Touhou 19: Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost is the product of grand ambition from someone looking to show that something grand can be produced by a single person, with sparse help from others. When asked about the development of Touhou 19 around its release date, ZUN had taken notice of the amount of attention AI has been given recently. ZUN set out his goal for this game to be jam packed with content to counteract that notion. From that, Touhou 19 has materialized as an experience of being jam packed, but is missing some elements that fans have expected. I think the scale of this game might have exceeded ZUNs capabilities a bit, maybe due to his own method of game making or due to a schedule. This game is in the style of a competitive shooting game, similar to Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, or even going back further to Twinkle Star Sprites. This style of danmaku game is fitting for the goal of the most amount of content possible without getting repetitive. These games have historically always had more playable characters, and that amount of characters is seemingly required for the story ZUN was trying to tell in this game. UDoALG wraps up the interconnected story of Touhou since Hidden Star in Four Seasons. This “arc” of the story, if you will, is similar in structure to how Touhou 10-14 were interconnected, with the plot of a proceeding game affecting the one that comes after in some fashion. Touhou 16-19 are interconnected with Okina mentions, the beast leaders, the character cards from Unconnected Marketeers, etc. I think the story is done extremely well in 19, with each characters’ scenario giving a hint to eventually uncover the whole truth of what is going on in Gensokyo this time. However I do feel that the character list is a bit bloated. I don’t mind their inclusions as characters, but I do wish that some characters in this game, Orin and Seiran for example, had a bigger role in the overall plot to make their inclusion feel more valid. On the topic of the amount of characters in this game, this game is by far the lengthiest in mainline Touhou games when it comes to time to see the story through. Getting a 1CC for all characters on normal took me just around 10 hours, which adds to the feeling of the game being jam packed. Touching on the gameplay and difficulty of this game is hard because ZUN isn’t known for his polish on games OR his balancing. So expecting the game to be balanced and bug free from him is in a sense unfair, but some of the balancing and user experience is so out of whack it needs to be addressed in some way. Chiyari is obviously a busted character, breaking even the CPU, but the more damning thing to me is the features of the game that simply don’t work. It is no secret that the online mode of this game is dead and bad. I think the online was a big selling point on this game, the variety of characters, the format of the game, lack of extra stage, and online being an option supports that, but it is so laggy and prone to desyncs that it is basically unusable. ZUN desperately needed to get someone else to work on this part of the game, giving him more time to polish some of the balance perhaps. It isn’t even as if he is afraid to give the work to others either, as the boss sprites and card art are done by people that aren’t ZUN. It felt as if the feature was put in just to say it was in the game and was left at that. Maybe a patch will come in the future and fix the netcode at least but I have extreme doubts about that. It has been nearly 6 months since the game came out and as far as I am aware, no efforts have been made to fix it. I do like this game however despite the rough patches it has. The game is visually the best looking the mainline series has ever been, with textures and environments that look crisper, ZUN portraits being the best that they ever have been, the boss pixel art being so beautiful and full of life, this game looks amazing. The music is amazing too, with new instruments being experimented with by ZUN, most notably to me on Biten’s theme. And this game is full credit to ZUN, jammed with stuff in it. It feels like it takes elements of the past 4 games and combines them into a melting pot of danmaku, it is quite lovely in terms of theming and story. I do hope the cards are done away with after this entry though, 18, 18.5 and now 19 have all had them as a prominent game mechanic. I think they are getting a bit stale at this point. This game, which was born out of a passion to make something ambitious, the most ambitious Touhou Project game in nearly 20 years, will always be a hard sell to the series I think. With the unorthodox difficulty and game style, and lack of (working) built in online support, I think this game will be passed over a lot when looking back on the series, but it is important. There is an essence here, but it feels only achieved to about 85% of what it could be.