edit: 1cc'd this one again this week and wanted to update my thoughts. not that anything's changed for anything but the better. honest to god not just a perfect game but one of my favorite games ever made. i think it stands as THE benchmark by which every arcade shooter should be measured - gripping gameplay, gorgeous and restrained, heartfelt visuals and soundtrack, legendary boss battles that paint stories in the shape of danmaku, and an earnestly somber and bittersweet story that stands as the only one in its genre that has ever moved me like this. flawless game, and zun's masterpiece as far as i've played. <3

unbelievable how much of an improvement this is on every touhou game prior. i was told the jump between embodiment of scarlet devil and this game was big, and i suppose i wasn't ready for how tremendous a leap that was. i'll say it - as of right now, this is my favorite arcade-style video game i've EVER played and one of the most rewarding playthroughs i've ever experienced of a game of this type. i wasn't expecting to enjoy and crave the difficulty present here the way that i did, and i certainly didn't expect a surprisingly moving, quietly somber story like the one present in perfect cherry blossom.

this game flows with the delicacy of the wind; the deft moment in which a haiku lingers. breezy, chilly and brisk is the name of touhou 07's game, and the presentation here is beyond marvelous. i see elements of games like kirby's dream land 3 all over this game's aesthetic, colored-pencil like backgrounds and character sprites with a surprisingly acoustic and wind section-heavy ensemble in zun's arrangements. when the intensity ramps up as the climb whisks reimu, marisa and sakuya up from the snowfall and cheeky eastern villages into the sky and beneath the youkai's solemn cherry oak, the music follows suit; songs of dread, songs of triumph, it's all here. the setpieces and deliberate pacing of stages 4 and 6 are an absolute marvel within the medium and genuinely stopped me in my tracks with my prior expectations.

even the boss battles themselves are now pure spectacles - zun has somehow found a way to tell you all of a character's personality through their bullet patterns. it's astounding what characterization this gives bosses like chen, the prismriver sisters, and youmu. not to mention the... legitimate gutpunch of a plot reveal waiting at the absolute end of it all.

another breeze blows blossoms of scarlet and rose through the air. another crisis averted. another soul laid to rest. man. this is the one that elevates touhou to real masterpiece territory.

Sapphic Sonic the Hedgehog with rhythm game elements that also features motorcycles, anime battles between women that use both martial arts AND sword-fighting, AND it has robots AND lasers AND skeletons; as a one-and-done aesthetic experience Sayonara Wild Hearts is pretty fucking awesome. It's got cute themes going on too, but it is pretty lucky it's such a short game cuz otherwise it'd be kinda frustrating that it takes so long to get to its specific thesis. And I'll be honest here: I don't think the gameplay is very good, as an action game nor as a rhythm game. The controls and camera were especially aggravating during certain sequences; it's really only saved by the game's rather generous checkpointing system. I don't know if it was just the Switch version or what, but the controls would also just hang up a lot for me causing a lot of unavoidable deaths, mostly happening when the player character model gets caught up against a wall/boundary.

That said, I do love how confident it is in its storytelling and diversity of gameplay stylings, and the best chunk of the game was probably towards the middle where the game mixed up the gameplay almost on a level-by-level basis (and also where I think the best song in the game happens). Relying on the player to form their own interpretations of the events unfolding was smart and I think pretty effective, but sometimes the visual homogeneity/repetition feels like it's potentially undermining the distinct narratives they're portraying, alongside muddying the visual clarity in a game that's already extremely difficult to parse in the moment-to-moment.

But I suppose a lot of that just doesn't really matter in the end though, huh? It's definitely been designed to be an aesthetic experience first, a narrative experience second, and a gameplay experience third (emphasized in how the game really doesn't want you to die and how performing perfectly seems overall deemphasized as there's only three possible achievable ranks on top of there being seemingly no possible fail-state). I dunno if I'll ever revisit this one, but I'm glad I finally picked it up on a whim. Also Queen Latifah sounds like she's having a lot of fun yelling the title of the game, and that kinda rules lol

when you think about the fact that the true milestone of the whole gaming history till this day is a '80s classic 2d platformer about an italian plumber with a sexy mustache who somehow lives in a kingdom where almost everyone is an anthropomorphic mushroom (but you also eat mushrooms for power ups... cannibalism ?) except for his brother who in this game is just a color swapped version of mario and i dont even know if it was already established to call him luigi and a princess who later on will be called peach but now is just generically referred to as princess toadstool and if you follow the story (which was probably written in a dirty ass guide book since this game has 30 words in total i think) the kingdom is being invaded by other ??? mushroom ??? like ??? creatures or whatever and an army of walking turtles led by the hot and tempting king koopa aka daddy bowser who in this game is ugly as fuck and gets a third degree burn and kidnaps princess toadstool because sexism and because he wanted to fuck her or something i havent read the guide book anyway i was saying really makes you realise we live in a simulation

italians are so cool ♡ wish they were real