All the jank, technical issues issues, and rubbish stages of a ZUN game without the overwhelming charm those games have. FDF2 is a fan remake of Perfect Cherry Blossom that is just a waste of time.

I will say there's some good stuff here. The character artwork is fairly nice, and it's quite interesting to see a game basically be extremely faithful to the ZUN formula, but with a bit of a twist in that it almost seems like a mirror world touhou where ZUN got away with tracing the art well past EOSD, or maybe had a bigger support team.

And if the game had the polish to go along with it's artwork, it would be fine. But it's not. Controller compatibility is an absolute mess, resolution only goes up to 720p for no apparent reason, you have to use an awkward setup every time you boot the game - the UX in this game is as bad as the early windows XP touhous, which is very bad for a game from 2019.

And frankly, the game would just be better off doing it's own thing. The team here clearly has some aptitude, the art's nice, the remixes are good, and there's definetly room in this world for a more polished fan approach to Touhou - see Luna Nights. This is just the worst of both worlds.

A visually stunning and highly polished fanmade reinterpretation of Perfect Cherry Blossom with an impressive amount of fresh new patterns to boot. The music is pretty great too, even if not quite on the same level as the original. The soundtrack consists of both Touhou remixes and original works and has a very different vibe to it, lacking the dizzying energy of ZUN's compositions and replacing his signature trumpet sound with a more string-based approach and traditional Japanese instrumentation, in line with the game's main setting. The difficulty level is a bit more relaxed compared to the original, but I can't complain since Lunatic is probably still out of my reach. Also, rejoice if you love the sound of grazing as much as I do, because the hitboxes for grazing here are enormous. (Though needless to say, this inevitably lowers the skill ceiling for scoring.) My only serious complaint is the pacing: clocking in at 40 minutes, this is a good 5-10 minutes longer than PCB, which I don't think is entirely justified and can make starting a new run a somewhat uncomfortably large commitment. Regardless, this is worth buying at full price for the visuals and atmosphere alone. It feels like visiting the most enchanting and mythical Japanese cherry blossom fireworks festival ever!