This game is like, fine, but I just didn't really like it.

Did not help that after about an hour of troubleshooting to play with friends it ran at a crisp 1 frame per minute at best. I'm sure it's good fun if you have people to do couch co-op with, but otherwise I don't really see a reason to play it when Soku is right there.
[Also I personally prefer how Soku plays to begin with]

The story is cool though. Worth reading!

As usual, I am unqualified to actually talk about this as a fighting game so I won't. But I WILL say that this is the third full Touhou fighting game and the first to switch over to the newer gameplay style, so it's not an update of the previous fighters anymore. This one was a clean slate. The biggest change is that everyone is flying all the time, so you can "jump" either up or down. The roster is much smaller since everybody had to be redesigned from scratch, with only the obvious inclusions of Reimu and Marisa returning, and the focus is squarely on characters from Mountain of Faith through Ten Desires. Even Sanae and the rest of the Moriya Shrine crew is mysteriously absent, though you can see them as part of the ridiculous number of cameo background characters. The spritework is gorgeous. The music is great. The presentation is the best thing the series has had yet. A feast of aesthetic delights.
This game had to take on the incredibly meaty task of making good on the religious war storyline, which could really only be resolved in a fighting game. But since this is Touhou, it both has a bunch of other stuff going on AND makes everything kind of a farce. Everyone is very explicitly in text just having a good time, fighting for sport, sometimes not really trying etc. There are a bunch of systems in the game governing popularity and the crowd's allegience to the three religions and all kinds of crap that I never bothered caring about, but it's there. The take on religion here cannot be read as anything but cynical. The people, looking for anything that could give them hope, will latch onto whoever is the flashiest at the given moment, but might also just forget and turn to something else three seconds later. Does ZUN think this is how religion works, or is it a function of the hope being sucked magically out of humanity as part of the plot? I really can't tell you yet, but the series has enough of a backwards-facing view that it's hard for me to think it's being critical of the concept of spirituality so much as the people who publically advance it. In order for the new boss character Hata no Kokoro to achieve self-actualization, she decides she must purge herself of those people, who manipulate others for personal gain only. Yet another example of Reimu being straight up marked as the villain in the story, as it was in UFO.
Kokoro is great, also. Definitely not a character I expected to care much about but the story does a lot with a little here, plus I'm a sucker for tsukomogami and noh imagery I guess.
Despite all the sugar I talk I don't think this is as good as Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. There's just not quite as much imagination here, and it's smaller. I don't like the new system as much, either, but I do concede it's more touhou-feeling. I'm really looking forward to seeing where the next few fighting games go, though.