I was worried going into this game that I wouldn't like it coming off of Imperishable Night and hoo boy was I right. To be clear right off the bat, this is a good game. The soundtrack is great as always, the writing is charming, the backgrounds look great, and overall this is still a quality package. If you played this as your first Touhou game I can absolutely see why you would like it, but for me, I'm too spoiled by earlier games.
Too many features are missing compared to IN. I get that this was made in a new engine so ZUN is pretty much starting from scratch here, but the fact that we're starting from scratch in the gameplay department really sucks. I wasn't optimistic about spell practice being in any game after IN but I'm still disappointed to see it missing. The playable roster has been reduced down to just Reimu and Marisa, albiet with three shot types each compared to the previous norm of two, but focused shots have returned to EoSD style as opposed to in PCB where focused shots behaved differently. You can no longer choose your starting lives which just feels like a bizarre choice to me, since the games were challenging enough as they were, and you got a score penalty for using more than 3 anyway, so I don't really see why we needed to remove the feature? Continues start the stage over which I think is fine but again I can't help but feel like I'm getting nerfed by it. Bombs are tied to power which is a fine idea in concept but it's just not that fun in execution since bombs should make the game easier, and lowering your power by using one just doesn't feel like a worthwhile tradeoff when simply dying gives you back almost all of your power. Grazing is gone for some reason, the particle effect is still there but it doesn't seem to have any actual purpose.
There are almost certainly even more things I forgot to mention but this is just a death by ten thousand paper cuts, none of these changes would be too bad on their own and if you haven't played an earlier game then you wouldn't even notice them, but to have them all piled on at once like this it just makes this game feel like a downgrade. I'm open to returning to this game in the future but for the time being I'd rather just move on.
Too many features are missing compared to IN. I get that this was made in a new engine so ZUN is pretty much starting from scratch here, but the fact that we're starting from scratch in the gameplay department really sucks. I wasn't optimistic about spell practice being in any game after IN but I'm still disappointed to see it missing. The playable roster has been reduced down to just Reimu and Marisa, albiet with three shot types each compared to the previous norm of two, but focused shots have returned to EoSD style as opposed to in PCB where focused shots behaved differently. You can no longer choose your starting lives which just feels like a bizarre choice to me, since the games were challenging enough as they were, and you got a score penalty for using more than 3 anyway, so I don't really see why we needed to remove the feature? Continues start the stage over which I think is fine but again I can't help but feel like I'm getting nerfed by it. Bombs are tied to power which is a fine idea in concept but it's just not that fun in execution since bombs should make the game easier, and lowering your power by using one just doesn't feel like a worthwhile tradeoff when simply dying gives you back almost all of your power. Grazing is gone for some reason, the particle effect is still there but it doesn't seem to have any actual purpose.
There are almost certainly even more things I forgot to mention but this is just a death by ten thousand paper cuts, none of these changes would be too bad on their own and if you haven't played an earlier game then you wouldn't even notice them, but to have them all piled on at once like this it just makes this game feel like a downgrade. I'm open to returning to this game in the future but for the time being I'd rather just move on.