It's kind of funny what a melting pot this game is. SMT fans who know nothing about Touhou playing this, Touhou fans who know nothing about SMT trying the genre out. However, all of it to comes out to almost unanimous praise from both sides. I am from the latter, and as someone who is a 1CC fiend for Touhou, I appreciate the series a lot. I also appreciate Touhou fan games a lot, with Luna Nights being the best Metroidvania I've ever experienced. I was well aware of Potemki11's work through fanart and the extremely solid Udongein X. But this project at first seemed like it wasn't for me. I've always been intimidated by the brutal reputation of SMT games, but I was willing to try it out in a Touhou-adorned game. It was a bit rough at first, mainly due to my freshness with the gameplay, but this game turned out to be one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. Nothing about the charm of Gensokyo is lost in translation with this game; it is captured perfectly. There isn't a ton of dialogue in this game, and writing lines for all of the sleepers is an impossible task, but every character in the series is expressed well with their gameplay. Shion has great stats for where she is in the game, but has pitiful luck. These subtle characterizations make this game succeed for someone who came into it as a sole Touhou fan. Gameplay-wise, twice there were parts in the game where I thought to myself, "Surely there's only an hour or two left in this game." Then I saw the world open up in a completely different way through an upgrade or area being opened. The difficulty level of this game is extremely fair in my opinion, and for someone who played this as their first SMT-style game, I am satisfied with the difficulty. A lot of annoyances early on are put away by items you gain access to, or upgrades later on which makes progression feel perfect. One of my only gripes with this game is that I wish that the unique abilities that are given to only a handful of the cast were buffed and each character had their own abilities. I felt the rate of new characters with abilities fell off in the mid- to late-game, and the characters felt more like stats at the end, rather than individual characters who could provide their own unique angle in fights. The abilities themselves are also extremely weak, in my opinion, outside of a select few (Hello, Heaven and Hell), and if they were universally buffed, it might save some characters with lackluster stat spreads. But outside of those truly minor gripes, this game is amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with a genre I didn't think I would and am looking forward to Udongein X2!