you hit me with BOOM monogame and im already seein bonus points. who needs "unity" or "ren'py" or "gamemaker" (gamemaker user)

then you hit me with BOOM very antique textbox. you dont see this kinda stuff unless you dig real deep in old flash games or some comiket stuff on vndb. i quite like it and also the attempt to work around what is presumably the textbox limitation of "shit dont work right unless its a monospace font" (i have this problem) by using a nice-looking almost handwritten style font. obvious problem: if you press enter before the box is done it skips the rest of the box. the text speed isnt slow to the point that i would mind waiting for it to complete but sometimes i accidentally just eat entire lines. second problem: when drawing the final line of a box it slows down in proportion to how much shorter the line is than the textbox, unless its the first line. funky

also third problem: i had massive consistent audio desync after the first song. almost a quarter note exactly. i would have changed the offset if i remembered how but i did not! it is only on the title screen! oops!

the rhythm minigame is cool though i like it. being a stepmania player i had to rotate my head 90 degrees to play but i also do that to read sheet music because im a dumbass so not the game's fault

the maps are pretty nice and while it is funny that you play as cirno (never seen) i hear the streams in the guitars...................mmmm.............gimme

its incredibly forgiving which is probably good for a jam entry. doesnt seem like theres any way to hit a note too early so theoretically you could just turbomash and get everything. maps are pretty good even if its not a style im used to

ART is nice. lil. funny dudes. just doin music. on the title screen there is what looks like a cg of mystia and kyouko sitting together but it never shows up ingame. shame since it looks nice! also all the backgrounds look nice! kinda like aforementioned secret comiket games. fairly awesome

fourth problem: audio goes wacky. the static area gets longer seemingly every time a song is called so im guessing you are reading some fouckinnnn data past where you should or otherwise wrongggggg i dont know i use gamemaker lmao

awesome game

I loved the writing in this. It had some  personality and a nice little arc. I'm not too familiar with Kyouko and Mystia, but they were cool characters and their relationship was fun to watch. Echoing ghostguts's thoughts, I was pleasantly surprised by how gay it was. Though, I think the stint of drama before the epilogue could've been better led-up-to. Maybe it was and I just didn't notice the foreshadowing, but I think one more scene showcasing Mystia favoring the band over her relationship wtih Kyouko would help.

As a side note, I love it when Touhous interact to outside world technology with curiosity and wonder. For some reason, stuff like this always gets me to smile--

I had found a few issues with the textbox. First off is that pressing spacebar instantly skips text even if it's still scrolling-- it should probably just made that text scroll instantly, so pressing spacebar again moves you on to the next line. Putting the narrator's name at the start of narration seems kinda unnecessary, and at first it got me confused on what was dialogue and what was narration. Also, the  last line of text in any given textbox always scrolls more slowly than the first-- is that intentional?

Also, this looks weird.

As for the songs, I think there should be more customizability with the controls, as well as a visual indication of a note having been hit (like the note lighting up). Also, the first song had a weirdly long silence at the end. And then, like Kiroko mentioned... some songs were mostly loud static. For me it was the song before and after the fourth rhythm section.

Also...

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In short, 'twas a rockin' story with a lot of technical issues.

"Guitar Hero visual novel Touhou" is, quite simply, one of the best ideas concept-wise I've come across in Jams, you should be very proud of what you accomplished here! This is an ambitious idea with a lot of post-jam potential and I hope it gets some QOL updates soon. The visuals and story were very nice, reminding me at times of old Flash games or early generations of visual novels. The music is also very well-done, though I did notice some odd sections (as noted by previous comments.) If improvements could be made to the control scheme so it could be more forgiving, that would be very nice; the "ASDF" set-up was a bit of a bear to work with, to say the least. The first level is also extremely unforgiving for a tutorial song. The horizontal bar is also a strange choice for a music game, which are typically vertical. But those are some minor technicalities which don't erase how cool this game is you're able to get past that! I'll keep an eye out for his game in the future.

First a little note about the actual release: it comes packaged with a shortcut which runs a .bat file... which just runs the game. It's a little silly; I had to go into the files to run the executable directly.

When I got in, it was a bit unclear what I had to do. I hit a lot of buttons until I figured out that I had to click a scene. Minor thing, but fine.

Gameplay wise. It's a visual novel, first and foremost. It's got the suggestion of a rhythm game; after I got frustrated with the difficulty of the first level, I learned that mashing (fast enough, though some sections were too fast for me) never dropped a combo, and I learned there wasn't a penalty for not playing at all in the next rhythm section. That's fine! Honestly, I was gonna judge it on the basis of a rhythm game for difficulty, but as-is I ended up treating it like a VN.

Writing's great. I love the treatment drummers get. It's also gay as hell.

However, I also gotta echo Kiroko: Parts of the music just went into horrific static in the VN sections. Really gotta fix that.

First off, the writing is great, heavily enjoyed my time with it in that respect and the character portraits and their in song sprites are cute. I was going to talk about the rhthym game aspect and how it throws you too much into the deep end at the start, but frankly that's a really minor nitpick and not as important as the heavy static that would occasionally play midway through my play time. Occasionally, one of the tracks that would be part of the loop would just be straight static, I doubt it's intentional and it heavily detracted from my experience. Im not sure what caused it but I hope that it's fixed for others who will play the game later.
EDIT: I should note, I do like the game, it just sucks there are portions of it where the music is replaced with loud static. Friend was also experiencing this problem