating, and mitigated by the game allowing to start from any stage. The only condition to see the ending and unlock Extra is to beat stage 6, no need to start the run from stage 1. And since there's no scoring system either, there's no motivation to go for a full run, which is quite odd in a Touhou game. 2.: The game automatically saves replay data and associates it with your Steam ID. As a consequence, it's required to start the game form within the Steam client, and it will not let you past the title screen if you don't. Guess what, this doesn't work in Proton. I had to install Steam in a wine prefix to be able to play the game. That ain't good practice if you ask me. 3.: Some bullet visibility issues exist, particularly in the final pattern of the stage 6 boss where the screen becomes very, very, very cluttered with GFX. Not too uncommon in Touhou either, I guess, but still worth the mention. So bottom line, go pick this one up if you want to; you're guaranteed to have at least one evening of good fun with it.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 24, 2021

  You can face tank the EX boss by just shooting at the orbs that drop point items. In fact, if you try to just concentrate on the boss, you're just getting shot down by the Party Battle mechanic. Seriously, I died about 20 times during the last phases and still won - all the tension was gone; Dying to a bullet wasn't going to game over me, and the party was already locked and loaded to destroy the opposing team. I could've left the game running on its own at that point and I still would've finished the boss, there was nothing fun about it. This is the first time I finished an EX stage in anything related to Touhou with zero tension, and I am genuinely upset I managed to play over the two hour mark before I noticed how broken this thing is. If there was an actual life mechanic on top of everything, maybe there would've been any point to dodging, but there wasn't. So no, didn't like it.