This is the Touhou game I spent the most time with. It's fine enough single-player, but a vs. shooter like this is it's at its best when you're playing with a friend.

Each of the playable characters has their own distinct attacks and playstyle, sending over various obstacles to their opponent. I like how instead of a single bomb type, there are progressively more powerful spells you can use as you kill more enemies. Komachi in particular is so much fun to play as with the sheer amount of bullets in her spells. As usual, ZUN's soundtrack is great. Wind God Girl is one of my favorite tracks in the series. 2-player mode is a lot of fun and can be played locally or online via peer-to-peer connection.

The only issue is that controls get uncomfortable after awhile. There are control options, but you have to decide between no autofire or no unfocused movement when firing, neither of which are ideal.

yuuka kazami is my wife

my favorite touhou game and all in all a really great bullet hell. to be honest, this game is also a great intro to the series, what with its big ass cast and friendlier gameplay. 9 has the best roster of characters, tied with 15 and 11. 19 is a great successor but i feel 9 is much more fleshed out, and its more appealing to me personally

the music is really, really good. all the remixes of old themes sound great and the new character themes are great too, with shiki eiki's being my favorite. gameplay is super fun, the playthrough starting out easy but quickly devolving into chaos. the ai literally cheats sometimes, but its ok. all the spellcards are fun to learn and i had a great time going through the game with every character

eu não acredito que o único jogo em que eu posso jogar com a Mystia, as irmãs Prismriver e a Yuuka Kazami (na sua caracterização da era windows) é esse danmaku competitivo esquisito. eu queria gostar um pouco mais dele por ser um encerramento da primeira fase dos jogos windows (já que o próximo mainline muda umas coisas, aparentemente), mas em termos de gameplay, phantasmagoria of flower view não me atrai tanto. a AI das inimigas começa incrivelmente burra e abruptamente se torna injusta, e o fator aleatório que vem da competitividade acaba tornando esse touhou meio fraquinho pra mim por não ser muito um jogo de aprender padrões de bala. eu gosto de alguns dos arranjamentos musicais novos, pelo menos.

eu não acredito que essa é a ultima vez que a Yuuka fala na série.

The most fun multiplayer experience I can think of honestly. It's extremely deep when it comes to it's meta and mechanics in PvP and it still feels like this game is being figured out even after so many years of it being out.

Shoutouts to the Phantasmagoria Netplay discord for offering a place to find opponents as well as tournaments both online and offline.

Fuck Reimu though

There's always that black sheep in a game series isn't there?

I'm sure this game is a blast to play with against friends, but as it stands... man, I didn't like this one.

This versus style gameplay was a pain. Having to spam your key to attack instead of holding it was rather uncomfortable, and playing the story itself was not fun. It was mostly just me frantically dodging a rather crazy amount of bullets while forgetting to shoot, all while the crazily programmed AI did everything like child's play.

Plot is eh, OST is eh too. I usually don't get too attached to remixes, but the new songs were good

Honestly, skip this one. Play it later. It doesn't matter

Pretty good, does enough changes to be unique and has some cool ideas. That being said, it's not all that memorable and it inevitably comes off as stale due to the dual gimmick it implements. The AI quickly goes from shit easy to HARD as shit, whiplash as fuck. Having to continuously spam the attack button did not help my opinion towards the game, especially during its more redundant, annoying segments. It's clear the game was made for Versus in mind rather than single player. Despite all, it's a really fun game with alot of love for the previous installments.

recently i took one of those online personality quizzes (this one was about what emotions you create art from) which i usually enjoy because it's a way to feel seen and heard and connect with complete strangers even if the quiz wasn't really well-thought at all. but this one was and the result i got both shocked me and at the same time it didn't. that's because at some level i always knew about my discontent, it's not one of those things i'm gonna be talking about a lot and it's not even fully related to my gender experience, it's just something that i knew and that i don't think other people knew. that's what shocked me, that this was even a possible result at all. these things don't really have to do with the state my life is in, i'm pretty happy right now! but i also have no idea where this discontent comes from. seems to just be some inner thing that probably doesn't have a good explanation. maybe i just dislike reality as a concept.

i think ZUN does too. of course this comes just from my observations, i have never read an interview with the man and i could be completely off-mark. i hope i am because this is a bit of a cursed existence i wouldn't wish on anyone else. but ZUN very clearly created a world within our world. if i didn't hate analogies i'd say gensokyo is simply a fictional manifestation of his mind, a barrier against the outside world.

god i hate that i'm psychoanalyzing him this sucks, but i think there's merit in what he created, a fantasy world that still exists in ours. while he doesn't get too heavy into the themes he wants to portray in each game, as they mostly have a dream-like feeling or are retellings of other stories or is mostly just making these characters come to life, i'd be lying if I didn't think Phantasmagoria of Flower View wasn't his first step into trying to talk about human condition in a more focused way. in this game, which is a versus game funnily enough, there's no threat, there is no culprit, there's just someone at the end who likes to lecture others so they try to be better people. no, the whole "incident" in this game is something happening outside Gensokyo, in our world, as a very clear mass death event just happened and spirits are flooding their home world. the characters keep driving home the point that this is something that happens every 60 years, which would make 60 years into the past from this game the 1945 nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. what i think ZUN was trying to say here is that no matter how divorced we are from reality, we still live in it, and that affects our fictional worlds too. we or our fictional population liking it or not. in this case, it didn't make much of a difference for the people of Gensokyo, but i'm pretty sure it did for their creator. some people think this was in response to a shock from the 2004 tsunami, but honestly i wouldn't dare to try to comprehend what was going through ZUN's mind at the time. i just think that i feel a kindred spirit in him and that seeing a fantasy world get affected by the events of our reality to be incredibly sobering and unique, even with all the meta narrative going around us i don't think i've ever seen anything done this delicately.