I had a whole file on my computer where I was writing my thoughts on this and then I kinda fell off of it and have changed computers so whatever, look, I'll need to just get through this before I play the next couple games so I can write about them.

I liked this one a lot! Fun mechanic that is busted as hell in a way these games usually aren't, Sanae is playable again (hell yeah) and I felt like there was a lot I was interested in chewing on thematically. Also god Tsukasa is gender, too me. Oh and some real great tunes but what else is new. The levels stand out as particularly high quality this time.

The plot is that there's trading cards of everyone now so you're characters go out to start punching everyone they find over it since they're all purely reactionary forces who hate it whenever anything at all happens. This is all part of semi-complicated plan by a Chimata Tenkyuu, god of markets, to team up with a tengu and mine a bunch of special ore to make the cards and then they get sold and I guess the tengu makes money.

Given the timing of the release, there's a lot of 'oh it's about the blockchain' and 'oh it's about capitalism' and such but ZUN apparently said it's about Covid. Public places. Markets predate capitalism and all that, after all. So it's about people gathering and, honestly, just sharing their appreciation for Touhou. Like one of the endings the boss says this directly. Markets as a physical place, but more importantly as a real event that brings people together, and the good things that can result from it.

So the mechanic here is that there are a lot of ability cards, some of which are special weapons on a cooldown and some of which are passive. You collect money and get to buy one after each stage, and the baseline difficulty isn't tooooo bad so the availability of super strong abilities makes this fairly easy compared to the harder games. You unlock more and more item slots you can choose to start the game with, using any item you've used before. It's a bit roguelite-ish? From the scoregame perspective I think it probably makes this one worse but I don't care about that. Just watch out if you want to create some kind of ransomware that forces you to get a certain score before it decrypts your files I guess.

Alright that's it. Love the game, had to get this out of the way, still gotta play 18.5 which I think goes all in on the roguelite thing? That sounds fun.

This game is really good. I feel like it often gets overlooked simply by the merit of being new, which is rather unfortunate.

Though, I will say, I do not think this is a good game for beginners specifically. This game's gimmick is that you can get different cards that give you different abilities. While very fun, I think there's some that can become crutches for people learning, and make other games much, much more difficult because of this.

That aside, it's very fun. I adore the card system, and I feel like it adds a ton of replayability. Your cards can affect your playstyle a lot or a little, depending on what sort of built you have going on. I'd almost dare to compare it to a rougelike in that specific regard.

Presumably because of the cards, however, I do think this game is one of the harder entries in the series overall, so be aware of that! Definitely worth playing though.

The weakest OST in all of Touhou, stages are all barren and boring. Enemies are tanky as fuck so you feel extremely weak, the card mechanic is too insignificant to offer a unique game-play experience.

I already hold the opinion that Touhou games are very weak shmups to begin with but this one is even of low quality for a Touhou game.

Easiest score counter-stop of my life