Thank you for playing! The PC-98 aesthetic unfortunately wasn't intentional; most of the playfield sprites were placeholders from a previous fangame. To wit, Meiling and Reimu are supposed to be Hecatia and Junko. Switching characters when bombing is part of a team mechanic ripped off borrowed-for-life from Len'en Reiretsuden ~ Reactivate Majestical Imperial. The character you choose (the active character) starts as the character you play as, while the other (the passive character) follows you below the playfield, scooping up items. You can swap between the two by bombing or dying. While point items collected by the passive character only give a minimal amount of points, power items collected by the passive character give double power. Unfortunately, there's nothing more to the system than that since I didn't have time to expand it. I probably should've put this in the readme in the first place ^^;
I have noticed that Marisa's patterns are a bit too easy (especially her spell cards), so I'll try to buff her a bit. I do agree that it seems weird for Marisa to confuse love-in-general and romance, as her infamous "love sign" series of spells would imply that she's an expert on the subject. I probably should've swapped Reimu and Marisa's roles, but at this point, it's probably too late to change it. That's what I get for writing the story at the last second ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Regardless, I'm glad it wasn't too ducked up!