Touhou crossed with SMT, which is pretty funny as a lot of the PC-98 era of Touhou lifts bits and pieces from SMT itself. The game does a good job of letting you explore Gensokyo, and once you get into the combat cycle it can be pretty fun.

For better or worse, the game left me a wanting of more everything except the core gameplay. One of the main appealing aspects of Touhou is in its music, except sadly there is only one normal Boss theme. There are three normal battle themes throughout the course of the campaign, but only one midboss theme and one normal boss theme. The boss theme is especially egregious, not because it's bad it's good actually, but because the theme chosen matches the first boss you're fighting, so when you face the second boss that leads to a bit of disappointment. The themes that are arranged are good, just having bosses match the music would have lead to more of them.

Another thing I would have liked was more skills. There's some attempts at diversity in the physical skills but everything still feels standard, which would be fine in a game replicating early SMT, but you could have captured a lot more personalities here. There is one aspect where it excels however and that is the Capture system, replacing Demon Negotiations (though a randomized version of them is an option you can choose as soon as you reach the first save point). The Capture system utilizes Touhou's danmaku roots, having you shoot to hack through the Sleeper (which I have and will continue to refer to as 2hu) to get them to join your side. These patterns are mostly based on their in-game self, but capture the essence of each character well.

A similar criticism goes to both the sacrificing and inheriting systems, which prevents the 2hus from truly sticking out in what they can do. Imagine if Satori, one of the earliest 2hus you can get, came with an ability that would show the enemy's affinities for that battle. It wouldn't be great in the long term as your turns become more valuable and you get upgrades, but it'd help the player ease into the game and match Satori's canon abilities. Some do have special skills, but they can all be inherited by others which makes them a lot less special. General skills too, as much as I enjoyed the Immolation+Last Resort paired with another 2hu that has Cover, I wish there were more strategies like this beyond the standard "buff and debuff" and "hit the girl hard."

The slightly barebones nature of things makes it walk a tight line between a groove like the first half and too repetitive like the second, but it manages its functions well and is a delightful experience for any Touhou fan and SMT fan that has enough going on in it to keep you lasting the whole time.

Recently I ran into a bit of a problem. See, I'm a noble worker, and my work was slow and dead, I'd already browsed Twitter, and I had to do something. Unfortunately, I wasn't in the space to play on my 3DS, and there was nothing to do in Master Duel, so I decided "yeah sure why not I'll try this" and it certainly did save me for those 40 minutes. You get paywalled pretty fast, so of course I finished the levels pretty early on.

The decorating stuff seems pointless and the main levels are fairly easy to just go through and require memorization (especially for the purple/pink coins) to master, but Toad Rally making you feel like you're racing someone for both speed and coins forces a lot more strategy into the game which is nice.

The stuff where you play 10 quick segments in a row kinda sucks though. It's pure memorization for Purple coins and sometimes you'll be spawned in to where if you don't act quick you'll die.

It's a mixed bag but again for killing some time when I had nothing to do in Master Duel it served its purpose.