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(3 edits) (+1)

Gosh, I musta spent 3 hours trying to beat this. I got "Ending 1", which I presume is the Bad Ending or something, but I don't feel like playing through the whole game a third time to get another ending.

Pretty much everything about this game is great. Awesome text scrolling across the screen, awesome voice acting, awesome Paper Mario thingy with Marisa, awesome mechanic where your HP and MP and movement speed are all one bar. It's great. But also, 80% of my time playing this was pure suffering.

As you know, the enemies showing up from offscreen and immediately shooting at you (or swarming you in the case of the eye thingies) make the game harder, but in a way that isn't very fun. With that and the way the mechanics are mostly unexplained, the game is very heavy with trial and error. Pretty much every wave of enemies past round 2 is only surmountable by failing at it and then memorizing it & thinking up a specific "trick" to beating it. Reminds me of Ninja Gaiden for NES. Whether that's a compliment or its opposite is to your discretion. Beating it felt nice at least. Genuinely though, I do quite like games like this, that feel like insurmountable brick walls. It's amazing to beat a game that, just a moment ago, was so unforgiving that you genuinely didn't know if you'd ever beat it. If I weren't caught up with beating this game as quickly as possible so I could rate everything, I think I'd have a lot more fun with its "unfair" difficulty.

And this may not be super important to ya, but I found it funny. During the final phase of the final boss, I was holding Patche, and wanted to use the Spark on the boss. But I accidentally rightclicked like 5 frames before leftclicking, and threw Patche at the final boss instead. Throwing Patche did an insane amount of damage, and basically instantly defeated the boss. But... she only had 1 HP when I did it. So the final boss's defeat cutscene played, and then as soon as it ended, Patche died and I Gameover'd before the End screen showed up. And of course, that obviously doesn't count at beating the game, so I played through the whole game again, and did the exact same thing right at the end, but this time Patche had like 4 HP, so I didn't gameover and got to see the end screen. This kind of "Gameovering while the final boss is exploding" thing has happened to me like, 7 times across different Touhou games, so I gotta thank ya for adding another instance of it to my collection.

In short, it's like Embodiment of Scarlet Devil-- extremely charming presentation and solid gameplay design overall, but it's pretty unforgiving and abrasive in its difficulty, to the point of only feeling rewarding to play if I'm in a very specific mood.

(1 edit)

Ending 1 is the good ending, I should have specified that, but I did the endings when I was half asleep. TnT
Fun fact: I think I accidentally made it harder to get a bad ending than a good ending.

The game is supposed to be like an NES game, but I maybe went a little overboard on that idea as I just made the game really unfair. I do actually like games that are unforgiving in difficulty and is the reason why I got into Touhou.

Sorry but also not sorry for causing the classic "die as the boss dies" thing. Sorry because it is really unfortunate, but not sorry because it is really funny because of how unfortunate it is. You get an imaginary gold star for beating the game though!!